4.11 General debugging

[Whacker]

I'm unsure as if this is the right thread or not. If it's not, then I trust the mods will move it as necessary.

I have a part-question/part-seemingly bug/possible feature request to report on.

When I'm flying in offline campaigns in career mode, I've noticed a number of times that I've shot the bejeezus out of other aircraft, yet not been given kill credit when they go down. I started paying more attention during the missions, restarted careers with all the allowable views enabled. What I found was that even if I pumped an enemy full of lead to the point where the engine's quit and they've got the canopy open with arms flapping trying to escape, I still won't get the kill credit if a friendly so much as puts a single shot into them before they go down. In essense, what I see is I do maybe 75% plus of the critical damage to a single plane, and a friendly will come along and do the other 25% after me yet get the credit. I tried the converse a few times as well, wait for a wingman to shoot the piss out of somebody, then as they were heading down I'd swoop in and give them a few shots. In most of the cases I get the credit. Another irritating thing is sometimes I'll shoot up a bad guy enough that they'll go down, but they won't nosedive in, they'll kinda belly flop it on a flat piece of land, maybe a few chunks come off, etc. I don't get kill credit for those, when the plane's clearly a write off and loss.

So, in summary, it *seems* to me that the formulae for calculating who gets credit for kills and when is either wrong in some ways or incomplete.

My questions then become, is it just me? Am I wrong here? I don't think I am, given my highly unscientific testing... Is it handled differently for online and offline play? (I don't play online)

Possible courses of action as I see it:
- Team D could document some kind of short 'n sweet write up on how this mechanic works for our education.
- Fixing any wonky or weird code mechanics so kill accreditation is more accurate. (bug fix request?)
- Fleshing out the code mechanics so that kill accreditation is more accurate. (feature request?)

Cheers all

[IceFire]

Whacker: I take it you don't fly online all that much?

We call it kill stealing and it's sort of a blight on some online matches. I've observed the AI closely and they behave like humans up to a certain point after which they are much more fair. If the enemy aircraft has initiated the bailout or if the pilot is dead the AI will stop firing and ignore the plane. They will also ignore if there is a wing or the entire tail section is missing.

Otherwise they continue to shoot.

To some degree this "bug" is a historically and very human type response. The bigger problem isn't really the AI doing this but the scoring involved and that's where the game part of this comes in. It would be nice to share points relative to the amount of damage that one aircraft has dealt to another aircraft. So the magic BB for the steal is no longer a problem.

[Whacker]

@ Ice

No mate, I don't fly online at all. But I have certainly read enough around the various forums to get a feel for the big ticket items the online guys deal with. I'm glad you posted though, it somewhat validates in my mind the idea that the kill credit code could use a little massaging and/or tweaking.

Giant wall of text follows:

Core logic ideas:

1. Whomever causes the most damage to critical systems gets the kill credit.

Reasoning/Logic - Seems pretty straightforward to me, whomever caused the most hurt should get the credit. If I've pumped enough lead into the bad guy to the point where he's leaking fuel out of all compartments, engine's seized up, missing huge chunks of control surfaces, and he's coasting trying to get distance, that's one written off plane in my view. If someone comes along after and puts two 20mm rounds into him while he's coasting and doesn't damage or destroy what I've already destroyed, that's not entirely fair to me since I put him out of action to begin with.

Example in numbers. Say I shoot up Mr. bad guy. I cause his engine to 100% quit working. 100% damage to all fuel tanks so they are leaking. 50% damage to all controllable surfaces. 100% damage to the hydraulics system. 66% damage to weapons (4 of 6 guns are broken). My fearless wingman comes along and pops him with those 20mm shells and does another 25% damage to the controllable surfaces, and puts the remaining 33% of weapons out of action. In this case, I should get the kill credit.

2. Whomever kills the pilot gets the kill credit.

Reasoning/Logic - This would be a "final nail in the coffin" kind of scenario. A dead pilot essentially guarantees that the plane is going to crash and burn hard with no potential of repair or salvage. This could POTENTIALLY not be fair. Taking my previous scenario, I do the damage percentages to Mr. Bad Guy. Fearless Wingman comes along and puts 2 20mm shells into his cockpit, doing 100% damage to the pilot and removing him from this cruel, pixelated world. One could argue that even though I shot the crap out of Badguy's ride to begin with, he COULD try and coast it back across enemy lines, belly flop it in such a manner that it's mostly intact, and it COULD get drug back to an enemy airfield and repaired to be back in the action again. I don't know if I like this idea or not. This potentially leads to point 3:

3. Share kill credit under certain circumstances.

Somewhat subjective here. Say Fearless Wingman and I both do roughly the same amount of damage to critical systems in Mr. badguy's plane. He crashes it. Seems logical we should both get credit for that. Say we have the above scenario, where I do tons of damage to critical systems and Fearless Wingman comes along and snipes him dead with 2 shots. Should we share credit? I'm leaning towards probably, he wasn't likely going to get anywhere after I was done with him, Fearless Wingman just sealed his and his ride's fate to be sure.

When should kills NOT be shared? Bears some discussion IMO. Say pilot A gets in a few lucky shots off the first pass and pilot B's engine quits, but everything else is intact. Let's say he did 100 pts of damage total to pilot B. Pilot C could wait for pilot B (who is maybe an AI pilot?) who's now flying nice and level steadily descending as the AI tends to do and not bailing out. He proceeds to do 1000 points of damage to this nice, steady, level target and causes tons of other critical systems to fail and maybe even kills the pilot. Is it fair that he should get full credit or partial credit for the work pilot A did? Should pilot A be penalized for not following up and ensuring pilot B is dead? I don't know.

When should kills not be counted?

Best things I can come up with:

1. Badguy gets shot to bits BUT makes it back to an enemy airbase and lands with gear down. IMO shouldn't be a kill, even if the plane is a write-off.
2. Badguy struggles back to within a certain distance of an enemy airbase and manages to flop it in the grass mostly intact WITHOUT catching it on fire. What defines mostly intact? Dunno, maybe call it a certain percentage of the airframe intact? If he flops it and one wing comes off and it lands upside down with a ruined engine, could they get it back in the air? Possibly. If he flops it and the engine's ruined but the airframe remains intact, could it be back up in the air? Sure.

When should kills always be counted?

1. If they put it in the drink. Yeah, one could theoretically recover a plane from shallow water and get it back in the air, but it's extremely costly, time consuming, and effort intensive. I would submit for our game's purposes that any plane that goes in any body of water as a result of enemy fire gets counted as a kill, plain and simple.


Overall Assumptions - Ignoring certain "reality" aspects such as requiring a witness to claim a kill.

[Luno13]

Too complicated. 50/50 always.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Luno13

Too complicated. 50/50 always.

Historically, some allied units sliced the pie more finely than that, with pilots getting a 1/3 or a 1/4 of a kill. But, whatever works. Any partial kill credit would be an improvement.

Mostly, though, I'd love to see some consistency. Sometimes, I'll kill a plane and I'll get an instant "enemy destroyed" message. Other times, with equivalent damage, and equivalent circumstances, I'll get nothing until the plane actually crashes, giving "friendly" planes ample time for vulching.

It's definitely a bug with the programming. It's a very old bug; it's been the second biggest offliner complain for a decade.

By comparison to the now fixed AI problems (THANK YOU TD!) it should be easy to instantly assign kill credit when a plane catches on fire, blows up, falls apart or has the pilot killed.

[WTE_Galway]

How about a system where kills are only credited if it can be verified by at least one other friendly pilot or ground troops?

[Luno13]

That could be cool. You could "claim" a kill in a post-mission drop-down list, and it only counts if an AI was around to see it and survives to "tell" about it.

I suppose humans could verify, but witnesses could leave the game, lie if they have a spite issue, or forget to report, etc. Splitting a kill 50/50 (or even 25/75, etc) automatically based on damage done would be just fine. However, you wouldn't want the guy who gets in a couple peashooter shots just as the opponent hits the ground to get a half, or even quarter, of the pie. But it's better than nothing.

Also, I think point structure for ground targets could be re-worked. I mean, an aircraft carrier is worth 700 points....a bomber is 400. It's much easier to shoot down two bombers than one carrier, and a carrier could have 2000 points worth of planes in its hangar or on the deck. Fuel stores and "infrastructure" should also count for something and be target-able by AI (and I know about the whole hiding the truck in the building thing, but that's not very cool ).

[Cloyd]

The AI are SUCH point whores!

Cloyd