Read from a few different posts that AI improvement will be one of the focus areas in future patches. Is there any plan on which aspects of AI behavior to improve upon?

IMHO there are at least several areas that can use some fine-tuning:

1) AI gunners on bombers – too accurate at times, and their aim appear not to be affected by condition of the bomber (e.g. when the bomber is executing high-G maneuver)

2) Fighter AI – rely all too frequently on the 360 degree barrel-roll as defensive maneuver. Could use a wider repertoire.

3) Fighter AI – appear to automatically detect player’s presence behind them when at relatively close proximity, even in their blind spot (e.g. lower six o’clock position). It is difficult to surprise the AI regardless of experience level

4) AI can see through cloud and is not affected by low visibility environment

5) AI chooses forest and town to belly land instead of road or relatively flat area

When reading WWII fighter pilot memoirs, one often come across passages of how they 'sneaked up on' inexperienced enemy pilot for an easy kill, or how when the situation got tough they would use cloud cover to aid escape. Improving on these would I believe greatly help realism in offline missions.

One also wonders how far we can improve the AI in the game without severely affecting performance. For example, would it be possible to code advanced maneuvers and ‘doctrinal training’ into AI behavior? E.g. head-on or high-side attack on bombers with strong rear armaments, entering into a luftberry circle for mutual defense (at least for inexperienced pilots) or executing a ‘Thach Weave’?

Any other areas of AI behavior that can be improved?

Cheers,

That looks really great! That would be something for the war between China and Japan!

What would be also wonderful, would be a G3M1 Nell as this plane was in a lot of early war missions, like the sinking of the Z-Fleet of Singapure.

Never hoped to see that many possible new planes for this sim any more.
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m.../Comics/11.gif

Sorry if this has been answered before: the Fokker D.XXI should have 4 guns, as mentioned also im the 4.09 guide. The in-game Fokkers have got only 2 guns. A mistake or I'm missing something ?

Regards,
insuber

Insuber, the cowling guns on the D XXI are very deep in the fuselage and fire through quite long blast tubes between the cylinders. It is very hard to see the muzzle flash.

The guns are indeed there.

This came up over at UBI and one of DT pointed it out.

Thank you ElAurens. I'll check better.

Regards,
Insuber

Change file format of skins
 

First, I would like to thank Daidalus Team for their efforts and continuous work on IL-2 :-)

I have one suggestion for future versions: Change the skins file format from BMP to PNG. A quick test on a fresh 4.09 install shows that I have about 2 GB of data in the PaintSchemes folder. I then ran a batch conversion of all BMP files to PNG, and the result is about 480 MB.

I guess the choice of BMP was natural as a lossless format when IL-2 was first released, since few tools supported PNG back then. But now PNG is widely supported, and provides a lossless format and a nice size reduction.

Mhondoz,

Actually, because they are 8-bit .bmp, not 24-bit true color, they reasonable size .. 1024x1024 is 1026kb .. same .png is 457kb though .. don't quite see how you got a 75%+ reduction .. should be 45% or so

My unmodded 4.09m is 5.20GB .. 1.78GB in skins
My modded 4.09b1 is 10.2GB .... 1.71GB in skins

It's not a bad idea to go with .png, but unless you have alot of custom skins in .. saving some 800MB by my calculations

then I suppose, everyone would need to convert ?

Wing guns on the Fokker D.XXI
 

Hi Insuber,

You will find the the 4 wing gun version of the Fokker D.XXI under 'Allied aircraft' and the the 2 wing gun version under 'Axis aircraft'.

DFLion

"unless you have alot of custom skins in"

My Paintschemes folder has 18,8GB on it :shock:

But, dude, it's worth it :mrgreen:

Well, maybe the .PNGs could work. I don't actually care, anyway :-P

WWFlybert,

You are right :oops:

First, I checked the size of the whole PaintSchemes folder, and this was about 2 GB. Second, I converted all BMP files with the batch conversion tool in IrfanView. But since many of the skins has the same name (void.bmp), when dumped to the same destination folder of converted skins a lot of files were overwritten. That made the PNG folder a lot smaller than it should be, and my hope for size reduction was too optimistic, sorry about that and thanks for correcting me WWFlybert. :-)

I have now realized that IrfanView has an option to create new sub folders in the batch conversion, and I have done the test again, so this result should be more accurate:

http://i259.photobucket.com/albums/h...bmp_vs_png.png

Not so large difference as before, but still significant I think.

A change to PNG could be carried out as part of the installation process of a new patch, like the 4.09 default skins patch. Then all default skins in BMP format could be deleted and replaced with PNG. Reducing download and installed size. Custom skins would not be touched, but over time custom skin providers could start to supply their skins as PNG.

Just a thought ;-)