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Disaster

Captain Kurt

Captain Kurt

Administrator
Staff member
Well, very serious pain in the butt anyway.

I finished up all 102 of the missions for the 354th Fighter Group in WWII campaign last week and began testing the missions in full campaign mode to make any final tweaks.

Maybe it is just my set up, but every mission that was hand edited to include more than the stock 8 aircraft in the players flight CTDs. They load and fly just fine in MB and single mission, but now crash in the campaign. That's about 25% of the total missions! That's a serious setback as these missions will now need to be rebuilt.

I suspect it comes down to the CFS2 engine trying to assign a name picked from the country cfg. file to the additional aircraft. I will first be experimenting to see if I can find a work around to the problem. Really frustrating after all the work put in to customize the missions.
:banghead:

Any suggestions welcome!
 
Size does not make any difference I'm afraid, kdriver. The missions are all different sizes from 18K up. Thanks though.

And I have not been able to find a work around to get the missions to load - such as naming the planes individually, using no names for the extra aircraft, etc.

No one other than kdriver seems to have any thoughts on the matter and I am out of ideas. I was hoping someone had found this before and had a solution or at least some ideas to chase. Guess not. :crybaby:

I had hoped to have the campaign packaged and ready for Christmas delivery. But it looks like I am going to have to rebuild 25% of the missions so it ain't gonna happen now.
 
Why not post a couple of the mission here Captain Kurt. Perhaps one of the mission experts may see what the problem is.
 
Smaller Campaign maybe?

Hi,
Have you tried making a mini campaign with just a few of the missions to see if it somehow size related?

Try just one good mission followed by one troublemaker and see what happens. or even a 1 mission campaign with just a troublemaker.

It might determine if it something about how the missions are handled inside the campaign engine or if it is something else.

Just a thought

Gavin
 
There´s also no hint in Cody´s handbooks, so it is probably not possible to work around the problem. The program just won´t let you fly with more than seven wingmen in campaign mode.

Did you consider uploading just the missions without a cmg file? Personally, I prefer to fly in Single mission Mode anyway.

Sorry I don´t have a more useful suggestion..
 
CK,

This one's a long shot - did you check the a/c dp file? I think it has a min & max group qty entry... could be single missions are OK, but in campaign mode there is a check with the max group size?
 
Thanks guys. All very good ideas. I 've tested via a mini campaign, moving missions order around but the result is consistent regardless of the mission selected. I''ve now tried the dp file idea but unfortunately it had no effect.

Yes I can add an upgrade missions only pack to the campaign if desired. The campaign itself is a chronological history of the 354th as historically accurate as I can get it. The recreation of the history is kind of the point of the campaign so the single mission idea feels sort of blasphemous to me though:icon_lol:

This is the smallest, simplest mission of the problem ones. If anyone wants to take a look at it. Nothing unusual about it
except for the edited number of planes and their formation.

View attachment 53845
 
skylane said:
...The program just wonґt let you fly with more than seven wingmen in campaign mode...
Click to expand...

I'm gonna go with Skylane on this one Kurt. We all know by now how much the designing CFS2 coders used hidden hard-coded limitations throughout this sim. A hint of Skylane's comment can also be found reflected in the MISC sections of ALL dp files. Every one you examine shows a max group size of eight. Another example is the default max player and enemy flight size limits one encounters in mission builder and QC -- again, only eight allowed on both sides. There seems to be a deliberate design point at work here and this may be where the issue lies. Maybe they were thinking in strict military terms when they set this thing up. As i'm sure you're aware already, in military doctrine, a standard maximum sized fighter flight is comprised of four elements, with two aircraft in each element. And going further, when you think about the way that the CFS2 player's attack command sequence works, its geared towards controlling up to three elements besides the player's own wingman.

Conventionally, we've been working around this flight sizing limitation for years by just adding multiple flights of eight on both sides in order to fill our virtual skies in mission building, but still, the player can only control his seven guys directly by element commands. So, taking all of this into consideration, it stands to reason that if you're loading a model with a dp that dictates a max group size of only eight, you're bound to get some argument from the game engine if you attempt to exceed that number with mission editing.

Assuming that we're onto a valid prognosis here, my solution would be to detach all of those extra wingies, compile them into additional eight-ship flights and assign them to "escort" roles on the player's flight if the player's mission is sweep or patrol. This way they stick close, fight your fights and rejoin your flight again when the skies are clear. If the player's mission is ground attack, they can simply be assigned to that role as any normal, 'all-AI' flight and given the same exact waypoints and timings as the player's flight -- with some very slight variations in altitude and wing positioning. But on the flip side, even if they have the same waypoints as the player flight back to base, they may not egress the target area along with your flight when you decide to RTB, so you may see a coordination problem there.

Well, there's my two-pence...
 
Bearcat, I like the escort idea, and I'll give that a shot.

The USAAF WWII fighter formation doctrine was based on a flight of 4 which was comprised of 2 elements of a leader and wingman. A section was two flights of 4, i.e. the 8 that CFS2 uses. A squadron mission could be flown with 3 sections, or 2 sections, or 3 fights depending on the mission and available aircraft. The latter 2 was what I was striving to recreate. I personally think that CFS2 was limited to 8 planes in the players flight as an effort to keep frame rates up on the slower PCs available back then rather than other factors, but who knows?

When a mission is flown in single mission mode with a full squadron of 16 aircraft, the squadron commander has control of all 16 aircraft which I thought was pretty cool. At any rate, the dp max flight number does not seem to have any affect on flight size allowed that I could determine. Otherwise larger flights would not work in single mission mode without changing the number, and they do.

But alas, a full player squadron just will not work in the campaign mode. Because it works in single mission mode but not in the campaign mode, I have become more and more convinced that the issue is that in the campaign mode, the game coding assigns names from the country config file to each plane and the hard coded maximum is 8 names. When it finds plane number 9 it locks and crashes.

Interestingly enough, I can increase the size of an AI flight to any size I want and it will work in campaign mode. The names of the AI are assigned in the .mis file. This further leads me to believe the problem lies with the naming of individual planes in the player's squadron.

I can't find a solution to the issue, so I will try working with your escort idea. Thanks.
 
Report back:

I've tried working wth the escort idea, but am running into a few issues with it.

First of all, the AI won't attach as escort unless the player's mission is set to Strike or Search and Destroy. That's not necessarily major except you can't use Intercept. But when warping to a way point and coming out of warp, the AI escort flight always appears so close to the player flight that the formations have to scatter or collide. For some reason the AI sometimes is flying in the wrong direction as well.

I figure there may be some ways to do the mission desgin to mitigate this. Flight speeds are matched so some tweaking there might fix it but it would be change and test, change and test, etc., so I haven't tried that. I am not going to take the time to experiment with it right now. Just trying to finish up the 354th FG campaign is a full plate. I'll go ahead and split the player's flight into multiple 8 or less plane fights and redo the mission so the player does not need to issue commands to them.

Maybe I'll play with the idea when I start a new campaign in the future.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and ideas. :applause:
 
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