Zephyr Net

I've been playing around with mission generating today. What some of you may have expected is that aircraft on the ground will simply taxi to the nearest allied airport and take off there (and thats the way it really is)

This makes generating missions much easier. You dont have to be too accurate with placing aircraft, they'll find their way to the runway and take off, even if they are not placed at the correct spot.

I wish I had time to continue work on this. This could help very much in building a campaign generator.

P.S.: I've coded a little programme that can read all airport data from the MM file. It can place aircraft on an airbase and make them take off there. It's even possible to let e.g. 4 aircraft take off together directly after each other (which is normally only possible with 2 planes max and only if they are in one wing)

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now THAT'S cool!!

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Fighting for justice with brains of steel

Let your anger be like the monkey which hides inside the piniata.

Very nice work.

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"cool beanz"
D. "FETCH" Jordan

well that would have been possible by hand, too. If you just place them close to each other at the beginning of the runway they'll take off pretty quickly. If they are in one wing that makes them form a formation much sooner than usual (because they dont have to wait all the time for all those who are taxiing). If they are not in one wing they'll take off even more quickly, but I dont see how that is useful to any end.

What Im really interested in is a generating tool which will be able to build a (campaign) mission autonomously, comparable to the IL2/FB mission generators.

Ill be coding it myself, but since I dont have any free time these days the first version with any useful features will come out in late July, earliest.

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What about formation take-offs?

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Centurian

Great question CENT.
Takeing off in the diamond would be a nice option.

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"cool beanz"
D. "FETCH" Jordan

Nothing even that complicated though it's good. But what about having a flight of 3 MiG-29s per say, taking off along a runway together and engaging.

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Centurian

sorry, formation wont work that way, all AI planes will move to the center of the runway.

to get them to take off in diamond formation you'd have to have 2 invisible runways next to the visible one. However it IS possible to make planes from the same wing take off from different runways (I dont know wether the wingmen will wait for the leader to be airborne before taking off, though).

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Hi Tank, one year ago i was trying to make a mission generator for FA, but i encounter a difficult problem : How can i make,my program to read the RESULTS of a mission ? Do you found a solution ?

Tank! Great work! Keep it going! If you are successful I can merge this into the FAF campaign manager as the mission generator!

I look forward to seeing the finalized segment in July...

You should post about this in the EGroup...

CAG out...

finalised version... that's still far away.

My first objective is a version which can do anything you'd wish for with aircraft, leaving out ground forces for the moment.

Any windows application will be able to make use of it, as all relevant data for a mission will have to be written into an .ini-file which will then be worked into the mission without any user input.

After that one could code a campaign manager which feeds the mission type and units to my programme.

Im afraid analysing mission results is beyond my expertise. I only have a remote idea of how to get the mission results from FA. It would require hacking the FA.EXE considerably, or using some kind of client-server application, but I dont know much about that.

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Could that be the reason that the old Janes EA servers used an applette to launch the game server and access the results for the kill board?

I have no idea how it worked, I thought u knew more. Moreover Diabolico said he knew (maybe someone who knew) how to get at the kill stats.

Concerning my generator...:

I've been coding a little here and there and it does what I tell it to do pretty well so far, but some of my objectives will not be achievable:

I have been trying to make it possible to have more than 8 wings of fighters in one mission, after some testing it is evident that this is not possible without modifying the FA.EXE.

Moreover I thought it could be possible to have aircraft of different nationalities in one wing, but this failed, too, all aircraft are wearing the nation symbols of the lead fighter, regardless of what nation they're set to.

I tried to enable wings of more than 10 planes, this didnt work, either.

I found out along the way that coordinates in FA mission files are given in ft, which I guess some of you knew already.

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Yes Tank, the number of airwings and the number of aircraft within them is hard coded to the game...

Its possible to change it, but I doubt the graphics engine could support many more then this...

WIth the new FAF skins with embedded national symbols, you no longer need to worry about not being able to mix with the FA national symbols, so multinational airwings are possbile in FAF already...

Keep up the good work though! You are doing us all a great service!

CAG out...

Does anyone know the exact settings for the 'flags' and 'react' entries in mission files? I could find them out by testing, but why do all that work again, if someone has already done it?

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