[bizzybody]

What would drastically help Alpha One's survival is the Finger Four flight formation.

The flight lead (Alpha One) takes the point with his wingman to the left or right and a bit behind. The element lead (Alpha Three) takes up the position opposite the flight lead and his wingman's position is to whichever side is outboard from the flight lead's position.

Thus the formation takes the positions of the tips of the fingers of a human hand with the fingers straight out.

Everyone follows the flight lead's orders! If the flight lead orders the element lead to split off, his wingman goes with him. The flight lead's wingman always sticks with the flight lead.

Under radio silence, all planes in a flight do what the leader does unless combat gets into a dogfight. The wingmen can take targets of opportunity as long as doing so does not endanger their lead.

Freespace doesn't seem to work too well in this regard. The bloody stupid wingmen are always haring off on their own, getting ganged up on and killed.

See the History Channel show Dogfights for how the best combat pilots through the history of military aviation shot down their enemies and lived to tell about it. One American pilot, with only 10 hours of previous flight time in the Hellcat fighter, shot down seven Japanese aircraft in his first combat mission. I'd like to see an episode of the show on Saburo Sakai, Japan's 4th best pilot in WW2 with over 60 kills and their best pilot to survive the war.

[Wanderer]

Finger four is actually very, very misleading name for the that flight formation. Main point about finger four are the two 2-fighters elements which are able to fight independently while still supporting each other. Often the second element was assigned into 'high guard' or 'top patrol'.

[jr2]

That would be a very good idea, as well as perhaps allowing enemy / other friendly AI to be controlled by the lead, instead of individually.  That way, wings are always there to support each other, unless theres a reason.

[takashi]

think about the balance of the game! implementing this in the main campaing would make of people mad. maybe telling a dev about this for his/her mod?

[MP-Ryan]

I'd settle for ANY formation... wingmen don't seem to know how to keep it together.

[takashi]

C 3 7

form on my wing. perefect formation.

when shivans come:

C 3 9

easy as 3 keypresses ever 5 minutes or so.

[Commander Zane]

Until they're all hood ornaments against the hull of a Deimos...no...not that easy...

[takashi]

deimos? when i play like that they're on a sathanas.

and even so they only end up like that in 2 missions.

[Flaser]

Oh for ****s sake!

Finally forget the darn gameplay mantra; the AI has long been a sore point of Freespace.

It could be optional, the campaign could be rebalanced/reworked; mods, usermade campaigns and most likely the total conversion WOULD use it.

[Flipside]

Splitting into two groups like that would probably be Fred-based behaviour anyway, it'd be kinda complex to get the squadron to start dividing itself up into fighting and cover units on the fly, but by using ship orders and wing orders, you should be able to get a wing to fly its objectives, but have each ship assigned a 'partner' which it protects if attacked?

[takashi]

that souns like a C 1 (number) 5 command to me.

[bizzybody]

What'd really be slick is to be able to order a wingman to do a Thach Weave with you. 'Course you, as Alpha One, would have to be able to fly your half of the pattern without screwing it up.

[Trivial Psychic]

I suspect that there are hard-coded values which dictate the formation configuration, as well as the distance that ships must be from one another, which would likely be calculated as based on the size of the ship, so that small ships will maintain a tight formation, but larger ships won't use the same real-space distance figures as the small ships, and end up grinding hulls.

In order to allow more than the default formation, its likely that we'd need a new formations.tbl file.  It would likely use degrees from the last ship in the formation, along with a distance variable based on the radius, as mentioned.  There'd need to then be a "formation" tab in the wings editor, which would list "default" if no formations.tbl file is present, with alternate formations.  An additional distance modifier might be useful, if the FREDder wants the formation to be a little more spread out than standard.

[Inquisitor]

Starting over on the formation flying discussion. Carry on.

[Bob-san]

A complete rewrite on Freespace would be awesome. At least change the look a bit more...

Anyways with AI, you should have a set distance between the midpoint. This should help you when you want a formation flow. Generally, you have an optimum distance between two ships of the same class. Divide that distance in half. When two ships are mismatched, the major ships will not collide; so for example a Deimos will never collide with a Colossus because the Colossus is set to have what would be half of the optimum distance next to another Colossus, plus half the optimum distance next to a Deimos. It keeps them separated while close without requiring so many individual settings. Add in a key for FRED to change the midpoint distance of individual ships.

Some other problems... how fast will ships move away from each other? Have it based on ship size once again. If equal class, they move apart from each other at a ten-degree angle (5 degrees off endpoint for each). If mismatched in size, the smaller ship moves away at a twelve-degree angle. Add in conflicting directions, modifying the into-formation setup so the large ship will go up and then down to meet formation.

Other things about fighters... add in a few meters differance as it always annoys me how annoying their tight formations are. Also, allow two different form-on-my-wing commands; one for stay on my wing no matter what and one for defensive formation.

That will however expand the commands system; seperate orders into three categories... Offensive (destroy target, disable, disarm) , Defensive (tight formation, defensive formation, protect target, ignore target), and Strategic (depart, rearm, capture, etc)

[Cobra]

A complete rewrite on Freespace would be awesome. At least change the look a bit more...

Well, see, the thing is, a complete rewrite of the code would probably take years. Five at least, since these guys don't actually code for a living (correct me if I'm wrong).

Anyways with AI, you should have a set distance between the midpoint. This should help you when you want a formation flow. Generally, you have an optimum distance between two ships of the same class. Divide that distance in half. When two ships are mismatched, the major ships will not collide; so for example a Deimos will never collide with a Colossus because the Colossus is set to have what would be half of the optimum distance next to another Colossus, plus half the optimum distance next to a Deimos. It keeps them separated while close without requiring so many individual settings. Add in a key for FRED to change the midpoint distance of individual ships.

You mean like a boundary sphere of some sort?

Other things about fighters... add in a few meters differance as it always annoys me how annoying their tight formations are. Also, allow two different form-on-my-wing commands; one for stay on my wing no matter what and one for defensive formation.

Well, from what I understand, again, the team would have to dive into the (messy) AI code, make new code for the AI and screw around in the control scheme, and possibly make new gauge art.

[Bob-san]

Yeah, that's the problem with a rewrite. How about modulating the code and do it piece-by-piece? Expand engine features (130+ ships,internal settings for AA and AF, better brightness settings), then do AI, after that the UI, etc.

Not quite a boundry of space... more like we choose a good distance for two ships. Example..

&& Deimos && ==================||=== && Myrmidon &&

versus

&& Deimos && ==================||================== && Deimos &&

The Deimos has a large midpoint, compared to the Myrmidon's relatively small midpoint, versus two Deimos midpoints.

How about we use the radius of a boundry sphere where the center is the midpoint of the ship and the closest point on the circumference make the second point of an arc, the internal angle governed by the lead ship. How's that for a new formation? I don't know how to script it, but that would be damn-good to have.

[Flipside]

Problem is with any computer program is that you only have a certain amount of runtime. You take from here to give to their, which is why programs which have massive item databases or exceptionally good AI tend to look more 'basic' than games with high level graphics and passable AI.

Of course, the way round this is MMO's but that's another story

The other problem is that the AI is very tangled with the rest of the program, as in, there are a lot of references and situations where it would be easy to break AI entirely in some way and not know until much later, for example, you may change something in the way ships approach their target and completely mess up docking without knowing and testing tends to be 'item specific' by neccessity, so it may be missed until someone spots that ships aren't docking properly.

I think updating the AI itself would take a lot of dedication, not just from the coders, but from the testers, since they'd not only have to test the actual application of the AI, but also it's behaviour in other situations.

[Bob-san]

Good points. If we do it slowly, it should be fine. Save each change, let us do what we do best; beta the content and tell what's wrong. If we change everything once a week, it makes it fairly regular to check, perhaps a highlight about it and links to the latest and the archives.