Mission planning on a per-control point basis lacked the context it
needed to make good decisions, and the ability to make larger missions
that pulled aircraft from multiple airfields.
The per-CP planners have been replaced in favor of a global planner
per coalition. The planner generates a list of potential missions in
order of priority and then allocates aircraft to the proposed flights
until no missions remain.
Mission planning behavior has changed:
* CAP flights will now only be generated for airfields within a
predefined threat range of an enemy airfield.
* CAS, SEAD, and strike missions get escorts. Strike missions get a
SEAD flight.
* CAS, SEAD, and strike missions will not be planned unless
they have an escort available.
* Missions may originate from multiple airfields.
There's more to do:
* The range limitations imposed on the mission planner should take
aircraft range limitations into account.
* Air superiority aircraft like the F-15 should be preferred for CAP
over multi-role aircraft like the F/A-18 since otherwise we run the
risk of running out of ground attack capable aircraft even though
there are still unused aircraft.
* Mission priorities may need tuning.
* Target areas could be analyzed for potential threats, allowing
escort flights to be optional or omitted if there is no threat to
defend against. For example, late game a SEAD flight for a strike
mission probably is not necessary.
* SAM threat should be judged by how close the extent of the SAM's
range is to friendly locations, not the distance to the site itself.
An SA-10 30 nm away is more threatening than an SA-6 25 nm away.
* Much of the planning behavior should be factored out into the
coalition's doctrine.
But as-is this is an improvement over the existing behavior, so those
things can be follow ups.
The potential regression in behavior here is that we're no longer
planning multiple cycles of missions. Each objective will get one CAP.
I think this fits better with the turn cycle of the game, as a CAP
flight should be able to remain on station for the duration of the
turn (especially with refueling).
Note that this does break save compatibility as the old planner was a
part of the game object, and since that class is now gone it can't be
unpickled.
Mission planning has been completely redone. Missions are now planned
by right clicking the target area and choosing "New package".
A package can include multiple flights for the same objective. Right
now the automatic flight planner is only fragging single-flight
packages in the same manner that it used to, but that can be improved
now.
The air tasking order (ATO) is now the left bar of the main UI. This
shows every fragged package, and the flights in the selected package.
The info bar that was previously on the left is now a smaller bar at
the bottom of the screen. The old "Mission Planning" button is now
just the "Take Off" button.
The flight plan display no longer shows enemy flight plans. That could
be re-added if needed, probably with a difficulty/cheat option.
Aircraft inventories have been disassociated from the Planner class.
Aircraft inventories are now stored globally in the Game object.
Save games made prior to this update will not be compatible do to the
changes in how aircraft inventories and planned flights are stored.
In the mission editor, using a VHF frequency for a Player or
Client A-10C results in an error. Changed the radio definitions
to use AN/ARC-164 for intraflight comms.
This was previously mostly working because the allocator itself was
moving forward, but since each radio has its own allocator, aircraft
with different radios would often get overlapping intra-flight
frequencies.
Adds the following:
* AJS37
* AV-8B
* JF-17
This does move the preset channel allocation logic into its own class,
since we need to customize that behavior for the AJS37 since it has a
rather unique preset channel layout (see the comments in
`ViggenRadioChannelAllocator` for details).
Since we create a target waypoint for every target in a
strike/SEAD/DEAD objective area (including every ground vehicle), the
kneeboard can quickly be overrun with target waypoints. When there are
many target waypoints, collapse them all into a single row for
brevity.
Make the type of the waypoint a non-optional part of the constructor.
Every waypoint needs a type, and there's no good default (the previous
default, `TAKEOFF`, is actually unused). All of the target waypoints
were mistakenly being set as `TAKEOFF`, so I've fixed that in the
process.
Also, fix the bug where only the last custom target of a SEAD
objective was being added to the waypoint list because the append was
scoped incorrectly.
The first waypoint is automatically added by pydcs, so it's not
actually in our waypoint list from the flight planner. Import is from
the group so it shows up in the kneeboard.
Not every aircraft has a pydcs radio index, so we can't use that to
index into a list. Any mission with an A-10C crashes, since it would
try to use `None - 1` to index into the list of radios to find the
intra-flight radio.
Also fix the radio ranges for the newly added radios. The current
implementation can't model gaps, so extending the radio ranges across
those gaps means that we might allocate channels that aren't tunable
by those radios. Additionally, the end frequency is exclusive rather
than inclusive, so fix the ranges to include that last tunable
frequency.
