@Eagle-Eye:
Interested to see how this turns out. 🙂
Me too…
Don’t you think there will be a lot of downtime for your controllers? Mainly during the cruise part (easily 10 - 15 minutes, with an additional 15 - 20 minutes if the flight AARs) our controller was really just sitting there watching blips move on his screen, with nothing to do. Same for A-G missions, where a GCI is pretty much useless.
Certainly, for a single flight TE, for example.
Consider six flights checking into a MP campaign, however.
During our tests, we noticed that BMS 2D is hardly ideal for ATC / GCI as it only shows flight leads and has a noticeable lag. OSC is better, but AISpy seems broken, so you can’t spot AI (blue or red) on your F4AWACS screen. As such, how accurate can your GCI locate, inform about and guide towards possible threats or targets?
Eh, as I posted, aispy (i think the latest is 2.05 now) seems to be working for me with 4.33U2.
It certainly would be nice if it would filter out things that are on the ground or stationary…
My list of “wouldn’t it be nice if…” has plenty more things on it than that.
Certainly the current capability is a little less than what one would consider ideal.
As someone who knows a bit about the topic, and is a little bit of a coder, I would love the chance to get involved with taking that capability up a step. I (suspect) it’s not THAT major of surgery to get quite a lot of payoff…
It is definitely the case that given the current capability, a flight of human players will be able to “trick” a controller looking at the 2d map / aispy.
However in order to do so, they will be sacrificing mutual support of each-other.
…that said, I don’t think most bms flyers actually USE mutual support anyway… so that may not be much of a loss to the fighters.
Depending on how sharp people are… if I tell you that there’s a flight of two, 35 miles off your nose… because all I can see is the flight lead,
and you look over there and only see one… then well that should give you a nice little clue that something’s up.
where is that other guy, anyway???
not perfect, but better than not even knowing they were there at all in the first place, no?
AI red air certainly flies together at least until it’s well within a human blue bubble whence it might try some sort of tactic or maneuver.
Just knowing that 5 minutes ago, picture was clean, and 20 seconds after you went heads-down ip inbound, two mig29’s launched off of an airfield 40 miles away and are heading toward you would pay itself off immediately. AI awacs isn’t going to reliably/accurately tell you that (if it’s even available). Amongst other lists of similar useful information that I can think of.
Once a fight is WVR, C2 is probably out of the game anyway…
Unless of course you’re merged with 2, in ACM mode, head up your lift vector, and you would like to know that there’s ANOTHER bad guy inbound, about 20 miles out right now… might be useful information to have…
…orrr you have taken off on a strike mission and arrived at your target to find that it has already been struck, or is not where you planned on it being… Or perhaps you completed your strike and still have some opportunistic ord and a little bit of gas available for another target… Who you gonna call??? Ghostbusters won’t help you much. But a fc2 controller should be able to find you something valid to strike and pass it to you over U6.
i could go on.
I don’t mean to discourage you, but I wonder if you will be able to set a standard at all.
As the discussion i’m (trying) to invoke over at http://www.falconc2.org goes,
the whole thing needs to be a contract between the fighters and c2.
the fighters tell c2 certain specified things, that c2 needs to know (help me help you)
and c2 tells fighters certain things that they need to know (where can i go find things like targets, gas, or a place to land)(what’s about to shoot me)(etc)
what those things are (both of those lists) is up for development/discussion as they pertain to the simulation and community…
I am not trying to dictate anything to anyone here, i’d like to get an organic solution that raises the level of game for everyone.
come on over and pitch in 🙂
I suspect that most bms pilots don’t have the foggiest idea what they are missing out on by having zero or crappy ai C2 in the game.
Vipers without C2… meh.