Some new official info from ubi forums

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by David603

Yeah, I think it does mean mechanical wear. It was mentioned many times when a dynamic campaign was still planned that you would get a new plane and it would wear out over time. No idea if that still applies to the static campaigns.


Why is it less work because of an extra dimension? All pathfinding in a RTS can be defined as a areas a unit can move in and areas it can't. These areas could be represented as a white sheet of paper with black areas. At a slightly more sophisticated level units can be made to start avoiding no-go areas before they bump into them, and recognise other units as no go areas but it is still only a few lines of code and some basic calculations. Of course, if you have thousands of units then this will still add up.

By contrast, pathfinding for an aircraft needs to be more sophisticated. The basics are keeping a safe distance from the ground, but more accuracy and hence more calculations are required to do this, because unlike an RTS unit which can bump into the obstacle and then move on, a plane will turn into a fireball on contact with the ground.

Simple flight from point A-B is easy enough, you just need the altitude and speed, but that is still more complex than moving an RTS unit across open ground, because an RTS unit doesn't need to calculate the altitude and moves at a fixed speed.

After that, you need to be able calculate an accurate path for takeoff and landing.

Once you add combat things get much more complicated for the Flight sim. While a RTS unit only has two basic parameters added, which are the range that it will sight (and move to attack, if the units AI is set to) and the range where it can use its attack, the aircraft requires many calculations on how to position itself relative to the enemy and more to be able to lead the enemy and shoot accurately. More so if you want the AI to be able to predict the needed aiming point against a manoeuvring target. Separate calculations are required for different styles of attack, for example dive-bombing or strafing.

Of course, you can simplify some stages, IE in Il2 AI landings are simplified to a fly to this point, and then be guided in on rails down to the runway system, and AI bomber pilots do not "know" the whereabouts of other aircraft, which leads to collisions, but I believe the intention is to improve on this aspect in CoD. One of the methods mentioned was AI bubbles, where aircraft outside a certain range use simplified AI and pathfinding.

End of story, the AI and path finding in a simulation of the level of CoD requires at least several hundred times as many computing resources per unit as an RTS.

You need to re-read my post. I specifically sighted 1 RTS which is TW series and does not match your description of an "rts" because there are no sight ranges etc. So you did not address my example, but a generic genre example which you are right requires little cpu usage, but its not what I was talking about.

Again TW = 56,000 units moving in often complex enviroments. The pathfinding needs to be done but it cannot "conflict" with the paths or posistions of thousands of other units and therefore becomes a massive calculation interms of pathfinding.

There are a few errors in your post, for example just because its a 3d space (of movement) does not add much load to the pc at all, thats not how the computer calculates movement. Also altitude and speed does not in any significant way take extra cpu processes, because its all numbers and once broken down, fundamentally simple. Now when you have an interaction between two aircraft when one has to "attack" thing get more complicated. Depending on the AI used it can be very complex but since neither of us know how the ai operates then we should not include that, same goes for a TW rts where the ai has to utilise its limited troops (and if you dont know about TW youtube it, it isnt age of empires).
Now as far as calculating when/where to fire thats one of the most simplistic thing it does. It is simple math that can be done by hand, although it would have to be rapidly updated in a serial fashion. On the other hand pathfinding creates mathmatical conflicts and recalcs which is the cpu eater.