Problem Wtih Stock Air Spawn Final Waypoint

Daiwilletti

Charter Member
Well I may have posted on this before so apologies if so.

A common final waypoint for air spawns in stock and many other installs is Waypoint type = turn Position = home speed = 100.

The problem is that position "home". Looking at the Mission SDK, this position is designed to send the aircraft deeper into friendly territory.

Remember that you are by default "friendly" whatever Alliance you are flying for.

But unfortunately a lot of the enemy aircraft final waypoints also use the "home" position. I've often noticed that after you beat up a number of aircraft in a CAP mission for example, the remaining enemy aircraft are heading deeper into friendly territory. This is an immersion killer.

So I've worked on a final waypoint for enemy aircraft spawns, where appropriate. The final waypoint uses a type = landanywhere, position="enemy". Or sometimes I use flags="enemy".

The trouble is that I get patchy results. I had a full spawn set working with position="enemy", then (maybe after a subtle tweak) the spawns stopped working and I had to default back to position="home" to get my intercept spawns working again.

It is very frustrating and one of the things is when making such a change you really have to fully boot out of the computer and restart to make sure of what you are testing.

Has anyone else noticed the problem with the waypoint position "home" for enemy aircraft?
 
OK I've tested a different formulation. Just once so far, but it worked. Trouble is Microsoft closed me down as I moved to the next mission so don't know whats going on there for sure.

Final waypoint typically used in enemy aircraft spawns is

<Waypoint Type="turn" PositionType="home" Speed="120"/>

I've changed this to add an extra waypoint.

<Waypoint Type="turn" PositionType="player-die-roll" Die="1d12" Distance="1600" Speed="100"/>
<Waypoint Type="landanywhere" PositionType="facility-die-roll" Die="2d6" Position="enemy" Speed="90"/>

The blasted system is so flaky that more testing is needed.
 
The extra waypoint seemed to cause problems. but changing the third waypoint in cap and intercept spawns to something like
<Waypoint Type="landanywhere" PositionType="facility-die-roll" Die="2d6" Position="enemy" Speed="90"/> seems to work. Strangely I use the Position parameter in the CAP spawns, and the Flags="enemy" parameter in the intercept spawns.

Having a distance parameter just seems to add unwanted complexity. When you think about it, often the distance to enemy territory is much greater for a CAP mission - the enemy spawns deep in friendly territory by your airbase. In an intercept campaign mission, the campaign engine creates a spawning point somewhere along the frontline so the distance is not nearly so great. Then for a sweep mission, your target spawning point is over an enemy airbase - all quite different vis-a-vis friendly/enemy territory.
 
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