4.11 - AI debugging

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by jameson

That happened to me flying earlier with AI as wingman, he'd been shot down and five minutes later he's praised my shooting!

There's lots of little ways that friendly AI radio messages are messed up. Huge amounts of lag before a message is transmitted is just one.

Even more jarring is a "calm voice" "This is [Number] . . ." statements followed by a long period of silence, then a "freak out" message (e.g., "I'm bailing out!").

Another annoyance is that the game doesn't have unit callsigns, just generic "color" names and all units use the same "frequencies." This means, during a big mission, when multiple flights of the same color are in the air, you can have multiple "red 2" (or whatever) calling out different messages simultaneously.

Even worse, since friendly planes never identify their location on the map, you've got no way of knowing which "red 2" (or whatever) is under attack/returning to base/bailing out.

Another annoyance is that periodically someone (I've never figured out who) will call out random numbers. I've been playing IL2 for something like 8 years now and I still don't know what those random numbers mean. Is it ground control calling out altitudes and courses? If so, whose altitude and course? Why?

If you're going to have ground control, it should actually vector you towards your target.

Then of course, there's the friendly AI which calls out "bandits" (or whatever) without giving you any useful information about: A) Number, B) Type, C) Location, D) Altitude, E) Activity.

In a better world, you'd get a report like "2 bandit fighters, 5 o'clock high, inbound!" or "Multiple bogies, 20,000 feet, grid coordinates 20-32, inbound!"

In a perfect world, you'd have even more info, like "2 109s, 5 o'clock high, coming in!" (i.e., actually beginning an attack run) or "Multiple bogies, angels 20, 17 miles off Lunga Point, inbound. Course 137 degrees, speed 250 knots."

Finally, while it's merely a "color" thing, some of the AI dialog just sounds wrong when translated into other languages/dialects. Every air force had its own method of doing things and its own slang.

For example, "He's going to hell" might be a good literal translation from the Russian, but a 1940s British pilot might say "That Jerry's gone for a Burton" when claiming a kill over a German plane, while an American pilot of the period might say, "That Kraut's down for the count!"

The better add-on voice packs get this right. Stock voice packs, not so much.