Option to turn OFF CHEATING AI in DCS

[FlankerKiller]

Ok, now I'm going to be a dick. Just because you can't beat it, dosen't mean its cheating. Yes it uses an SFM, yes an upgrade to something like the EFM would be nice. But.. there's going to be a limit. The AI sucks and dogfighting because the Ai sucks at dogfighting. Its its improved then it needs to get a lot harder. I've flown the SFM alot. Yes its its simpler, and yes its different. But its certainly no cheat. The XFM simply allows you to do so much that the SFM dose not. Yes there have been AI aircraft that had horribly unrealistic flight models. The Mig-19 at release was the worst I've seen. But as far as I can tell they have been fixed. 

 

Honestly if I can reliability beat the new Ai when it's set to ACE I'm going to be pissed. You shouldn't be able to beat it in the same aircraft when it's set to its highest level. 

[razo+r]

7 minutes ago, FlankerKiller said:

Ok, now I'm going to be a dick. Just because you can't beat it, dosen't mean its cheating. Yes it uses an SFM, yes an upgrade to something like the EFM would be nice. But.. there's going to be a limit. The AI sucks and dogfighting because the Ai sucks at dogfighting. Its its improved then it needs to get a lot harder. I've flown the SFM alot. Yes its its simpler, and yes its different. But its certainly no cheat. The XFM simply allows you to do so much that the SFM dose not. Yes there have been AI aircraft that had horribly unrealistic flight models. The Mig-19 at release was the worst I've seen. But as far as I can tell they have been fixed. 

 

Honestly if I can reliability beat the new Ai when it's set to ACE I'm going to be pissed. You shouldn't be able to beat it in the same aircraft when it's set to its highest level. 

 

Well, regarding WWII planes, the AI is cheating. They don't have the engine and temperature limitations that a player has. They simply don't have the same limitations a player has, making them able to perform maneuvers that a human could not do without risking to blow up the engine.

Edited January 16, 2021 by razo+r

[FlankerKiller]

1 minute ago, razo+r said:

 

Well, regarding WWII planes, the AI is cheating. They don't have the engine and temperature limitations that a player has. They simply don't have the same limitations a player has, making them able to perform maneuvers that a human could not do without risking to blow up the engine.

 

I'll give you that. Its gotten better but the SFM was never ment to handle torque, or engine temp, and really shows itself at slower speeds. It's a challenge in all WWII simulationors, but particularly bad in DCS. And that's sad. 

[Dragon1-1]

Try going into a MiG-15 vs. MiG-15 fight with AI and you'll see how egregious that one is. Once again, it's pretty much the only plane with that kind of problems.

 

People should just forget MiG-15 exists as far as the AI is concerned, it's practically unbeatable in its current state. Flying against a MiG-19 produces results much more inline with what would be expected.

[alphagamer4]

14 hours ago, FlankerKiller said:

Ok, I'm not trying to come off as a dick but. Because the AI behavior is definitely way to simple. However I'm not sure they totally cheat vs humans. So there are a few issues I see with your observation. One is that a Mig-15 should be a very tough fight for an F-14B, at least in a guns only turning fight it would be. Give the F-14 AIM-54s and place them sixty miles away, and see if the results change. The issue here isn't that the SFM the AI uses is so radically different from the FM your using. It isn't, not in broad strokes. It's that it's behaviors and tactics are really simple, and favor the the Mig-15 in this case. I can beat an Ai F-14B in the Saber or Mig over and over, and I can beat an Ai Saber or Mig in the F-14 the same way. But the tactics I use in the F-14 are not in the AI toolbox, at least not yet. Better AI is inbound, and hopefully that will fix a bunch of issues. I do think we need to keep on Ed's ass about it though. 

 

Great point about the guns-only dogfight between the MiG-15 and F-14B. One of the reasons I went guns-only was because it was too easy using missiles against the MiG.

[Baco]

its not that hard, limit energy state, limit Gs to AI, let her do what she can with in those parameters.. if out of energy either panic (rookie) and stall crash, or look for alternative maneuver... yes couple of hundred more lines of code but its doable...

 

[Ikaros]

The A.I. I-16 is really bad as well. It will shred any World War 2 plane in the game. It will even manage to catch up to you in a P-51 somehow despite not being able to in real life AFAIK.

[Dragon1-1]

15 hours ago, Baco said:

its not that hard, limit energy state, limit Gs to AI, let her do what she can with in those parameters.. if out of energy either panic (rookie) and stall crash, or look for alternative maneuver... yes couple of hundred more lines of code but its doable...

It's far more than that. AI coding is hard. This is one of the most difficult parts of making a good game, especially with complex mechanics like we have here. You basically need to teach the computer to pretend to thing and to do so convincingly. This is by no means easy.

 

That said, fixes to the AI are long overdue. Just don't assume anything about it is easy to do. It is doable, and they should definitely do it, but it won't be quick nor easy.

[alphagamer4]

1 hour ago, Dragon1-1 said:

It's far more than that. AI coding is hard. This is one of the most difficult parts of making a good game, especially with complex mechanics like we have here. You basically need to teach the computer to pretend to thing and to do so convincingly. This is by no means easy.

 

That said, fixes to the AI are long overdue. Just don't assume anything about it is easy to do. It is doable, and they should definitely do it, but it won't be quick nor easy.

 

I am not an expert coder but I have coded.

 

What is so hard about forcing the AI to abide by the same in-game physical limits that human gamers must follow?

 

For example, if a human flown F-14B can only sustain a specific G turn before breaking up and losing all control, what is hard to code an AI-flown plane from doing the same?

[Xilon_x]

 

I have often seen online f-18s and even su-33s that fly completely with their wings folded and make maneuvers in flight (is it actually possible to fly with an F-18 with folded wings?).
another thing that happens to me to see a column of 2 or 3 planes that taxi on the taxiway do not respect the safety distance risking to burn the afterburner in DCS does not happen.

 

 

Edited January 27, 2021 by Xilon_x

[Dragon1-1]

14 minutes ago, alphagamer4 said:

I am not an expert coder but I have coded.

 

What is so hard about forcing the AI to abide by the same in-game physical limits that human gamers must follow?

 

For example, if a human flown F-14B can only sustain a specific G turn before breaking up and losing all control, what is hard to code an AI-flown plane from doing the same?

The hard part is making the AI account for that property in its decision making process. Basically, making the AI "smart" about it. If you just slap on a limitation on top of the existing model, you'll get an AI that'll be constantly going out of control because of the limit. You need to redesign the brain to account for the limitation, or code it so that it can cope. Neither is a simple thing (as a rule, nothing in the AI development is, really).

 

In fact, the AI shouldn't ever break the wings off an F-14, it just needs to fly in a way that's possible, without breaking the wings or losing control. Competent pilots don't get into such situations, and it would save CPU cycles. Of course, if you apply the AI to a plane with a hardcoded G limiter, it'll act very dumb. That's pretty much where things stand. AI cheats, but in most places it doesn't do it as egregiously as with MiG-15. However, in all cases, it remains very dumb, using the "endless vertical loops" tactic pretty much all the time. In multi-ship flights it sometimes displays slightly more complex behavior, but at the root of the problem is an AI that dates back to Flanker 2.0 or so, and is very outdated in modern context.

[TLTeo]

Exactly. It's not hard to teach an AI to not break the laws of physics, but it's next to impossible to teach it to fly BFM well (which is why a lot of the people doing it for the US Navy are using machine learning to do it, and even then those codes still have a very very long way to go).

[Mars Exulte]

1 hour ago, alphagamer4 said:

 

I am not an expert coder but I have coded.

 

What is so hard about forcing the AI to abide by the same in-game physical limits that human gamers must follow?

 

For example, if a human flown F-14B can only sustain a specific G turn before breaking up and losing all control, what is hard to code an AI-flown plane from doing the same?

 

  Because it's not as simple as a ''hard limit'' unless you inherently enforce one. The PFMs used by player aircraft are not ''spreadsheet/lookup table'' based. They are to a certain extent, artificial aircraft, with their structure and aerodynamics being dynamically simulated on the fly, ie a virtual wind tunnel.

 

  The simple flight models used by AI (and at one time for some player aircraft) ARE simple look up tables, ie hard coded values that just ''apply a fixed value'' at certain times. This makes them easy and light on resources, but sometimes result in incorrect behavior. This wouldn't be so noticeable or relevant if the AI wasn't so stupid in the first place. For example, it abusing infinite loops are only an issue because the AI is actually stupid enough to ENDLESSLY LOOP in the first place.

 

  It's literally not necessary for the AI to have the same model, it just needs to behave in a plausible manner and you'd never know the difference. It's also not realistically feasible from either a performance or pure practicality standpoint. People routinely forget that 9,000,000 things that are ''intuitive'' for a human do not apply to AI. AI are not an ''intelligence'', they are themselves ''faking'' behavior they're programmed to emulate. An ''AI'' doesn't know SHITE unless you do the coding equivalent of taking it by the hand and babying it through the whole process step by step, which in the case of something like an aerodynamically fully simulated aircraft would be unfathomably laborious, all for an end result that the human interacting with it will largely NEVER NOTICE.

 

 Fixing the idiotic AI behavior in the first place will resolve 99% of the ''simple flight model'' issues, the remaining 1% can be resolved by tweaking the actual flight model for more realistic performance.

 

-edit

The issue is that flight models and AI are literally the two most resource intensive and time consuming issues in DCS. There has to be a balance between the two, or the game would be unplayable. 

 

On ED's side, AI is really hard to deal with, and for every game, really (that's why AI usually suck or cheat and usually both). Also, cause we're not talking Star Wars or Star Citizen where you have imaginary spaceships flying in a vacuum with fixed values for a lot of things and no ''flight'' to model... it's a lot more complicated. Add in the variation and it gets worse.

 

Even from a SFM standpoint, how a MiG-21 should ideally try to fight a F-5 would be very different from how it should fight a helicopter or an F-16, so you not only have to teach an AI how to fly ITS plane, but ideally also how the target aircraft compares to it. Add in energy states and blah blah, it gets complicated fast.

 

That's not excusing the AI here. It sucks, we all know that, so do they. I'm just saying, it's a tough nut to crack. The very things that make DCS DCS also make it a right bastard to code for.

Edited January 28, 2021 by zhukov032186

[kotor633]

This whole discussion is not expedient. Take a look at the newsletter from January 08, 2021. It's written in black and white:

Enhanced AI

Behaviour

Currently, much of our AI engineering effort is focused on the AI aircraft behaviour, in harmony with the new damage modelling and in line with logical and understandable rules and practices. Additionally, the new ATC and radio communications will demand a significant amount of AI engineering. This work is ongoing and will probably never really be finished but we do hope to deliver substantial enhancements during the latter half of 2021.

 

Even if it's annoying, we just have to be patient. Actually, we DCS players should have learned that by now ...

[Baco]

22 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

It's far more than that. AI coding is hard. This is one of the most difficult parts of making a good game, especially with complex mechanics like we have here. You basically need to teach the computer to pretend to thing and to do so convincingly. This is by no means easy.

 

That said, fixes to the AI are long overdue. Just don't assume anything about it is easy to do. It is doable, and they should definitely do it, but it won't be quick nor easy.

 What I meant to say is that from the "flow chart,  algorithm" point of view is not hard, and then I added a couple of Hundred lines of code, so Yeah its not easy, but its not Rocket Science..... IA evidently checks variables.. if a variable tells it that Gs are x,then stop... 

 

But yeah I have been reading on FM Modding and I can see why the AI cant do certain things, its because the SFM does not measure drag, AOA etc... so Yeah they need a new FM that tells the AI that it is supposed to stall....o to have a G limit. right now, specially for subsonic planes, the FM is very limited.

[Ulfrun]

On 1/28/2021 at 11:52 AM, kotor633 said:

This whole discussion is not expedient. Take a look at the newsletter from January 08, 2021. It's written in black and white:

Enhanced AI

Behaviour

Currently, much of our AI engineering effort is focused on the AI aircraft behaviour, in harmony with the new damage modelling and in line with logical and understandable rules and practices. Additionally, the new ATC and radio communications will demand a significant amount of AI engineering. This work is ongoing and will probably never really be finished but we do hope to deliver substantial enhancements during the latter half of 2021.

 

Even if it's annoying, we just have to be patient. Actually, we DCS players should have learned that by now ...

"It's written in black and white.." be careful with such statement. By the way - we are still waiting since years for the long promised and announced ME-262 in different newsletters.   So far - so bad. There are later always explanations why things or timelines has changed.

To come back to the orign topic of this post: Yes, the AI in DCS sucks quite a lot. I am neither a noob nor a flamer but a realist. Flying the BF-109 against AI to practise your skill, there is no chance against a Spit starting on an equal hight: The AI Spit climb or dive after me without a problem and got radar (look through clouds). So basic flight manoeuvres b+z...t+b are good for nothing.

 

Another bad thing is that in my 1+2 vs. 3 scenarios sometimes all AI enemies are chasing only me during the AI team members enjoy the view around or suddenly start to attack my opponent instead one of the two on my six.

 

I hope they improve some of this soon.

Edited July 1, 2021 by Ulfrun

[draconus]

On 1/28/2021 at 12:27 AM, Xilon_x said:

I have often seen online f-18s and even su-33s that fly completely with their wings folded and make maneuvers in flight (is it actually possible to fly with an F-18 with folded wings?).
another thing that happens to me to see a column of 2 or 3 planes that taxi on the taxiway do not respect the safety distance risking to burn the afterburner in DCS does not happen.

Flight with folded wings is forbidden, wrong and not safe, but possible, and it happened IRL.

Yep, taxi distance should be corrected but burning anything/anyone with engine AB is not implemented.

[Tank50us]

See, this is something I have a hard time understanding... why is it that we have people who rant and rage over things that ED has outright stated they are working on? We know they're working to fix the AI, and most of us know that this is the sort of thing that can take a long time even at the best of times. It's not a case of File-> make competent AI, it's thousands of man hours worth of trial and error, with some of those errors forcing ED back to the drawing boards.

[FastNotFurious]

Does Eagles Dynamics plan to correct the AI's ability to detect you with its radar? I did several tests and even 100 nautical miles from the AI, radar off while flying 50 feet above the ground the AI is heading towards you when it is not supposed to see you, I find that it kills more immersion than the simplified flight model due to the fact that it is almost impossible to intercept the AI properly and it completely destroys the BVR against the AI.

Edited December 7, 2021 by FastNotFurious

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

3 minutes ago, FastNotFurious said:

Does Eagles Dynamics plan to correct the AI's ability to detect you with its radar?

It's been reported so many times over the years, and we've seen little reaction from ED on that front. I also find it rather annoying how good the "radar" of the MiG-21/23 AI is at look-down etc...

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

14 hours ago, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

It's been reported so many times over the years, and we've seen little reaction from ED on that front. I also find it rather annoying how good the "radar" of the MiG-21/23 AI is at look-down etc...

We'll have to see in GFM will address that. I have my doubts.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

10 hours ago, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

I have my doubts.

So do I. In fact, I think those 2 are completely unrelated, but I'm happy to be proven wrong :-)

[PAIDtriot]

On 1/11/2021 at 11:20 AM, Dragon1-1 said:

Actually, it's mostly the MiG-15 that's hit by this. The others don't defy physics that egregiously, but the MiG-15 flies like a magic carpet, not a plane. Try a MiG-19 instead, it's got a little higher performance than the -15 IRL, but it seems to cheat much less.

I know this is an old thread, but I just recently got back into DCS because a friend wanted to Fly Sabres against MIG-15's only to discover that the AI MIG-15's (a 5 G airframe) are pulling 9+G's. BTW, I had already bought the MIG-15 (not inexpensive). I expect the module work fly realistically unless I choose arcade flight model. The flight model and AI filght model needs fixing. Don't tell paying customers to just go buy a less broken module.

On 1/27/2021 at 5:10 PM, Dragon1-1 said:

It's far more than that. AI coding is hard. This is one of the most difficult parts of making a good game, especially with complex mechanics like we have here. You basically need to teach the computer to pretend to thing and to do so convincingly. This is by no means easy.

 

That said, fixes to the AI are long overdue. Just don't assume anything about it is easy to do. It is doable, and they should definitely do it, but it won't be quick nor easy.

Just code the AI aircraft to limit the amount of G they can pull to realistic values. Can't be that hard. 

[Dragon1-1]

You can pull 9+Gs in a 5G airframe without FBW, just don't be surprised when the wings come off.  That should be modeled, as far as the player FM goes, it's a thing in other planes. It's same in other pre-FBW aircraft, you can pull 11Gs in the Tomcat, just don't be surprised when the INS gyro seizes and the chief chews you out for making him take the bird apart and inspect every single load-bearing element. In a MiG-15 your biggest worries would be lose the gunsight (if not caged) and bending the wings, assuming the engine didn't quit (and it was a temperamental beast IRL).

AI FM is just broken, and it's not going to be fixed until GFM comes out. I know how it goes, the moment work starts on a shiny "new and improved" system, the old one becomes a legacy pariah that programmers will only touch if they absolutely have to. Hopefully, the AI will respect the load limits once that happens, with only the high level ones occasionally going a little beyond in a life or death situation.

[PAIDtriot]

15 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

You can pull 9+Gs in a 5G airframe without FBW, just don't be surprised when the wings come off.  That should be modeled, as far as the player FM goes, it's a thing in other planes. It's same in other pre-FBW aircraft, you can pull 11Gs in the Tomcat, just don't be surprised when the INS gyro seizes and the chief chews you out for making him take the bird apart and inspect every single load-bearing element. In a MiG-15 your biggest worries would be lose the gunsight (if not caged) and bending the wings, assuming the engine didn't quit (and it was a temperamental beast IRL).

AI FM is just broken, and it's not going to be fixed until GFM comes out. I know how it goes, the moment work starts on a shiny "new and improved" system, the old one becomes a legacy pariah that programmers will only touch if they absolutely have to. Hopefully, the AI will respect the load limits once that happens, with only the high level ones occasionally going a little beyond in a life or death situation.

I just flew the MIG-15bis module. G-Effects = Simulation. Game Flight Mode and Game Avionics Mode *unchecked. I am able to pull 9+ G's w/o any airframe damage--none. Pilot blacks out, but upon waking up has a fully functioning aircraft. Disappointing.