4.11 - AI debugging

[IceFire]

Interesting. I will look for that behavior on my next several flights.

I have noticed the AI pulling too hard and crashing but it's been on the lower AI levels and I think this is in the realm of feature rather than bug. It's nice to see the AI pull too hard, screw it up and stall out. It looks very natural and realistic.... and it doesn't happen so often as to be regarded as artificial. At least not for me.

[Whacker]

Originally Posted by IceFire

I have noticed the AI pulling too hard and crashing but it's been on the lower AI levels and I think this is in the realm of feature rather than bug. It's nice to see the AI pull too hard, screw it up and stall out. It looks very natural and realistic.... and it doesn't happen so often as to be regarded as artificial. At least not for me.

Agree. It needs some tweaking but historically there were plenty of deaths and aircraft losses due to pilot error in all aspects of flight. I just read something not too long ago about when they switched from P-47's to P-51's in Europe, there were more than a few deaths right off the bat due to pilots trying to dive like they did in the jugs, which the Mustangs couldn't handle. I don't necessarily expect that level of AI modeling, but stuff like rookie mistakes are a welcome change IMO.

As for the acrobatic weirdness, try it against mainly veteran or above pilots, in airplanes with good roll rates. Bring the fight down the near the ground and get behind them. If they decide they want a turning fight, you should see what I mentioned. There will be lots and lots of hard rolling, and some of that zany upside-down flying. I'll try to get a screenshot, since the track saving and replay seems to be broken as of now (4.11hotfix).

[Luno13]

It has been acknowledged that .trks no longer work. DT is unlikely to fix this. Instead, be sure to record an .ntrk. Set a key, or press ESC and click "start recording" or similar.

[Whacker]

Well that stinks... What's the difference between a .trk and .ntrk? So you have to decide when a mission starts if you want to record it or not? Seems kinda silly.

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Whacker

Well that stinks... What's the difference between a .trk and .ntrk? So you have to decide when a mission starts if you want to record it or not? Seems kinda silly.

TRK was setup to record the inputs from the player (and AI) into the flight model. It's an extremely unreliable format as slight or minor changes to the flight model and AI modeling over the years has made saving anything in TRK a near useless endeavor. The NTRK format is a very different beast in that it records more information including the actual positions of aircraft and damage states so that the playback is virtually identical between versions no matter how much has changed.

It's why the BlackDeath.ntrk or the Kamikazi02.ntrk still work many years after they were created.

I know what you mean about deciding to record later... and perhaps there is a solution using NTRK that would be possible but TRK was always problematic. As soon as IL-2 went from version 1.0 to 1.01 things started to go astray.

[Luno13]

Right. And those training tracks? Before, you could actually take control of the aircraft to complete the training. Now, it's just a boring movie that doesn't really teach much at all.

What is nice is that you can make an .ntrk of an .ntrk. So, make a long recording of your flight, and then play back and re-record only the interesting bits. It's useful to add the recording indicator as this shows a timer to tell you how long you've been recording, and at what minute something noteworthy occurred. While pressing the recording hotkey creates file like "00001.ntrk" you can go into the records folder and change it to something more descriptive, like "Il2_pwns_noobs" (no spaces or some symbols allowed).

Add this line to your conf.ini under [Game]:

RecordingIndicator=1