TonyE's Wish List

[TonyE]

What I would like to see...

• Useable entire world map, including the ability to seemlessly move 'across the back of the Earth'.
• Multiplayer!
• Allow units to carry other units, i.e. LCACs in LSDs, Marines in LCACs
• Make ASW LR Patrols more customizable, buoy patterns, MAD runs in a defined area, etc.
• Increase the levels of zoom in the SE (Accomplished in build 2007.017 added 16x, 32x, 64x zoom)
• Allow greater number of items per annex in the database (Accomplished in build 2015.021, from 2047 to 4096 items per annex)
• (Smitty) Allow for damaged bases to be repaired.
• (Smitty) Allow for the capture and use of enemy bases.
• (Smitty) Allow refueling groups to be assigned to intercept the groups they will refuel and join up and refuel automatically. Note that refueling aircraft are often slower that the aircraft that will be re-fueled. Often they will start out, while the aircraft to be refueled are on the outgoing leg. The logic will have to allow them to deal with that fact in this situation. In other words they will never intercept until their target flight starts back.
• SE - Allow the scenario designer to specify courses for AI plane groups, for instance fast passes by reconnaissance planes, more capable multi-vector attacks, etc.
• (Smitty) Allow one or more additional range bands in the formation editor and increase the maximum range in the formation editor from the current 255 nm. (Accomplished HCE - 2018.002)
• (Smitty) Allow the time of day for the scenario to start, to be set either at start up or in the scenario editor. (Accomplished in build 2015.008) It would also be nice to have some sort of progress bar to show the current day night situation.
• (SteveF2006) Have formation patrols pull from similar type of aircraft if designated type is exhausted. So if I had a 2 x F-14A patrol, the GE would happily send out 2 x F-14D on that patrol if no F-14A were available at launch time. http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=1621972
• Allow renaming of units in the SE with arbitrary names (for battlesets with Scenario File Format that permits it). (Accomplished in 2008 sometime, improved in 2013)
• When the AI decides to create an airstrike, make it smart enough to consider using the existing loadout of the planes if the loadout has a proper loadout type for the target. Currently it will reload with the preferred loadout type and waste the time.
• Be smarter about saving window size and position.  For non-sizeable windows, only save position, letting the size be auto calculated.  This would reduce the need to run the clear registry options 'script' to get missing windows or portions of windows back.

[gkm]

1. Useable entire world map, including the ability to seemless move 'across the back of the Earth'.

 

That would mean that I could hit Murmansk from Malmstrom, or F.E. Warren from some place in the Urals.

[TonyE]

Added

"SE - Allow the scenario designer to specify courses for AI plane groups, for instance fast passes by reconnaissance planes, more capable multi-vector attacks, etc."

[pmaidhof]

Added

"SE - Allow the scenario designer to specify courses for AI plane groups, for instance fast passes by reconnaissance planes, more capable multi-vector attacks, etc."

 

It's good to be the king.

[TonyE]

Wishes 1-13 noted for the big redesign.

[TonyE]

added 14. Allow renaming of units in the SE with arbitrary names (for battlesets with Scenario File Format that permits it).

[Joe K]

What I would like to see...

1. (Smitty) Allow refueling groups to be assigned to intercept the groups they will refuel and join up and refuel automatically. Note that refueling aircraft are often slower that the aircraft that will be re-fueled. Often they will start out, while the aircraft to be refueled are on the outgoing leg. The logic will have to allow them to deal with that fact in this situation. In other words they will never intercept until their target flight starts back.
   

 

One consideraton here: It is entirely possible to need multiple refuelings on a mission - especially with short-legged a/c types (like the F-16 or Harrier), thus the feature would need the ability to "intercept" on the out-going leg, too - if needed.

 

Now, it would be really cool to combine the ability of multiple re-fuelings from tankers capable of such with this intercept feature, to provide for these missions that need multiple re-fuelings, as in the following scenario:

 

A flight of, say, six F-16s goes on a mission that is 2.75x their fuel range, requiring at least two refuels over the entire mission. Now, add a large tanker (KC-10, KC-135, etc.) that's already airborne somewhere near the course of the faster F-16s... the F-16's are launched on their mission; sometime after, the tanker is ordered to rendezvous; eventually it does so, and later does the first refuel (waiting until near the end of the F-16's fuel range, in order to maximize the range). Then the tanked group gets the usual "split tanker from group" query, but with a new option, like: "Shadow supported group". If the player selects this option, (and assuming the tanker has more refuel capacity available), then it will split off from the F-16 group as usual, but then continue to follow them on their course, albeit falling behind; later, when the F-16s need another gulp, the two groups would re-rendezvous automatically (or upon an applicable user query response), and perform a subsequent re-fueling, up to the remaining re-fuel availabiilty. All these operations could recur until the tanker's supply became exhausted, potentially allowing one tanker to repeatedly refuel its supported group - but without having to remain joined to the attack group - so as to avoid slowing the group and to avoid being present during the group's attack... yet at the same time, semi-automatically handling the tanker support operations - so as to avoid all the unnecesary user micro-managment!

 

A second option could be provided in addition to the "Shadow..." and normal "Return to base" options: "Loiter for group"; If the player selected this loiter option, the tanker would split off, but would hold station and then re-join the group upon its return - assuming, of course, that the tanker has remaining re-fuel stores (and enough fuel of its own to remain on station)!

 

Ain't re-fueling fun! ;-}

[TonyE]

Wish 14 added to the master wish list

[TonyE]

added 15 (thanks to eeustice for getting me to dig into the situation enough to see the behavior). Hint, look at MakeAirStrike in effect4.c

also updated some that have been implemented.

15. When the AI decides to create an airstrike, make it smart enough to consider using the existing loadout of the planes if the loadout has a proper loadout type for the target. Currently it will reload with the preferred loadout type and waste the time.

[TonyE]

added "Be smarter about saving window size and position.  For non-sizeable windows, only save position, letting the size be auto calculated.  This would reduce the need to run the clear registry options 'script' to get missing windows or portions of windows back." as a result of changing the size of the formation editor dialog and having much of it cut off due to pre-saved window size from the previous layout.

[TonyE]

Implemented HCE - 2018.002 - 2018-05-15 Increased the formation zones available in GE and SE
                 from 4 to 6 so even though the game structures can
                 handle 64 zones, the UI only understands 6 zones.

 

[TonyE]

I've been thinking about ExportDLLs and associating additional information with various game entities, AnnexData, Units, Groups, etc.  

What would be a good way of doing that so that multiple ExportDLLs can associate disparate information with each of the game entities?

Some possible approaches:

1. Add a field to each game entity with a pretty empty json object.  Each ExportDLL interested in supplementing the information would add to that json structure.  

   a. Pros: By using json, any ExportDLL can access the additional information populated by the other ExportDLLs, lots of standard json libraries to help ExportDLL authors.

  b. Cons: Each ExportDLL must be careful not to wipe the data of others, i.e. only work on their own subset of the json object.

 

2. Add a structure to each game entity that contains an index to each block and a linked list to hold the actual data.

   a. Pros: ExportDLL can store any format of data since it is binary storage

   b. Cons: One must work with a linked list, inconsistency of data formats reduces interoperability

 

[donaldseadog]

What sort of additional information?

A means of tracking and restricting aircraft munitions would be nice. 

[TonyE]

8 hours ago, donaldseadog said:

What sort of additional information?

A means of tracking and restricting aircraft munitions would be nice. 

Any kind of information the ExportDLL wanted to store, how many crew members, tracking aircraft munitions (the restricting part would be up to the ExportDLL code), cost of an item, more fine-grained RCS, seeker generation, etc.