CoC Unified Artillery progress/discussion

[calm_terror]

what aboot air burst rounds or is that impossible  from the OPF engine..

and what cna be used to rearm this things?
normal ammo truck or what?

[Dinger]

VT and TIME Fuzing scripts are in there, just not plugged in.  VT fuzing is a little dodgy in OFP (and would require a small amount of cpu power, but multiply that times a barrage...).


Originally planned to have custom rearm jobs.  But yeah, an ammo truck otta work.

[revellion]

Another great addon from CoC i see

one step closer to making OFP a 100% battlefield simulation


* Fooling around in editor all day long *

anyway Great Job  

[General Barron]

Hmm.... I see a lot of work was put into this and it works great and all...

But what is wrong with "simulating" artillery using camcreated shells above the target? I mean, how can you even tell the difference between "fake" and "real" arty if you didn't make the mission? After all, the only thing you end up seeing is the explosions anyway, and to me they look the same as the fake arty kind. And since the sounds of the guns firing or the shells flying towards the target can also be easily simulated, why bother with the whole UA thing anyway?

I don't mean to put down your work or anything, I just honestly don't see the difference between this and "simulated" arty. I only ask because I was thinking about including this in a mission I'm making.

[calm_terror]

because it makes things easier and simpler.
plus it is easier for the player to control.
plus multiplayer as well..

[Dinger]

Hi Barron,
that's a good question, and that was my first reaction when jostapo suggested we do UA.
I can say that I didn't fully realize the difference between the two until I started setting up test missions with UA.
As you know, I also did a pretty involved camcreated artillery suite.
So let's leave out everything else, and ask:
what advantage does the UA ballistic system have over making the artillery fire fake shells and camcreating shells over the target?  Why bother with all these fancy 2-minute TTL hacks and neural nets? How can you tell the difference?

Well, I see five major advantages.

A) Sound.  In spite of what might be thought, you can't "fake" dynamic 3D sound.  You get all kinds of sounds: Shells passing overhead on their way to a target 1km away, the different sounds of High- and Low-angle fire.  With the doppler and some experience, you can tell if a round is going to go long, short or hit you.  And that sensation 3 seconds before impact of "I'm going to eat this one" is priceless.

B) Trajectory.  Believe it or not, RL artillery shells don't fall straight down.  Artillery works very differently on slopes or in object-rich environments like towns.  Try hitting a hilltop with low-angle howitzer fire in UA, or take shelter behind a big building during a barrage.  Yes, you could just spawn shells and setvelocity them in the general direction, but at that point, you lose the advantage of precision.

C) AI interaction.  When a unit is killed by a UA HE round, the firing unit gets credit for the kill.  EVen better, the AI becomes aware of the firing unit.  That means that an incoming round triggers AI "under attack" actions, which doesn't really occur with created shells. Also, if the AI's on guard, and the unit's close, they'll even go and take out the offending artillery.

D) Added depth. Most people are just going to use UA and shoot with it, but for those who want to become experts, UA can be rewarding. For example, the dynamic nature of UA means that the pattern of shell hits varies across ranges. Thus a skilled observer will take into consideration range, terrain and target type in setting up a fire mission.  And someone could "read" the sheaf and guess where the enemy shell is.

E) Realism.  Anytime you fake something (And we all have that need from time to time), you limit the "suspension of disbelief" element.  Yes, it's true I'm biased: I've made missions with both sorts of artillery, and I know darn well what the differences are.

[bn880]

Yes, and General Barron it also depends on the mission type you are designing.  For example my "passion" is having artillery assets as secondary objectives that also keep interfering with your main objective.  Having this UA changed my mission(s) completely now that I am converting over.  It really is a huge bonus to watch and listen to the artillery fire.  Then the shells fly out/in, I find it amazing myself now that i have tried it in my own mission. (not just design/testing)

[General Barron]

Good points. Especially point C in Dinger's post. I hadn't thought of that; but I have been trying to make the AI act as if they are under attack during my fake arty bombings. Maybe there is a good reason to use UA....

However, I'm really not too fond of the interface used to control the arty. I'd rather have a more streamlined system. I guess it's nice when you have many different types of I.F. assets at your disposal, but it seems kinda clunky if you only have one type. Pardon me for not reading the editor's manual yet, but is there a way to use this via my own system for calling for fire? If not, I can't really use it in my own missions.


Oh, and as an aside;

What is a neural network? I've seen the term thrown around by you CoC guys, but I have no idea what that is. Sorry, maybe I'm the only under-grad in the room, but I am curious.  

[walker]

What is a neural network? I've seen the term thrown around by you CoC guys, but I have no idea what that is. Sorry, maybe I'm the only under-grad in the room, but I am curious.  

Here is the CoC unified Doccumentation page over time all our doccumentation will be migrated to it.

http://www.thechainofcommand.com/docs/

Click on COC_LIBANN for a full explanation of the CoC Neural Network and how it works.

In general Neural Network or NN is a form of Artificial Intelegence, basicly it imitates the animal brain and the neurons/nodes that model the outside environment and use it to make decisions about how to interact with it. It learns first of all by trial and error.

In UA then it has learned how to fire a shell so that it will hit a target in the OFP environment. The closer it gets to the target the bigger reward it recieves the futher away it is the bigger punishment. You learned how to walk in exactly the same way.

The major advantage is that this mathmatical model of the world outside is much smaller than that world or in the case of UA the fire tables used to fire a shell. It is also more accurate as OFP world physics cuts a few corners too and being an adaptive system the NN takes acount of it.

Like you I think the major advantage of CoC UA is that the OFP AI reacts to it. Seeing AI units stand around while CamCreated shells fell among them always anoyed me. With CoC UA they will actualy duck as soon as they are aware of incoming rounds and they will even run for cover. I think it is only a matter of time before the OFP AI starts putting a guy with Radio at the top of the kill list ;D

It is however a whole realism package we have recieved an awful lot of praise from real artillery soldiers for it.

Kind Regards Walker

[Dinger]

The action menu interface:
   Yes, it's clunky, and it's clunky for good reasons.
UA is supposed to work within the mission editor.  That means we needed a system that worked without dialogs.
The design of UA then is that, at the absolute lowest level of functionality, there's an action menu system.  Since at this level, the user changes settings on the fire mission on the fly, we had to include the acquire/release feature to prevent MP interaction.
But this whole interface is optional, and was designed to be superceded by a transaction-based dialog (which, alas, is still in development).

The dialog system would use the functions CoCfIFenumerateAssets to build a list of assets on a side, and whatever parses avails.sqf to get the list of options and default settings.
If you check the mission_editing text file, you'll find a variety of functions for control that run the major UA transactions (CoCfIFCallFire, CoCfIFFire, CoCfIFAdjustFire).  All you need to do is call those functions wtih the appropriate values and it'll work.
If you want to use the UA radio system (for whatever reason), you can bypass the interface at the IF menu stage, by setting:
CoCIFDialogAvailable to TRUE
and
CoCIFdialogaddress to the directory of the .sqs file you want to run.

[Vyper]

I keep getting this error every time i use anything from the UA pack......something like "objet missing "obhum.pbo".....it still works but its really annoying that keep popping up!

any ideas?

Vyper

[Dinger]

Yes.  This is an incorrect entry in the UA config.cpp conflicting with an incorrect entry in another config.cpp.

To fix:
A) make a backup copy of coc_arty.pbo
B) use PboTool or a similar program to uncompress CoC_Arty.pbo
C) Open the config.cpp with a text editor, and use the search feature to find the two entries that begin:
sounds[]
Delete those two lines (all the way to and including the semicolon)
D) use Pbotool or something and compress CoC_Arty to CoC_Arty.pbo.

That will fix it.

If that's too much work, you can always move CoC_Arty to your res/addons folder.  that will give CoC_Arty priority and make the other addon give the error.

We will fix this and other errors in a patch.


BTW General Barron: If you've got only one CoC_arty asset on the map, you can have the player control it via a very simple interface, such as:

OnMapSingleClick "[CoCIFA0, [_pos]] Call CoCfIFCallFire"

(CoCIFA0 is the name assigned to  the first UA asset.  CoCIFA1 is the second, and so on).

[benreeper]

OF COURSE there's a difference betwen real and simulated rounds.  Would you want to play with simulated bullets and vehicles.  Are the islands simulated?  What a question!

Ben