4.13 development update discussion and feedback

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by sniperton

I expected simply 'yes' or 'no'. I suppose it's a 'no'. Thanks. English is not my mother tongue. Sorry.

Sorry if I seemed harsh.

Programming is a difficult thing. What people don't seem to understand is that supposing that to do one thing is x amount of difficulty, then to do two is something like four (two squared) xs worth of difficulty, and to five is about 3,125 (five to the power five) xs worth of difficulty, and when someone says "just one more thing" when there are already a number being done, can be to push the difficulty from 3,125 xs worth of difficulty up to 46,656 (six to the power six) xs worth of difficulty.

[sniperton]

No problem, mate. The funny thing is that I have some programming experience, and I frequently work together with programmers, so the difficulty algorithm you mentioned is well known to me. Unfortunately, when I use a software, I involuntarily try to guess 'what's behind the curtain' / 'what's in the black box', and my badly formulated questions can be easily misunderstood as overpretentiousness...

[Pugo3]

Swept away again by high work load, but have noted the responses to my questions and agree. Upon further review, watching playbacks of test combats I record, the AI Ace is not performing miracle, magic bullet shots, but as several pointed out, convergence, spread, various factors effecting bullet trajectory, etc., and I have see the obvious factor I overlooked - these guys take the shot, they're dead serious skilled fliers, so the number of shells in the air is notably higher than the previous AI, which is as it should be. When flying in invulnerable mode, hits on ones' aircraft are accompanied by a high pitched sound indicating the hit. The number of hits is significantly less than shots fired, which is keeping with the difficulty of hitting a heavily maneuvering opponent with a relatively decent level of skill doing so [in this case, me] Apologies to TD, thanks to all who provided the correctives and explanations.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Igo kyu

Programming is a difficult thing. What people don't seem to understand is that supposing that to do one thing is x amount of difficulty, then to do two is something like four (two squared) xs worth of difficulty, and to five is about 3,125 (five to the power five) xs worth of difficulty

And then there are programming tasks that non-programmers think should be incredibly easy but which are actually incredibly hard:

http://xkcd.com/1425/

[Treetop64]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

And then there are programming tasks that non-programmers think should be incredibly easy but which are actually incredibly hard.

It is lost on most that absolutely every single little thing the AI ever does in it's environment, potentially or otherwise, has to be specifically written down without error in the code. This is most literally the case.

Absolutely every little step in every single action.

Absolutely every single thing that the AI "anticipates" has to be specifically defined and written.

The AI simply will not perform an action if there aren't detailed, specific instructions telling it to do so, no matter how basic it may seem to you and I.

AI, like computers, are comprehensively stupid. Right or wrong, they do only exactly what it is told to do, and nothing more. That means the person writing this stuff much preemptively anticipate every possible contingency that the AI might ever encounter, write how the AI recognizes any given encounter, write how it responds, etc, etc...

It's nothing like "just make the AI know what to do". Programming AI doesn't work that way. It only knows what to do if the coder wrote in specific and detailed instructions telling it to do so.

You can imagine how tedious this can become. Almost excruciating.

Trust me. I've tried my hand at programming. It wasn't what I thought it would be. The guys that do this for a living deserve every cent they earn in their profession. The guys doing this for free, well... What can you say?

[TexasJG]

You can imagine how tedious this can become. Almost excruciating.

Completely understand this, after writhing something as simple as HOTAS map files in scripting language. Time consuming (like hours and hours) and frustrating at times to say the least, and for less than 500 lines of code!!
Couldn't even imagine doing the code for the simplest of bot's...wow
I really, really appreciate what DT has done..
Hopefully, maybe someday I'll have the skills to contribute, with actual hard (java) coding myself....

[Deagle_Bubi]

It would be nice to add a simple editor fw-190f8 (mistel)... Boom!

[Oscarito]

And it would be nice if we could have this patch for XMas!
Two weeks BTW...

[nic727]

It could be nice to have better communication like "today we are fixing bugs and we will release the patch in one month if you are lucky".

What do you think?