Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

[tsh2005]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

lets keep on topic. no one wants to really read that

[WarGimp]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

What topic?

Oh yeah... A bunch of people refusing to discuss anything and just spouting the same BS over and over while e-jerking over their cyber-egos.

Both sides are doing this and it's adding nothing to anything.

Meh, whatever.

BTW, I think I might have tripped over the real source of the issue... I'm still trying to look deeper, but it seem like the way the AA Missile tracking is implemented you've only got 2 options. Either the missiles will never hit a plane that does even simple evasion maneuvers or they will hit with certainty. This doesn't take flares into account, ofcource. But yeah, there's a whole in the impementation that isn't fixable, it seems.

I'd personally rather have missile that are over effective than ones that are useless.

[Chris_Redfield]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

What topic?

Oh yeah... A bunch of people refusing to discuss anything and just spouting the same BS over and over while e-jerking over their cyber-egos.

Page back, one of the last posts. Congratulations on your suicide.

Wargimp- working or not, why black and whit? Why the extremes? Why not something between those two. A missile which will leave you room for an evasion maneuver to drop it off your tail.

[ApocolypZ]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

taken from planewhores post

Of course pilots have virtually no way to score teamwork points, capture flags, or do any of the other critical function that every single unit in the game aside from planes can use.

not true at all i saw a guy using the jumpjet or whatever you call it hovering above a flag so that statement would be false he was contributing to his teams efforts. Now thats a skilled pilot to me, not one who blows his own horn all the time looking for praise and glory because he thinks he is the best pilot. pw show a video of you doing this, better yet lets put an end to all this i'm the best. we can set up a server and let the selfproclaimed best pilots in battlefield fight it out.

[« R²» HKS]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

taken from planewhores post

Of course pilots have virtually no way to score teamwork points, capture flags, or do any of the other critical function that every single unit in the game aside from planes can use.

not true at all i saw a guy using the jumpjet or whatever you call it hovering above a flag so that statement would be false he was contributing to his teams efforts. Now thats a skilled pilot to me, not one who blows his own horn all the time looking for praise and glory because he thinks he is the best pilot. pw show a video of you doing this, better yet lets put an end to all this i'm the best. we can set up a server and let the selfproclaimed best pilots in battlefield fight it out.

:laugh: No that is a dumb pilot!

[FierceTeapot]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

lol... just tried looking at planewhore's stats. but it seems they are in demand. No matter what you do, or how long you wait between clicking refresh, bf2s just gives you a new wait time (sometimes less sometimes more) and a different queue size.

[ApocolypZ]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

i see nothing dumb in that he was near a base where no ppl were around but him and the others in my squad. frankly it was an awsome site, you guys cry that the jets can only be used for one thing ( dogfighting) utter ********. to me thats a skilled pilot, not only was he skilled at fighting in the air but skilled enough to take a flag, and leave unharmed. cry all you guys want about dogfighting and aa but the real pilots are never on here running there d1cksuckers about my ratio and the a2a missles, there on the maps learning ways to deal with it.

[WarGimp]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

*sigh*

I doubt that even spelling it out will help with the situation, but I'll give it a shot.

It's difficult to explain in layman's terms, so bare with me if I'm a bit clumbsy with it.

The thing is that the way the engine handles in-flight missile AI there's some nasty problems. Basicly all it's doing is a check to see if the missile has a lock per "tick" (a tick is when an object is quearied/processed by the server). It returns one of several states. "No lock" where it seeks a new lock, "Lock" advance towards target, "hit" blow up, and "ran outta gas" flight time expired/remove missile.

You could observe this via battle recorder playback. The missiles move in zig-zags, not smoothly following the target. This shows that it's "ticking".

Thinking on this a bit (because I was sick of the debate and looking for some real addressable issues), it occured to me that this system can never preform optimally.

With every tick, it determines if it should chase or not. This is a binery function. On (tracking) or off (missed, loose lock, look for a new one).

A missile needs to have some built in lag assossiated with it's tacking in order to make it dodgable. In effect, it shouldn't be using it's current tick for calculating tracking... it should use the previous one and average it with the current one. The missile needs to ask itself "What was I tacking?", "Did it move out of my tracking range?", "Can I re-aquire it without breaking my turn radius rules?" That's a lot of state information to remember/recall from tick to tick per flying missile tho, and would likely cause a significant CPU hit.


Without that sort of thing in place, you can't have a "soft system". Missiles either hit (almost) all the time (because the turn radius is sharp enough to catch planes), or it's going to miss by doing simple tight turns (because it can't turn as fast as a plane).

Basicly, to have a proper system that would make missiles dodgable via unexpected or complex maneuvers, it would require a full re-write of the code... and it's questionable if it's even possible to write the code to do this without increasing the minimum specs of player's computers.

Hrm. I don't feel I've explained this very well... I hope it makes some sort of sence, tho. As I say... I'm sick of the way the argument has been handled thus far. I'd like to see some meaningful discussion over what's really going on.

[FierceTeapot]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

i see nothing dumb in that he was near a base where no ppl were around but him and the others in my squad. frankly it was an awsome site, you guys cry that the jets can only be used for one thing ( dogfighting) utter ********. to me thats a skilled pilot, not only was he skilled at fighting in the air but skilled enough to take a flag, and leave unharmed. cry all you guys want about dogfighting and aa but the real pilots are never on here running there d1cksuckers about my ratio and the a2a missles, there on the maps learning ways to deal with it.

it was dumb. I play AT and could quite easily shoot him out of the sky from half way across the main battlefield.

a skilled tanker could do the same. Not to mention enemy AA fire.

[ApocolypZ]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

could very well have been dumb!! but he managed to take the flag and fly away. point of fact being pw says planes can't contribute, ******** this guy did and scored a capture point. you call it dumb, i call it that he has the nuts to help the team instead of crying in the forums about a2a, aa missles. you are very right if we had been on the other team we would have taken him out very easily. still to me he dared to do it, he did do it, he is the skilled pilot, not the cry babies because they can't get 100 kills anymore.

[Chris_Redfield]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

could very well have been dumb!! but he managed to take the flag and fly away. point of fact being pw says planes can't contribute, ******** this guy did and scored a capture point. you call it dumb, i call it that he has the nuts to help the team instead of crying in the forums about a2a, aa missles. you are very right if we had been on the other team we would have taken him out very easily. still to me he dared to do it, he did do it, he is the skilled pilot, not the cry babies because they can't get 100 kills anymore.

LOL, way to go. Ive never seen a jet capture a flag. Its so rare that it doesnt even matter. Jets contrinute to the team by killing, thats it. End of discussion.

And Wargimp, I sort of understood. Im not good with the technical sides of the game. From what I understand, the evasion maneuver that would work whould be either a simple one (sharp turn), or no evasion maneuver at all- to make it work?

[tsh2005]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

whats with all the essays. Guys really think by now everyone will read it? when it says the same b$ that has already been said for the 30th time

[WarGimp]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

And Wargimp, I sort of understood. Im not good with the technical sides of the game. From what I understand, the evasion maneuver that would work whould be either a simple one (sharp turn), or no evasion maneuver at all- to make it work?

I'm workin on something here to try to help explain the situation. It might take me a bit to sort it out and I'd rather post it via a new thread where it's likely to be discussed without all the useless noise that's dominating this one.

The main thing is that it may not be possible to do missile tracking that could be evaded and yet still be effective.

Thus, I'd rather it be over effective (and have to rely on hunting skills more than raw flight talent) than to have it be useless (since any noob can pull a tight turn and shake missiles).

[WarGimp]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

Well, here's a rough diagram that shows what I'm talking about:

Each missile image is placed to show a "tick" where it would try to aquire it's target. As you can see, the tight missile has no chance of ever hitting a plane that goes into a tight turn. The wider tracking missile has no chance of losing it's lock.

Without adding some kind of random break code, this system cannot be anything other than a binery one. Hit/miss, nothing in between.

Edit: It occurs to me that IF it were possible to make the tracking angle based on "fuzzy logic", it would improve things a bit. Instead of the tracking angle being an absolute, it would have to be based on a chance to tack that starts at 100% within a fixed angle, then drops off as the target moves away from that cone. Still, it's not optimal since it would still make simple hard turns your best evasive maneuver.

HOWEVER, if you were to use this in combonation with a delayed tracking script where it uses the prevous tick's information, the lag it would induce would make drastic changes in flightpath more effective DACM (Defencive Air Combat Maneuvers).

That's getting perty complicated tho. The increased complexity will impose a hit on CPU and raises the possiblities of bugs creeping in.

[Chris_Redfield]

Re: Highway to the Boredom Zone, a pilots perspective on the 1.2 patch

Thus, I'd rather it be over effective (and have to rely on hunting skills more than raw flight talent) than to have it be useless (since any noob can pull a tight turn and shake missiles).

Its all simple really then. Its a conflict of opinions. You prefer hunting while I prefer chasing. You are overly looking on the defensive side of the dogfight where I am concentrating on the offensive side. BUT, you also overlook that it took skills to evade a pilot with skills prepatch aswell.

Youre saying "any noob can pull a tight turn and shake missiles" where I am saying "any n00b can shoot a missile and hit a jackpot". In a sense- the n00b has a more of a chance to survive an attack prepatch than an attack in 1.2. If anything, certain riles have changed. A n00b now has an even shorter life expectancy, a dramatically shorter one. The sharp-turn evasion was a universal move to stay alive for pilots of every skill level.

Even in infatry level game, "raw skills" often matter more than anything. And since it really is a player vs player game- skills should ultimately decide who prevails. If you need a 100% automated weapon to do the job for you, then youre either inexperienced or just lack the skills, which should improve via playtime, not a patch.

One thing that a lot of people have suggested- proximity fuse. This way you still can evade the 1.12 missiles, but if you make mistakes, you get burned more easily. People dont need a 100% effective weapon in a game that should take skills to score.