The Interesting Missions Generator

These are all for the Georgian theatre, right? Any plans for Nevada ones?

I would love to do Nevada as well, but my understanding is that there aren't a lot of airbases there yet. Only three at the moment right?

Three is probably not enough to make compelling missions yet.

Plus, I don't own the map!

I would love to do Nevada as well, but my understanding is that there aren't a lot of airbases there yet. Only three at the moment right?

Currently we have McCarran International, Nellis, Creech and Groom Lake, so that really isn't much to work with. On the upside, several new airports are currently under development for the Nevada map, so things are probably going to look better once these are available to us. :thumbup:

i guess we'll find out whether its worth it when 2.5 hits with the map updates for boath old and new theatres.

Today I updated the Mirage missions.

I also changed the cruising altitude of the Hawk to be 20000 feet to account for the current lack of oxygen in that aircraft.

Today I uploaded the A-10C, MiG-21 and C-101 missions.

So that's the end of the updates that I have planned for the fixed wing aircraft.

Let me know if there are any issues and I'll fix them.

This thread may be quiet for a little while as I start work on the next thing, will talk to you fine folk soon!

Hi! I recently discovered your project and I love it. Fantastic idea! I wanted to give a little feedback:

Second. I'm always thinking of multiplayer when coding but at the moment there are two big limitations, or at least I think there are, let me know if I'm wrong:

 

- There are no failures in multiplayer for clients, only the host.

- I don't think the mission kneeboard images are shared in multiplayer are they?

Personally I don't think these are very severe limitations. Even if only the host has failures, it can still be fun for everyone. And a lot of the interesting missions don't even have any failures at all. As for the kneeboard images, this is unfortunate but surmountable. The flight lead becomes responsible for conveying all the necessary info. Realistically folks doing this mission together are probably going to be on external voice comms and can handle it. (At least, that's my use case.)

Regarding separate mission files vs. cramming it all into one dynamic mission: I think your solution is fantastic. Disk space is cheap. Complexity is expensive. Complexity kills. Your approach makes it possible to include the custom kneeboard images, which are WAY better than trying to get info via radio commands, and it's easy for the user to choose a desired mission and just jump right in. Btw, these .miz files compress brilliantly using 7-Zip solid archives. 400 missions go from 300MB to 60MB.

Regarding landing the Sabre when there's no visibility: I did this once, and it was one of the most exciting and rewarding experiences I ever had in DCS. It was possible because I was on voice with a person who was role-playing as ATC to give me a ground-controlled approach (via precision approach radar, aka F10 on his end). He guided me down by giving me regular updates on course, speed, and rate of descent. As I finally exited the clouds/fog, I was just a little to the right of the runway but I scooted over real quick and landed safely on the first try. What a thrill. If there was a way to script this so as to not require a real person's valuable time acting as flight controller, it'd be a fantastic addition to your missions.

Regarding speeds: I've only flown the first two L-39C missions so far, but I'm having a tough time trying to figure out how to use the aircraft's airspeed indicator instead of relying on the assistance you provide via the radio menu in order to find out the ground speed which is needed for navigation. Is it practical in these missions to use the provided info about wind speeds and manually convert from true airspeed to ground speed? If so, how would a pilot in DCS typically go about this?

Finally, I just wanted to say thanks a lot, and I'm looking forward to whatever you might come up with for helos or any other improvements to the system. And I hope the folks at ED are paying attention!

Hi Ralgha, thanks for all the great feedback!

Sometime in the future I will make it so that the missions are generated for you on the go from a website. I think that would be a good time to add multiplayer functionality.

It sounds like you had a fantastic time landing that Sabre! what a great experience.

There IS away to convert the speeds from the indicated airspeed to ground speed and vice-versa but it's not easy. You have to correct for wind speed and that's not too bad, but you also have to correct for the change in air density as you climb. On top of that, the wind direction changes as you gain altitude and that's not reported in the weather briefings!

I spent a bit of time trying to incorporate all that into the briefing text, but in the end realised that adding the in-game display of true speed and heading would be a better solution.

I'm working on the helicopter missions right now!

Thanks for the reply! Looking forward to the helicopter missions!

I did a little research on the speed conversion. From what I read, ground speed is simply true airspeed + wind. If you know your heading, true airspeed, wind direction, and wind speed, it should be possible to calculate ground speed via a bit of vector math. But if the wind direction/speed changes with altitude and there's no way to know what it is, that seems rather troublesome. :) I'm still going to give it a shot, though.

Another way of calculating ground speed is to time how long it takes to travel a known distance. Unfortunately this also seems rather difficult to make use of in these kinds of flight plans, but I need to think about it more.

Anyway, I think it's great that these missions with their emphasis on timing are making me focus on these problems. One of the best things about DCS for me is learning about and grappling with the challenges faced by real pilots throughout history. It's really interesting!

One more topic I forgot to mention before:

Regarding the waypoints: They're always right on top of radio beacons, right? Is this a realistic way of formulating flight plans for an A-B route? It seems logical, of course. For an added challenge, I could imagine having a waypoint or two located at some point of interest other than a radio beacon. It might be more trouble than it's worth though.

I'm also considering trying to use the radio navigation equipment sparingly, gradually building towards being able to navigate reasonably successfully without it. There are planes that don't have such equipment (as you mentioned with the Dora), plus a real pilot would need to be prepared for that equipment to fail.

Don't forget though, that true airspeed is not what's indicated in the airspeed indicator. There needs to be a conversion from that to true airspeed.

You are right about the winds at altitude, they are variable so you don't know really know what's you're flying in.

For the fixed wing aircraft I have made it so that the waypoints ARE beacons so that you can navigate when there is cloud cover. I've found that some beacons don't work well though, so you still have to do some dead reckoning navigation, or follow a beacon OUT, instead of flying towards it.

So for example, if the airbase you take off from has a bacon, you can make sure that it stays at the right spot behind you so you fly a straight line to the next waypoint.

Let's say that your first leg has you flying at a course of 210 degrees and there is a beacon at the airbase where you are departing. You can set your ADF to the departure base beacon and then make sure that the needle points to 030 (210-180) on your way to the first waypoint.

If the needle is moving towards 020 it means you have drifted too far left of your course and you need to adjust right.

I'm doing things a little different for the helicopters though, the area of operations is going to be a lot smaller so I'm going to rely on landmarks a lot more.

Hmm. The L-39C airspeed indicator has two needles: the thin one is labeled as true airspeed, and the thick one is labeled as indicated airspeed. Are you saying that what this shows as true airspeed requires further conversion?

Great point about following beacons out. So simple, but easily overlooked.

If it shows true airspeed then you are set! the calculations are a lot easier. Like you said, it's just triangles from then on.

I'm working on the helicopter missions right now!

Best news I've heard all day!!! Good luck with it emolina. This is what I've been waiting for!

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

Thank you JLX! I will start off with the UH-1H.

Hi,

I've had already great fun in flying these missions. Thank you again for your work.

I've attached some flight plans for based on your missions. The one thing I have is the timings. As there is always time to add (10 minutes or so) I find it difficult what to put into the flight plan because the default timings are based on the ME.

And I do have a question about your updates and explanations (like for the FW-190 D9). Would it be possible for you to include these explanations as txt files in the zip? And would it be possible to have some sort of version number in the files? Maybe on the highest zip level?

For those interested in the Mig-21, I've also added a modded lua file with all beacons available in the Caucasus. You can use these for your own flight plans and the lua file shows what channels to select for the extra beacons.

Again great work and I hope you'll keep on developing!

Flight plan examples.zip

R_NAV_data_Caucasus_modded.lua

Oh wow! the flight plans would have been a pain in the bottom to do!

I'm not sure what you mean when you say 'the only thing I have is the timings'.

How do you use the flight plans that you make? do you print them out? Similar to that I wonder why you would like the explanations in the zip? The reason I ask is because eventually I want to make the missions generated from a website as part of my learning process. I have been wondering what extra information people would need to be generated and delivered in a way that's not the kneeboard.

I don't want to have versioning of the missions (I assume you mean a way to identify individual generated missions) because I want them to be totally random for you when you play them. Because you are adding more information what I would like do is to make is so that you don't want to play a mission twice. Maybe I need to add more info to the in-kneeboard flight plan?

Hi,

The flight plan (based on your kneeboard) has all the information like runways, radials, NDB's, ATC and RSBN. I keep it open on another monitor. The size is small enough for a tablet.

The explanations is more the extra information you gave for particular plane's like in thread #29 for the Dora. People who join this thread later might miss on that.

Maybe I don't understand what you mean "totally random". If you make the missions truly random, would there be no directory with all the missions? How should I prepare for a flight, do you plan to generate the kneeboard information at the time of selecting a mission?

At the moment I open the mission editor to gather all the information based on your kneeboard pages and update the specific flight plan. Will I do this also in the future?

Make sense.

Many people likes to prepare the flight, before getting into the aircraft, preparing the flight is not only follow a path. So, many people makes additional work. ( you can spend a good our or more! By doing so... ). But I think, it would be hard work for emilina.

However... creating a web????, that would be great.

hsth, I picked my words poorly when I said 'I want them to be totally random'.

What I should have said is that I would like the missions to be generated for you every time you want one. Instead of you having two pick ones to download from a huge list.

You are right that the information for each aircraft should be more easily accessible than by going back through this thread!

Thanks Matador! Ideally I would like to make it so that you can pre-flight while sitting in the cockpit and looking through your kneeboard. I personally really like that feeling.

I just wanted to take a few minutes (while some missions are being generated!) to let you folks know what I am planning to do with the helicopter missions.

That's the crux of the matter right there, these aren't just flights any more, for helicopters they need to be missions, and because they interact with the ground so much (mostly in expected ways), there needs to be scenery too.

Can't just fly between airbases either, I needed to have some interesting places to go to as well.

So I've put together a system that generates four types of missions.

- taking troops from the starting point (a FARP right now) to a destination

- bringing troops from a destination back to the starting point

- taking troops between two locations that are not the starting point.

- taking swing loads of varying weights between two locations that are not the starting point.

At the lowest difficulty levels you only get the first two mission types. At the highest you only get the last two.

Missions take place in a relatively small area around Alahadzy but eventually I will grow the area a little and add more places to go to within the covered area.

Missions will be for the UH-1H to start off with, then when they're working well and things are settled I'll move onto the Mi-8. I don't think I will be able to generate interesting attack helicopter missions with the current system.

I've attached a couple of kneeboard pages for a difficulty 1 mission below.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

That sounds like a great addition, awesome! :thumbup:

Everyone, I need a little bit of help. The UH-1H missions are almost ready to go but I can't seem to communicate with the FARP.

I've started a thread in the mission editing forum but there doesn't seem to be any answers there. Thread is here : https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=177873 . I hope that maybe in this thread there may be more huey owners!

I'm fairly sure I've got the radios set up properly.

I've attached a sample mission below and would really appreciate it if you could give it a go and see if you can figure out what I am doing wrong.

Flight-0006 D03 0700H 25C CLD4-10 AT5200 WND12 FRM160 Troops Pickup and Dropoff.miz

Ok, I worked out the issue, I wasn't setting the aircraft callsign properly!

Glad you got it sorted out!

I only had a short time to try the mission this morning and noticed that the landing point was on a steep incline (marked with red smoke which was nice). I tried to land there for the fun of it but (unsurprisingly) crashed as the helicopter tipped as I set her down.

I don't know if you can check for slope when placing a landing point but if so, it might be wise to make sure designated spots are flat(ish) or perhaps place a FARP/Landing Pad (which I think is automatically placed level?)

However, if steep landing spots are intentionally allowed by the generator then it seems that the decision on whether it's possible to set down safely lies with the pilot (like choosing to fly in foul weather). If it's NOT safe though, what are the alternatives?

• Just leave and not be able complete the mission?
  
• Hover over the landing zone until (un)loading is comlete? - Are triggers set to allow this?
  
• Radio to cancel the pickup/drop off?
  
• Etc...
  

Really excited about these helicopter missions! This is exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for in DCS.

Hi JLX, that landing point was my screw-up. I've fixed it since that mission was generated. The landing points are placed by hand in a template mission, and the map editor really doesn't make it obvious how much of a slope there is there!

I've been thinking about your question of what to do if the mission can't be completed. The landing point is fixed now so it shouldn't happen again BUT I'm going to go through your points:

- Just leave? yes, it's not practical in DCS to radio the troops to move them so yeah, just leave if you can't do it. Or if the swing load is too heavy. But also, don't just LEAVE! Was it possible to put just the tip of the skids on the ground? that could have been an option. There are a lot of buildings there too, maybe try landing on the roof of one of them? I'm not sure if that particular mission supports those options, not sure if my generator ever will but I would love to have missions that make you of those things.

- Hover over the landing zone? not for pickup, but the script uses CTLD so maybe you can do that for drop offs.

- Radio? no, probably not, that kind of scripting gets complicated and fragile fast.

What really got me thinking about your email has to do with the concept of a completed mission.

From the point of view of the people on the ground, if you don't get them out moved then you really haven't completed the mission.

From YOUR point of view though, if you get the aircraft back on the ground safely, preferably close to your base the mission is completed enough. You can't be hovering on the side of a mountain for too long. If anything breaks (and things will!) you are dead. Not enough room to enter an autorotation and if you land where you are you will roll all the way down the mountain.

I wonder in reality how often that happens. Where people to be extracted just can't be found. Or the landing zones are not suitable, swing loads too heavy, weather too bad.