Utopioneer

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.

Is it generating an error log with a pop up message, or is it just failing to assign some of your kills? Also what version of the software are you using, it seems like you may be using an older version.

I really appreciate your responsiveness and desire for feedback. I've sometimes felt like I was complaining "Hey Pat this is broken!" but I'm glad you find these discussions useful and I try to help with bugs where I can. We plan to fly v6 this weekend, so I'll probably have more feedback after. The only thing I've noticed in my solo testing is the mission route is still not displaying in-game, but I think you said you plan on bringing that back for single side co-op. I understand you're not likely to be able to show a different route per side for competitive co-op, butif you can maintain the routes for single side co-op it would be appreciated. I was thinking more about competitive co-op, and even if the engine supported different routes per side, a human could jump into the wrong plane in lobby to see a competitors route before mission start. If you ever want to join us for some flights let me know. We're having a blast in our I./JG52 campaign, currently in Stalingrad in August of 42.

You're correct. @PatrickAWlson it looks like the radio buttons are not correctly writing the mode of campaign the user is trying to create. In the meantime, you can go into the folder of your campaign, and edit the campaign.json file and change the "campaignMode" value to "CAMPAIGN_MODE_COOP" That seemed to fix the issue for me, and allowed me to add pilots and use it as a coop campaign.

If a pilot gets injured they must miss missions to heal, or the whole campaign can take leave to skip ahead in time. In the most recent version of the software each player can have multiple pilots. So while one is recuperating you can fly another. That way no human squadron member is prevented from flying. You can play so that pilots can be killed, and a new one must be created, or you can play so that pilots can only be seriously injured. Your PWCG squadron will total around 12 pilots, human and AI. If a mission requires 4 pilots and only 3 humans are playing, any AI characters in your squadron can fill out the numbers. Hope this helps, I highly recommend you give it a try.

@PatrickAWlsonGenerated a new mission, shot down two planes, same result. Campaign and logs for that mission attached, screenshot of AAR below. CampaignAndLogs.zip

@PatrickAWlson I think I'll have to do some more testing and send files your way, the mission I sent I just hopped in and pressed go to generate some logs. That makes sense that it will only show spawned planes, as I've noticed the list will change from mission to mission. I posted in another thread about this happening to us when we had planes that we shot down. Unfortunately I wiped everything afterward in my effort to solve the problem myself.

Actually the "can't find logs" error is not what I got with the zipped set. I created the mission, flew it, and immediately attempted the AAR. I get the same issue that @TP_Jacko was getting in co-op, where the dropdown to select aircraft type on the claims page is empty, there are no aircraft types to select. I was expecting you would get the same issue with the zipped set, as I created that from a fresh install. Now I'm more confused...