Previously we were trying to make every potential flight plan look
just like a strike mission's flight plan. This led to a lot of special
case behavior in several places that was causing us to misplan TOTs.
I've reorganized this such that there's now an explicit `FlightPlan`
class, and any specialized behavior is handled by the subclasses.
I've also taken the opportunity to alter the behavior of CAS and
front-line CAP missions. These no longer involve the usual formation
waypoints. Instead the CAP will aim to be on station at the time that
the CAS mission reaches its ingress point, and leave at its egress
time. Both flights fly directly to the point with a start time
configured for a rendezvous.
It might be worth adding hold points back to every flight plan just to
ensure that non-formation flights don't end up with a very low speed
enroute to the target if they perform ground ops quicker than
expected.
When we don't coalesce target points on the kneeboard we call
add_waypoint_row multiple times, so calls after the first were using
the travel time from one strike target to the next. Since they were so
close that rounded down to zero and caused a divide by zero error.
Update the last waypoint in add_waypoint instead.
Also fixes the CAP racetracks so the AI actually stays on station.
Waypoint TOT assignment happens at mission generation time for the
sake of the UI. It's a bit messy since we have the late-initialized
field in FlightWaypoint, but on the other hand we don't have to reset
every extant waypoint whenever the player adjusts the mission's TOT.
If we want to clean this up a bit more, we could have two distinct
types for waypoints: one for the planning stage and one with the
resolved TOTs. We already do some thing like this with Flight vs
FlightData.
Future improvements:
* Estimate the group's ground speed so we don't need such wide margins
of error.
* Delay takeoff to cut loiter fuel cost.
* Plan mission TOT based on the aircraft in the package and their
travel times to the objective.
* Tune target area time prediction. Flights often don't need to travel
all the way to the target point, and probably won't be doing it
slowly, so the current planning causes a lot of extra time spent in
enemy territory.
* Per-flight TOT offsets from the package to allow a sweep to arrive
before the rest, etc.
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.
I've been wrongly importing these from `pydcs.dcs` instead of just
`dcs`, because that was what PyCharm thought they were. These will all
be broken when we get back to using a real pydcs instead of relying on
its directory being in our tree.
This page in the wiki should be updated:
https://github.com/Khopa/dcs_liberation/wiki/Developer's-Guide
Instead of recommending that `PYTHONPATH` be updated in the run
configuration, it should instead recommend that Settings -> Project:
dcs_liberation -> Project Structure be set to exclude the pydcs
directory from the dcs_liberation content root, and add the pydcs
directory as a *separate* content root.
Alternatively, we could recommend that configure a virtualenv (good
advice anyway, and pycharm knows how to set them up) that have people
run `pip install -e pydcs`.
I think even easier would be switching from the virtualenv-style
requirements.txt to pipenv, which can actually encode the `-e` style
pip install into its equivalent of requirements.txt.
I removed the nav target info from the briefing because that doesn't
seem to have been doing what it was intended to do. It didn't give any
actual target information, all it would show was (example is a JF-17
strike mission):
PP1
PP2
PP3
PP4
Without any additional context that doesn't seem too helpful to me.
I'll be following up (hopefully) shortly by adding target information
(type, coordinates, STPT/PP, etc) to both the briefing and the
kneeboard that will cover that.
Refactor a bunch to share some code with the kneeboard generator as
well.
Add central registries for allocating TACAN/radio channels to the
Operation. These ensure that each channel is allocated uniquely, and
removes the caller's need to think about which frequency to use.
The registry allocates frequencies based on the radio it is given,
which ensures that the allocated frequency will be compatible with the
radio that needs it. A mapping from aircraft to the radio used by that
aircraft for intra-flight comms (i.e. the F-16 uses the AN/ARC-222)
exists for creating infra-flight channels appropriate for the
aircraft. Inter-flight channels are allocated by a generic UHF radio.
I've moved the inter-flight radio channels from the VHF to UHF range,
since that's the most easily allocated band, and inter-flight will be
in the highest demand.
Intra-flight radios are now generally not shared. For aircraft where
the radio type is not known we will still fall back to the shared
channel, but that will stop being the case as we gain more data.
Tankers have been moved to the Y TACAN band. Not completely needed,
but seems typical for most missions and deconflicts the tankers from
any unknown airfields (which always use the X band in DCS).
This includes most of the briefing information in the kneeboard:
* Airfield info
* Waypoint info
* Comm info
* AWACS
* Tankers
* JTAC
There's more that could be done:
* Restrict tankers to the type compatible with the current aircraft
* Support for carriers
* Merge all relevant comm info (tankers, AWACS, JTAC, other flights)
into the comm ladder
This gives us a good start and a framework to build on. Very likely
that we'll want to split part of this (probably the comm ladder) off
onto a separate page once we start adding more to this, since it's a
pretty full page currently.
Also missing is any checking that the contents do not go beyond the
bounds of the page. We could add this if needed. For now the page has
enough room for about a dozen waypoints, which is quite a bit more
than most missions need.
