Adding AI Aircraft

[shadow9216]

Hello,
Returning to CFS3 after a long break, teaching my 8 year old how to fly; he's really interested in the Flying Tigers and the PTO in general so I loaded the PTO Solomons add-on, which he's playing as I type this. I'm wondering if there's any way to add AI aircraft in as targets- currently the Japanese aircraft are pretty limited (no Bettys for example), but I did see several flyable models in the add-on libraries. Are there other mods with AI adversaries, or would the computer select a flyable aircraft as an AI target? I looked around but maybe missed something in previous threads, so apologies in advance.

 

[Daiwilletti]

Hello,
Returning to CFS3 after a long break, teaching my 8 year old how to fly; he's really interested in the Flying Tigers and the PTO in general so I loaded the PTO Solomons add-on, which he's playing as I type this. I'm wondering if there's any way to add AI aircraft in as targets- currently the Japanese aircraft are pretty limited (no Bettys for example), but I did see several flyable models in the add-on libraries. Are there other mods with AI adversaries, or would the computer select a flyable aircraft as an AI target? I looked around but maybe missed something in previous threads, so apologies in advance.

Hi, look at the Projected Knowledgebase thread under the stickies. Thread#4 by nDicki tells you how to make AI aircraft. The thing about AI aircraft is that they are normally not selectable in Quick Combat mode, unless the settings in the .air file are set so that the aircraft will show up on the list for Quick Combat. I assume that bit is explained in the thread so you should be right.

If you don't have a top-end computer, the beauty of having AI enemy aircraft is that they do not need the cockpit model (m3d) file or the cockpit textures, so if you fly against say 7 enemy fighters, your computer will find it a bit more digestable.

Other installs such as the ETO make a lot of use of AI aircraft. In many aircraft folders, there is a "full" aircraft model and an AI version. Often the AI version is set to allow it to spawn (so you can shoot it down), and the "full" version will not randomly spawn but the .air file is set so it is flyable (so you can fly it). This set up has a number of advantages. Anyway probably too much information sorry.

HTH,

 

[shadow9216]

Thanks, got one working- and it shows up in QC.

Okay- spent most of today editing files, and I've got a bunch of new targets. Great explanation of how to add them in and how the computer makes use of the different files!

Is there any way to use more than one skin per folder/model? I didn't see that in the sticky, and there was some discussion for the BoB mod but it looked like that was focused on adding the letter codes to the individual aircraft...I'd like to have options for different USN paint schemes, or multiple variants in a formation, etc.

 

[popsaka]

Usually, different texture=different aircraft... however if you stick a second *_t.dds texture file (same name) in
the model or sound folder, and delete the .bdp one last time you can get a semi random occurrence of the
different paints on the same a/c...
good luck, cheers and welcome back

 

[ndicki]

Couldn't have put it better myself.

CFS3 does not reply on any particular folder structure for textures, so simply add one folder per skin, and keep the file names the same as the original. So all the skin files would be called, say, Hurricane_MkI_XXXXX_t.dds, and obviously, you'd be obliged to have them in separate folders inside the aircraft's own folder.

Having said that, make sure no other aircraft uses the same texture name, as CFS3 hunts through the entire install for texture files. That means that your playable aircraft would also have random skins.

In practice, I actually dropped this idea, because it has two side-effects; first, every AI Hurricane, let's say, will have the same skin. It won't put one on this one and one on that. It decides which to use, and uses that one alone. Then, I've been playing with numbers and probabilities - for example, during the Battle of Britain, there were many more Hurricanes than Spitfires. If you have one AI Hurricane and one AI Spitfire, in theory at least, you'll get equal numbers of each spawning. If on the other hand, you have two different AI Hurricanes and one single AI Spitfire, you'll be a lot closer to the historical probability of each.

Hope that's easy to understand...