Air Spawn Conundrums

Most air spawn .xml files have a final waypoint which is <Waypoint Type="turn" PositionType="home" Speed="120"/>

This seems fine for friendly air spawns. Trouble is, from my observations enemy spawns don't seem to know where "home" is. When I fly a CAP mission, and am chasing a damaged enemy aircraft, it as often as not goes deeper into friendly territory. Indeed, I do not remember a pursuit where the fleeing aircraft heads across the channel to escape.

So I spent a couple of days messing around with different final waypoints. I stuck to editing the enemy air spawn files. When I used a formulation employed by some stock enemy spawns, I failed to get any enemy spawning activity at all.

Here is a stock final waypoint: <Waypoint Type="landanywhere" PositionType="ground" Position="ground,distant,enemy" Speed="100"/>

As far as I can tell, this doesn't work! I also tried Position="ground,airbase,enemy". This also didn't work. Remember I tried these formulations across all enemy air spawns and drew a complete blank in enemy air activity.

Then I tried <Waypoint Type="landanywhere" PositionType="ground" Position="ground,airbase" Flags="enemy" Speed="100"/>. This does not work either.

Then I found another final waypoint formulation in order to get enemy a/c to sod off home instead of meandering around across friendly airspace. What I did was to modify another stock formulation and came up with:
<Waypoint Type="landanywhere" PositionType="facility-die-roll" Distance="46000" Flags="enemy" Die="2d6" Speed="0"/>
Note the enemy flag which encourages the enemy to sod off home. So a big improvement over the common formulation: <Waypoint Type="turn" PositionType="home" Speed="120"/>
I also greatly increased the distance parameter to allow for channel crossings. The speed=0 came from the stock formulation.

Does anyone know why the type="Landing" is not used? "Landanywhere" seems to be used as a preference.

All comments/feedback welcome

An update, or how CFS3 can stuff you up. CAP stopped working using new spawn settings. I exited CFS3 and replaced CAP spawns with stock settings! Still did not work! Gave up and went to bed.

Next morning fired up computer and CAP spawns were working! Moral of the story - even if you exit CFS3, for some reason some stuff is still in temp memory on the computer. To thoroughly test new spawn settings, you have to exit, turn computer off then on again :banghead:

This also means that some of the spawn combos I tried in my first post, may not have been tested properly because I didn't turn the computer off between tests.

that sounds time consuming :mixed-smiley-010:

weird there is no practical guide on how spawns work by now

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Originally Posted by sdsbolt

that sounds time consuming :mixed-smiley-010:

weird there is no practical guide on how spawns work by now

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There's a lot to it, and as you say slow to test. For mission builders the mission manager handles the assembly of spawns. The use of "home" position type for enemy spawns is a bit of a stuff up in the stock install.

I was pleased to see that, using a different final waypoint in a CAP test mission, remnant German aircraft were headed up and away towards the Channel (I had an altitude setting of 2000m). At least they were heading in a realistic direction when I directed my wingmen to blow them out of the sky! (We were flying Typhoons, which make mincemeat of a Ju-88 with a short burst of 20mm cannons).

Looking in the Mission Scripting SDK, they say that the "home" Positiontype sends the formation further into friendly territory. Unfortunately, it sends enemy formations deeper into friendly territory too. So in my CFS3 Modded Stock testbed I have eliminated the positiontype "home" from all enemy air spawns. My spawn set in the testbed are heavily modified now and will no doubt feature in the v2.2 version of my stock modified install. So far the base modified stock install has been uploaded about 1,600 times. Most people will not even be aware of the many differences from stock.

Can't wait for the update. Sounds like a great improvement over stock. Would i need to install NEK ? Thinking about installing this with all my favorite aircraft installed. Sounds like a fun project to get started with. Thanks for all the tireless work put in for us to enjoy. Regards,Scott

I can't get any spawns to work at all in ETO. Since you have been working on spawns I was wondering if you could offer any advice on approaching that issue.

Is the spawn swapper working? If not, you need to check that the bat file is correctly addressed to the spawn folder. It may be that the "no spawns" air.spawns file is in effect.