Bug report or something else?

[Crious]

Last night on TAW server:

Last night i showered a mig 3 with all my guns. Fight began at 6500. I was always at his 6 in my bf 109f2 mod. Opponent had from start of the fighting his gears down. As i hit him continuously he dove in a shattered plane reaching speeds above 750 ias with his gear down !!! If you see my log he suffered more than 20 and even 40% DAMAGED from me. The big question is: how on earth a plane even if it hasn't get any shell damaged is able to dive WITH ITS GEAR DOWN AT 750 + IAS WITH OUT TEARING APPART AND BEING ABBLE TO LAND?

This is the log of the mission: https://tacticalairwar.com/pilot_sortie.php?id=8472&name=-DED-Antip

[IckyATLAS]

It does happen indeed. I am not sure if it can be considered a "bug" but more a physical modeling limitations problem. How the physical damage in relation to the various kind of projectiles, caliber speed (energy) and where they hit a plane at what angle, as well as all the forces on the various structural and mobile elements that will make them rupture, deform or remain intact. As usual here we have simplified physical models (otherwise the processing power needed would be unacceptable) and due to the infinite scenarios sometimes the outcome is a very coherent and realistic behavior and sometimes just absurd.

I am afraid even if this can be tweaked for each plane, the result will never be perfect. Maybe it will solve your case but then have wrong behavior in another.

The typical situation where the physical model shows its limitations is crash landings or say impact with the ground. The difference between the plane just exploding and otherwise stay like a rigid thing just rebounding on the ground. In reality the result of the impact impact will depend of a very large number of parameters including the ground characteristics, like is  it a muddy field, hard ground, rocks, is it trees, at what angle, speed, the size and weight of the plane, the connections between all the elements of the plane and its geometry, its attitude in space before hitting, how is the contact made like engine and propeller first, or a wing tip, or the belly  etc... The combinations are endless and finally you have to simplify to make it tractable. And above all, how all of this contributes to the survivability of the pilot. On the horizon very powerful CPU/GPU's are in the labs that could speed up by X100 time or more todays calculation performance. This will help into using very fine an precise physical models with more realistic outcomes.

 

 

 

[Crious]

10 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

It does happen indeed. I am not sure if it can be considered a "bug" but more a physical modeling limitations problem. How the physical damage in relation to the various kind of projectiles, caliber speed (energy) and where they hit a plane at what angle, as well as all the forces on the various structural and mobile elements that will make them rupture, deform or remain intact. As usual here we have simplified physical models (otherwise the processing power needed would be unacceptable) and due to the infinite scenarios sometimes the outcome is a very coherent and realistic behavior and sometimes just absurd.

I am afraid even if this can be tweaked for each plane, the result will never be perfect. Maybe it will solve your case but then have wrong behavior in another.

The typical situation where the physical model shows its limitations is crash landings or say impact with the ground. The difference between the plane just exploding and otherwise stay like a rigid thing just rebounding on the ground. In reality the result of the impact impact will depend of a very large number of parameters including the ground characteristics, like is  it a muddy field, hard ground, rocks, is it trees, at what angle, speed, the size and weight of the plane, the connections between all the elements of the plane and its geometry, its attitude in space before hitting, how is the contact made like engine and propeller first, or a wing tip, or the belly  etc... The combinations are endless and finally you have to simplify to make it tractable. And above all, how all of this contributes to the survivability of the pilot. On the horizon very powerful CPU/GPU's are in the labs that could speed up by X100 time or more todays calculation performance. This will help into using very fine an precise physical models with more realistic outcomes.

 

 

 

I see what you mean but it's still disappointing...

[AEthelraedUnraed]

2 hours ago, 335th_GRAlbatros74 said:

If you see my log he suffered more than 20 and even 40% DAMAGED from me.

The "damage" metric isn't really a good one and I don't even know if it's actively used by the damage or flight models. It's just a rough metric of how much "HP" an aircraft had to tank. If he was 40% damaged but none of that was to essential systems, he should still be able to fly on mostly fine.

 

That leaves the gear issue. This could be a DM/FM bug, however the fact that he already started with his gear down makes me wonder if it wasn't a netcode issue where he actually had his gear up but it somehow showed deployed on your side.

 

I don't suppose you have a track file? Without one, the Devs won't be able to do any troubleshooting.

19 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

Let's see how Combat Pilot will do the physical modeling with Unreal 5.

Probably not much better. A Damage Model isn't really something that comes with a pre-made engine. Unreal will offer no advantages over the proprietary IL2 engine here.

[Crious]

No i didnt recorde it if i had i would have posted it to the devs BUT i didn't wrote what i wrote for fan. I value my time.

Edited June 16, 2024 by 335th_GRAlbatros74

[AEthelraedUnraed]

3 hours ago, 335th_GRAlbatros74 said:

BUT i didn't wrote what i wrote for fan. I value my time.

No-one is accusing you of doing anything of the sort.

 

The thing is that without recordings, it's not possible for the Devs to look into issues like these. There is any number of things that may have caused the issue - it could be a FM, DM, graphics or netcode bug, or any combination of the above. It might be something that only happens in one very specific edge case. Without track recordings from which the Devs can see the internal game state of the aircraft, they have no way of knowing what the issue might have been. If they'd decide to look into the issue with the present information, they might easily spend a hundred hours bugfixing, without any guarantee they'll ever find what the issue was let alone being able to fix it. This for something that a single user reported.

 

I hope you can agree this is not a good way to spend Developer resources (time and money). I'm sorry, but it is what it is - without track files, the Devs will not be able to do anything.

[IckyATLAS]

6 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

The "damage" metric isn't really a good one and I don't even know if it's actively used by the damage or flight models. It's just a rough metric of how much "HP" an aircraft had to tank. If he was 40% damaged but none of that was to essential systems, he should still be able to fly on mostly fine.

I checked the accuracy of the system that manages the damage metric. Normally it goes from 0 to 100%. You can define either a step mode (generates a message every time a step is achieved in terms of life lost) or an absolute value about what "life" you still have and not how much you lost. I can say that it is extremely inaccurate. I checked it by having an event reported according to gradual damage through firing on the plane in a predefined and repeatable scenario. The moment the message is sent according to damage value does not correlate with the damage incurred by the plane.

The definition of On Critical Damage and On Damage is also not so clear and does not fire as we could expect. But I must admit that the scale of damage and its correlation to a given damaged object is very tough to define. If we would know how this damage scale is made that would help. Otherwise we must as usual try and try with different values until you have something that is acceptable for your mission scenario.

Edited June 16, 2024 by IckyATLAS

[LukeFF]

Guys, you know the drill - please post track files along with a detailed description of the problem with these sorts of complaints.