Utopioneer

There's still no way to replace planes for pilots that are crashed/dead/captured/ejected. You can't rejoin the fight in a new plane in co-op mode. I think however that it could be used to create a scenario where multiple missions are flown in the same day... @PatrickAWlson is that something that would work within the code base, as a workaround for one mission file being generated per day? I know the code that generates missions would need to generate a new set of flights for the second mission that day, but would this method interfere with the current limitations?

I would love this as well, but currently the game itself doesn't support this in co-op mode, so PWCG can't do anything about it. My suggestion to the game developers would be a toggle-able setting that allows any AI plane to be taken over for the duration of the mission. What this would mean for PWCG is you could jump from your plane into an AI plane, but it would not impact your own stats. Nothing worse than crashing on take off and making your squad mates reload the mission!

Squadron definition files are stored in here: PWCGCampaign\BoSData\Input\Squadron To use the 11th Fighter Regiment as an example, the section that defines what planes they fly is as follows: "country": "RUSSIA", "squadronId": 10111011, "name": "11th Fighter Air Regiment", "fileName": "11th Fighter Air Regiment.json", "skill": 35, "planeAssignments": [ { "archType": "lagg", "squadronIntroduction": "19410801", "squadronWithdrawal": "19430301" }, { "archType": "yak", "squadronIntroduction": "19430302", "squadronWithdrawal": "19450601" } ], "conversionPeriods": [ { "conversionStartDate": "19430301", "conversionCompleteDate": "19430314" } ], "country": "RUSSIA", "squadronId": 10111011, "name": "11th Fighter Air Regiment", "fileName": "11th Fighter Air Regiment.json", "skill": 35, "planeAssignments": [ { "archType": "lagg", "squadronIntroduction": "19410801", "squadronWithdrawal": "19430301" }, { "archType": "yak", "squadronIntroduction": "19430302", "squadronWithdrawal": "19450601" } ], "conversionPeriods": [ { "conversionStartDate": "19430301", "conversionCompleteDate": "19430314" } ], The squadron file defines what archetype they flew for each time period, with any overlap dates that might apply. To define start and end dates of individual plane models, you must edit the aircraft files here: PWCGCampaign\BoSData\Input\Aircraft These files define the introduction, end of production, and withdrawal dates for each aircraft model. Modifying these values will change these dates for all squadrons that used them, as I understand it.

This is something Pat is planning for a future release. I ended up creating a script to generate an interactive summary that I share with my squadron mates, but it's not in a state where I could share it.

To this point, you must first create a new "player" before creating a new pilot for that player. This is done all the way back in the main menu under "Administer Coop". Not sure why your missions are failing to load, do you own the map and plane you were trying to fly?

I just flew one mission in a co-op campaign with a fellow squadron member, everything loaded and worked properly.

In one mission over the weekend, 3 of us encountered a much larger group of enemy fighters. I managed to shoot down 2 before we all got shot down. On AAR, I was credited with shooting down my squadron mate. I understand the fuzzy logic employed to match kill credits, but I checked and had no friendly fire, so I'm curious if it's written with this as an intended possibility, or if something got bugged in this case? I probably still have logs for that mission if it helps.

Hey Pat, it also seems like Ground Attack missions for fighter squadrons are no longer generating. There's no setting for how frequent they pop up, so I didn't notice until now, but we used to periodically get those.

Good sleuthing! The software may be checking the first file with "startup.cfg" in the name that it comes across. By the way, "a slight disquiet remains" is a very good way of describing the feeling when something works after throwing an error saying it won't.

To this point, it's easy to change the number of pilots assigned to each flight. On the "pilot selection" screen where you can change the loadout and planes for each pilot, you can click on the AI pilot's names on the bottom to add them to the flight, and click their names on the top to remove them from the flight.

Our squadron flew another 6 missions this weekend. Action was great and we had contact in 5 of 6 missions, so proportionally that reverse is exactly what we were hoping for. Thanks a ton for that and the re-implementation of the mission route. My 77 air victory persona was captured on the last one of the weekend, but I can't fault anybody but myself... One thing I noticed, the software seems to no longer be generating escort or scramble mission types. I even set the mission type percentages to 50% each of those, 0% on all others and it would just generate patrol missions. Patrol, Intercept, Low-alt, offensive missions all seem to be generating fine. Were escort and scramble discontinued in v6?

If you want to fly a co-op campaign against AI I would recommend trying PWCG again. It was very recently updated to fix some of the issues with not seeing enemies.

Fantastic! Thanks!

@PatrickAWlson We flew a set of missions in v6, some feedback and thoughts. From the player's perspectives: 1. Players definitely miss the mission route, I know you're aware. 2. The missions seem to take significantly longer to load for myself as host and for the players. Looks like filesizes are about double what they were. Is this related to generating the entire frontline and all objects across the map instead of just around the player flight? Side note: Is it possible to draw the two front lines as blue and red on their respective sides? 3. 4 of 5 missions we had no contact, but I don't recall you saying mission generation parameters changed much. Maybe this was a fluke or a function of our time and place in the war. Could it be that all squads now start at their bases instead of some spawning mid flight, and that's having an effect? From the host perspective: 1. I really like the new method of linking users to pilots, especially for those of us that fly dead is dead. It allows me to link who is who just by scraping the data. Previously I was restricting my player names to have a common callsign between their pilots, but now I can redo my code to take advantage of those files. 2. I find the "reference pilot" part of campaign interaction to be somewhat unintuitive and clunky. I imagine that was implemented due to existing code, but I wonder if there's a better way to handle the UI and data storage. Would it be possible down the line to basically treat every human pilot the same, and not have the UI and combat report files tied to a pilot? I'm imagining a UI where when you open the campaign, it has a list of squadrons that have assigned human pilots, and clicking on that squadron will go into the stats for that squadron similar to the default view now. Perhaps data currently held in the combat reports files could be generated on a per-squadron basis and stored in the squadron jsons? The campaign log could hold human pilot events that are significant to the whole campaign, like promotions or deaths of human players. Not knowing what your java code looks like, I understand what I'm suggesting could take significant rewrites, but I mention it because I think the way data is stored and accessed by the host would be cleaner, more intuitive, and easier to be used to generate web page summaries. 4. I like the pilot selection screen, but for users that have multiple pilots it would be helpful if the hover popup displayed the name of the squadron or the type of plane in that squadron. I noticed if a player tells me they want to fly their 190 pilot instead of their 109 pilot, it can take some sleuthing to make sure I'm picking the correct one for that mission. 5. Everything I've tried interacting with seems to working, not having issues with mission generation, AAR, etc. Sorry for the wall of text, and thanks again for all the work you're putting into your software, everybody I fly with agrees it's the best way to play.

It sounds like you may not have Java installed, especially if you had to roll back your system (I had to do the same because of a failed Win10 update that bricked me). If you definitely have Java installed, I'm not sure what would cause that.