Suggestion for improvements to AI lead comms
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Hi, as many others I sometimes fly as #2 with the AI for a quick flight, to do formation training. Practicing rejoins, going spread, echelon right etc.
One thing I noticed about the lead #1 is that his comms around the ATC is very good. Orders the flight to push tower, approach, which formation to assume for landing etc.
The next phase outside ATC is a bit lacking though, after taking off he does not announce to “push Tactical” after we have been on Departure. And when coming up on a tanker, he does not announce that flight should push the tanker UHF to listen in on his comms with the tanker. It would be nice if that could be remedied at some point.
But getting back to the formation practice: In between steerpoints flying is pretty smooth. That is when it is possible to fly alongside the lead and practice formations.
But when transitioning to next steerpoint, his manouvering can get a little unstable. Going burner, abrupt altitude changes etc.
This wouldn’t be so bad if it was announced, like a human lead would do.
So say we are flying between steerpoint 2 and 3, and coming up on steerpoint 3. The next path from 3 to 4 requires a left turn.
A few improvements in comms could go a long way:
Announce in advance when transitioning to next steerpoint. For instance, “Spade 1, reference steer 4”.
Announce in advance how he plans to manouver onto the next part of the flight path (from 3 to 4): “Spade 1, 30 degree left turn, angels 26”These messages contain information that he has and is going to apply himself, and hearing it out loud would go a long way to make the #1 a good lead.
It would be nice to see some attention to these suggestions at some point, although I have no idea how hard it is to do.
Thanks,
JayB -
I don’t know but I suspect a lot of the practical difficulty is just getting the voice effects mastered … in a way that doesn’t require re-doing all the existing voice effects, for consistency.
Personally, I really don’t mind the stephen hawking style text-to-speech that we hear in some of the carrier/atc and awacs comms. And probably there are much better free/open-source TTS engines available these days…?
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I agree, current quality of speech is fine, it gets the job done.
My basic thoughts for if this is doable is the fine work that has been done on the ATC comms part. In comparison this seems like minor additions.
Basically hook into what the lead is doing and have that transmitted as text-to-speech: when he switches to tanker freq he says so. When he switches to tactical he says so. When his state machine has figured out what degree turn to take, express that vocally (ideally a few seconds before he actually turns )