AI & MP Dogfighting now working! Bombable ships, aircraft...

[hellcat]

nice work, and thanks for improving my pearl harbor attack scenario.

[Vodoun da Vinci]

I thought they were getting pretty tough to hit and pretty clever at attacking in 3.0O. I'll load up P and give her a shot...no pun intended.

Thanks for all your hard work, Flug!!

Voodoo

[obk01]

so the link up there? if i dont have it dled and have the one from like page 1 or whatever the a-10 wont b able to dogfight other a-10s? i mean when i crash my a-10 now it says damage 100% etc, and seems as though itd work...??

[Thorsten]

It seems that at the moment the bad guys are hopelessly at advantage. I tried to engage the A-10 with the F-14b and the new sidewinders (never mind that they wouldn't actually register damage at this point) - the accuracy against evading aircraft is close to zero, I didn't score a single hit. Trying to attack with the gun, I quickly discovered that while I suffer from blackout, redout, lags and framerate drops (all of which make aiming difficult...) and don't always know where the others are, the enemy A-10 do not seem to have such problems. And they are the majority... Of course they are comparatively slow, there's no way they could catch the F-14 once I decided to light the afterburners and get away - but at the moment, that's somewhat unsatisfactoy... maybe the other guys need some penalty to account for blackouts or disorientation?

[xiii]

Just an idea to help tunning AI bots: it would be nice to have their G-load loged as testing feedback.
Now I'm just going to try one of these A-10 scenario
Alexis.

[Vodoun da Vinci]

AI AIRCRAFT ARE MORE MOBILE VERTICALLY: AI Aircraft dodge and chase you more vertically, diving and climbing. Result is they catch up with you quicker and are quite a bit more challenging to shoot down.

VARIOUS BUGFIXES

Flug, as I usually fly my custom AI scenraios with the Bombable Script and use transplanted/copied-pasted Nasal script borrowed form the A62M and the A-10 can you tell me if the parameters of these aircraft are responsible for the new attack/evasion characteristics?

I load up the Bombable Scripts as they become available and I'm not sure if I should be updating the Nasal Bombable Code in the custom 'Spits and Beaufighters with each new release to get the latest evasion and attack definitions and parameters.

Thanks again for the hard work and any advice you can render!

VooDoo

[Vodoun da Vinci]

I have had a chance to fly version 3P and *Wow* the 'Bots are now aggressive to the point it is very difficult to beat them. I love the fact that they are now very mobile in the vertical plane. They are agile enough in all planes now to be serious adversaries and I find myself being confronted/attacked a lot from the 12 oclock position...that is, head on attackes are now the norm. Which is very creepy and very difficut to get hits/kills on. I have yet to see one split S but if they do learn this trick I doubt I'll ever hit one again.

Except in a head on collison which has happened quite a few times.

I have to agree with Thorsten at this point - The 'Bots now have an advantage that is not really very realistic. I have managed to set a few of them up and get on their six. Often they will be in a steep turn and climbing/descending say with wings canted at a 45 degree angle to the starboard side as I settle in and line them up. Then, without warning, their wings flick instantly to a 45 dgree cant to the port and they pop instantly up perhaps 100 feet. They don't fly defensively anymore to avoid being targeted...they just go *pop* and they are instantly turned out of the line of fire. It's as if the roll rate of the aircraft is now effectively zero and they can turn a square corner and change course instantly to avoid being targeted.

No fair.

Also, I an't seem to turn off the smoke trails anymore. It used to be controlled with the "enable jet contrails" check box but now, even with both "enable smoke trails" and "enable jet contrails" disabled I still get them with smoke. The smoke trail is not to my liking anymore. I think it seems more natural a few versions ago - now it looks like the aircraft are pooping little cotton balls as you catch up to them. Also, I have noticed that smoke from a damaged aircraft actually appears *behind* the clouds that are present in the sky. Like the damage smoke is billboarded behind the clouds in the sky.

Other than that I'm still flying 3P for my life...taking hits from the 'Spit 'Bots is a common occurence. They haven't shot me down yet but I know that's gonna happen eventually.

Thnaks for the hard work, Flug!

VooDoo

[Thorsten]

Also, I have noticed that smoke from a damaged aircraft actually appears *behind* the clouds that are present in the sky. Like the damage smoke is billboarded behind the clouds in the sky.

I *think* that's a sorting issue in 2.0.0 and fixed in GIT - nothing flug can do about this.

[Vodoun da Vinci]

I *think* that's a sorting issue in 2.0.0 and fixed in GIT - nothing flug can do about this.

Awesome, thanks for passing this along!

I have been doing some sorting of the various 3P video captures I have and noticed that some of the chase/attack sequences are *so* realistic as to be the best yet...the Bandit 'Bots duck and weave *very* realistically. Not like earlier versions where they just let you walk up and pound on them. It is only occasionally that they pull this "flick" manuever on head on attacks or even from a defelection angle....their wings just snap over and they will literally just jump out or the gunsight. Very annoying.

At least one of these flicking maneuvers resulted in a head on collision which I managed to capture and will show on the Bombable 3P movie. I have also become pretty adept at getting consistent hits on these head on attacking Bandit 'Bots while avoiding collisions. I have been hit (not severely damaged yet) by 'Spit 'Bot return fire trying to get a shot.

These versions just keep zeroing in on the realism but I think maybe the 'Bots have a little too much agility to be realistic right now. Lots of fun/very challenging but they have advantages in that they obviously do not black out on high G turns, have roll rates (at times) close to zero, and can climb/drop a large distance without the aircraft damaging itself or the pilot blacking out. They also never stall and don't seem to lose speed in a steep turn and will counter attack even though severely damaged and trailing black smoke.

Very aggressive, nasty, mean, agile, these current 'Bots. I'd love to drink beer with their pilots but I doubt I could keep up...

VooDoo

[xiii]

Trying to attack with the gun, I quickly discovered that while I suffer from blackout, redout, lags and framerate drops (all of which make aiming difficult...) and don't always know where the others are, the enemy A-10 do not seem to have such problems. And they are the majority... Of course they are comparatively slow, there's no way they could catch the F-14 once I decided to light the afterburners and get away - but at the moment, that's somewhat unsatisfactoy... maybe the other guys need some penalty to account for blackouts or disorientation?

I just played again with MarinCounty scenario (p version) with the f-14b gun only. (Since I survived the nuclear war).
There is a noticable stutter every 1 or 2 secs. This prevent to have a steady turn rate. The Tomcat FCS is faulty here, it does need more CPU ressouces, maybe it would be ore easy with only 3 or 4 zeros around. Disabling the SAS lowers a lot the effect. It remains noticable when you are turning more than 4Gs mostly because of the blackout. But without the SAS, it is doable. So fly slow, in a range from 180kts to a max 300kts, use flaps, and react very fast when stalling in a turn at 1000ft AGL (also doable)

It would be much easier with the original f-14b G settings. AFAIK blackout is set by bombable at 4G onset/5G complete, (5.5/7.9 in the f-14b own config). I think bombable shouldn't overwrite the aircraft settings when they exist.

Now I enjoyed smoking a few bots (4) before running out of ammos though the debug log said 14% damage for me when I ran out of ammos.

Really cool stuff, thanks flug.

Alexis

[Hooray]

Trying to attack with the gun, I quickly discovered that while I suffer from blackout, redout, lags and framerate drops (all of which make aiming difficult...) and don't always know where the others are, the enemy A-10 do not seem to have such problems. And they are the majority... Of course they are comparatively slow, there's no way they could catch the F-14 once I decided to light the afterburners and get away - but at the moment, that's somewhat unsatisfactoy... maybe the other guys need some penalty to account for blackouts or disorientation?

One simple way for taking this into account would be to hard code a delay variable into the update loop that defaults to 0.00, so that the "penalty" results in the delay being incremented under certain circumstances, which in turn returns early, without updating the corresponding AI instance, thus emulating a disabled/disoriented AI pilot, which does not respond for a number of milliseconds. So the delay would be linked to a timeout, to make the delay expire (=reset to zero) after a a while.

These versions just keep zeroing in on the realism but I think maybe the 'Bots have a little too much agility to be realistic right now.

I think, we are really lucky that this addon has not yet been integrated with xiii's AI missiles, otherwise we would have a real problem now!
Also, the AI in its current form is fortunately still hard coded and not based on neural networks, otherwise they may even predict your actions/evasive maneuvers

Lots of fun/very challenging but they have advantages in that they obviously do not black out on high G turns, have roll rates (at times) close to zero, and can climb/drop a large distance without the aircraft damaging itself or the pilot blacking out. They also never stall and don't seem to lose speed in a steep turn and will counter attack even though severely damaged and trailing black smoke.

Yes, Thorsten also mentioned this. But if this is a feature request to make the AI bots more realistic by decreasing their pilot/flying skills, I would suggest to make this configurable instead, maybe by having a customizable skill level (0-10) or alternatively, by providing a GUI dialog where the individual capabilities of the AI bots could be selected:

[x] agility degree ___
[x] g limit = 4.0
[x] roll rate limit = xx
[x] aircraft damage
[x] aircraft stall speed

But many of these issues that you mention are indeed related to the fact that the AI system does not really use an FDM internally, so a pseudo FDM needs to be used for emulating realistic aircraft behavior. To fix this, one would have to recreate a complete FDM (for each aircraft!) in Nasal space, or add FDM support to the AI system, both of which is non-trivial.

So the easiest thing to do at the moment, would be to hard code exceptions, for certain maneuvers that cannot be flown (or which cannot be flown without a penalty), this would need to be done for each supported aircraft, and could be done with a number of hashes for storing maneuverability "limits".

[Thorsten]

Actually, I had a weird crash yesterday and don't know if it may be related to either the bombable script or the F-14 missiles (or something else).

I took the F-14 on an air-air refueling exercise from KLSV, taking off with a FAD light missile load and 25% fuel in the tanks, calling a tanker after takeoff. When I had the tanker in visual range (distance a bit less than a mile, but still some way to go before making contact), I 'crashed' in mid-air, i.e. bombable wrote out the message 'you crashed' and I was covered in fire and smoke. I deactivated the bombable Nasal, restarted Flightgear and my refueling exercise went fine. Possible culprits are:

* any modification of the F-14 (I had sidewinders on board, however they were not armed and I did not try to fire a missile, nor accidentially hit any key)

* the bombable system (can it 'create' a crash? , or does it just animate it when the flag is set)

* my clouds - I had a while ago the problem that one could 'crash' with a cloud, but I believe this is not the problem here, since a) I think the problem is solved and b) I was way above (at least 6000 ft if not more) any cloud layer

* something else (no idea... didn't ever have this with any other plane)

Does any of you have an idea what the cause of that crash might have been?

[Hooray]

I just looked into bombable's Nasal code, and it seems really not only well commented but also pretty well structured and generalized already, and I think another possibility to balance the whole experience would be to provide an option for setting up AI bots (or wingmen) to help you fight the bad boys.

Pretty much like AI bots that help you defend/protect an objective - while helping fight other AI bots.

One possible method would be to set up an option to spawn friendly forces on demand. To come and help you. Either using a hotkey or a GUI dialog.
They could either be spawned at a configurable fixed position (i.e. KSFO) or within a configurable range of your current position (say 20 miles).

There is also some good information available on creating autonomous dogfight agents: CREATING A DOGFIGHT AGENT: The design and implementation of a fully autonomous agent that can fly an airplane during a one-to-one dogfight.

but they have advantages in that they obviously do not black out on high G turns, have roll rates (at times) close to zero, and can climb/drop a large distance without the aircraft damaging itself or the pilot blacking out. They also never stall and don't seem to lose speed in a steep turn and will counter attack even though severely damaged and trailing black smoke.

This is actually interesting, because there have been efforts to use such bad behavioral patterns for training and "punishing" AI agents, which would then inherit their good capabilities to the next generation, by using genetic algorithms, so that only the smartest would "survive".

I think, in the late 90s there was an effort to use AI bots for controlling virtual fighter planes, in simulators used for training real fighter pilots.
This was in some way related to the Eurofighter project.

These AI bots were based on the "Creatures" game by CyberLife, and they were called "Norns"

Norns were based on work by AI pioneer Steve Grand, he has published a book titled "Creation: Life and How to Make It" about this.

Norn Attacks and Marine Doom:
Creatures,* a game developed in 1996 by Stephen Grand from the firm CyberLife, makes possible the breeding of individual beings and generations, all the way to an entire population of furry little creatures called “Norns." They possess a digital DNA and basically go through all stages of human development. Each develops an individual biography including infancy, childhood and youth when they must be raised and cared for, and finally adulthood. They reproduce sexually, they age and die. To experience a complete life cycle, players must spend approximately 18 hours with one of their Norns until the creature succumbs to the infirmities of old age.

Initially these AI bots were just intended to merely fly virtual enemy planes that would then be shot down by real eurofighter student pilots:

Norns go to war:
Agents from Albia , is an article by Clive Davidson in the May 9 issue of New Scientist which describes how Cyberlife, the company which created the popular creatures alife product, is working with the British government's Defense Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) to create agents to act as adversaries for pilots flying missions in flight simulators.

But eventually, due to the genetic algorithms used, the AI bots became excellent at flying the virtual aircraft (usually after about 400 generations):

Norns go to war:
"In their virtual world, norns live as cute, clever pets that reason and learn. In the real world, the military has enlisted the technology behind norns to create top fighter pilots. ... After running populations of 40 pilots through up to 400 generations of evolution, CyberLife has software agents that don't crash their planes and can keep targets in their sights for a long time. On paper, these synthetic pilots look as good as human aces, but DERA has not yet put humans through exactly the same test on a simulator. That would be one of the next steps for DERA and CyberLife to take."

Norn Attacks and Marine Doom:Now, on commission from the British Ministry of Defense (Bedford, Dera Research Institute), the “cute” little characters are being trained as Eurofighter pilots. The goal of this vision is “to put human intelligence inside computers by the year 2020.” The concept of unmanned armed vehicles (UAV) is being tested with the Norns. The term “unmanned" is not synonymous with “not live”; it is just that, in this case, there are no human beings piloting the Eurofighter.
This commercial application was selected because it contains the first artificial species capable of learning. Only the “born” flyers are bred further; the genes of those who crash are eliminated. It is only after 400 generations that the Norns master aviation. The death of the virtual test pilots means nothing. They are immaterial victims of military progress. Artificial life (still) has no needs of its own; all it wants to do is to survive combat. Hunger and thirst are trained out of it. Furthermore, it is capable of tolerating stress, and can withstand tremendous acceleration without injury, since it possesses no body and its cyberlife-brain has been trained exclusively to carry out this task.

And then a project was started to completely replace human pilots with such AI bots in the simulated world:

Norns go to war:
In March CyberLife Technology signed an agreement with the UK's Ministry of Defense research organization to build a simulated military aircraft controlled by a software agent. CyberLife will be using real flight model data from the MOD to simulate an aircraft akin to the Eurofighter. "This intelligent plane, however, requires no human intervention and will be capable of sustaining flight, pursuing enemy vehicles, evading attack and making reasoned decisions in order to complete its mission requirements."

Basically, the technique is now called "adaptive control systems", which resulted in "self-reconfiguring bots" that could really learn things like controlling a simulated aircraft.

This "learning" was based on a "punish/reward" system, and these agents were actually able to cooperate to a certain degree, to achieve their goals.

In fact, these "Norns" were even so good at doing their job in the simulated world, that they were immediately used to fly real aircraft, namely UAVs:

Norns piloting UAVs:
The British Ministry of Defense (MOD) asked CyberLife to adapt their Creatures game to a real application: piloting unmanned aircraft. The approach is genetic search through a space of complex neural networks and "hormone" levels designed to simulate human behavior and learning. The norns have been training/evolving in Eurofighter simulations, and can now "sustain flight formations, evade attackers, shoot down enemy aircraft, and complete reconnaissance missions." In about six months they'll be given genuine miniature planes to fly. [Anil Malhorta. Newsweek, 18May98, p. 10.]

Norn Attacks and Marine Doom:Toby Simpson’s remark “modelling reality to get reality” thus assumes a new dimension: modelled virtual reality becomes a reality of death and destruction. For the first time, artificial life has its “finger” on the trigger of deadly weapons. This lethal “smartness” of artificial life that leads an existence as a purely airborne being in an unmanned flying object constitutes the achievement of independence of a warlike form of killing. After all, the Pilot-Norns are capable of learning within their own “biotope” and develop capabilities which lie outside of the programmed structures — which is by no means astounding in the case of an artificial life form with a genetic code. The Norns keep the Eurofighter aloft in such an individualistic way that the programmers are now not even capable of explaining it any more on the basis of an analysis of the software.
The term “friendly fire” takes on an insidious new significance when Norns — juvenile homunculi and actually just a fortuitous visualization of digital processes - operate real aircraft and are in the position to extinguish real lives. Death is no longer depicted as a hideous skeleton, but rather as a “cute” cuddly creature. They are of course invisible to a potential enemy, to whom this is a remote-controlled guided missile without any form of life, since the enemy is incapable of perceiving it.
These Pilot-Norns are one further step in the direction of the fulfillment of the age-old military dream of replacing imperfect, mortal human warriors with an artificial species. They are perfect jigsaw puzzle pieces in constructions like the 21stCenturyLandwarrior (21CLW), the Pitman of the 1980s, robotic weapons and the idea of an “augmented reality” (Mark Weiser), and of conflicts decided on artificial battlefields.

Norn Attacks and Marine Doom:On one hand, artificial life rediscovers death as an important category of life; on the other hand, it threatens this very same human life with aggressive action and violent death in military applications. Artificial life has succeeded in making the leap to the reconstruction of human violence — from evolutionary aggression that promoted survival to premeditated aggressive action reinforced by machinery. With the advent of Pilot-Norns, it has lost its innocence.

All this took place almost 15 years ago ...

[Vodoun da Vinci]

Yeah, but is this ability to learn and adapt present in the latest AI aircraft/bombable script? 'Cause I swear...I use familiar and "favorite" ACM maneuvers in the same scenarios. My attacks against 12 opposing aircraft, the same AI scenario (which I programmed) are essentially the same but it seems as if they are getting clever and changing their tactics day by day. My favorite platform for head on attacks was the FW 190...I was hammering them and deliberately choose aircraft that are arcing in to make head on attacks. But after a dozen sessions these 'Bots have changed their tactics against the FW on head on attacks. They will not engage but instead tease until I "set up" and then they flit off up/down or avoid.

Then if I sneak a quick look behind I find an attacker (or 3) grouped and attacking from my rear as I set up to hammer an oncoming head on.

If I use the Bf 109 in the same scenario they go on ahead and joust head on...they have not apparently learned to avoid these kinds of attacks when I'm flying the '109 as I'm good at estimating range and defelection angle. But I have not deployed this tactic very much with the Bf and so they have not learned to avoid head on confrontations with the '109. Can this be the case or is it circumstantial? 'Cause I swear these 'Spits will not engage the FW 190 head on at high speed because I have popped so many of them by being aggressive and risking head on collisions while opening up at a few hundred meters head on. They veer away or flit and tease and then disengage when it gets scary. With the Bf 109 they come on a head and you can see them steer directly for a head on as if they have not yet learned that trick.

Is this possible or am I just too involved with attacking/defending against 12 other aircraft to see the randomness of their strategy? Do they have any strategy? Or are they just twisting and turning in 3 virtual dimensions looking for relative distance, altitude, and angle. They must be adapting to some degree...I can lead them to higher altitudes or crash them into mountain sides by flick rolling and split s'ing at low altitude or dodging around a tight pass in the hills. And if I split S at 25,000 and then zoom up to 30,000 I can see them circling or setting up at a higher altitude to get an advantage and dive down on me.

VooDoo

[xiii]

hi,

I'm beginning thinking what could be the most convenient way to report impacts from the missiles fired by the player aircraft.

Actually, we have a loop running each frame and updating the missile position. The distance between the target and the missile is checked in this loop. When this distance begins to increase and if in a given minimal range, the missile is fuzzed and the distance of the former loop is kept as the fuzzed distance (t-1).

An impact could simply be wrote at the precise t-1 location. Now this is not satisfying. To keep realistic we should compute a sphere (fragmentation WH), check how far the target is from the center of the sphere and somehow decide how much damage the target gets.

Now the idea is to find a solution so missiles and bombable integrate well and at an affordable (fps) cost and also with simple communications in the MP case.

Any ideas ? flug ?