Near misses

[Dili]

The MG bow is obviously an armor vulnerability and is needed to downgrade the armor value accordingly! [:D]

[GaryChildress]

Not only that but what if a bullet ricochets off the MG mount, through the firing slit and hits the machine gunner in the eye? Is this modeled in the game or is every bullet hit a hit against maximum armor? [:'(]

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

Not only that but what if a bullet ricochets off the MG mount, through the firing slit and hits the machine gunner in the eye? Is this modeled in the game or is every bullet hit a hit against maximum armor? [:'(]

You seem to be making my point...[;)]

[witpqs]

And you're both ignoring the fact that the machine gunner is wearing transparent aluminum bullet proof goggles. [:D]

[GaryChildress]

Are germs modeled in the game? I mean Halsey was sick during the Battle of Midway. Obviously this played a role in the decisions made there. Shouldn't the game model such incidents? After all there were maybe a dozen major sea battles in the war. One out of those dozen major sea battles had a key officer ill in it. That means 1/12 of the time key officers should be made unavailable to the player due to illness. That is a significant number and needs to be modeled!

EDIT: Next question is of course HOW should germs be modeled. Do we do a simple die roll to represent a 1/12 chance of illness or do we take into account factors such as how much of the time an admiral may be exposed to someone who has a contagious disease? From the latter we need to take into account how many of those people were exposed and then how many of the people exposed to the people exposed were exposed. This should modify the simple die roll in various ways. Then of course there is the chance of pneumonia which should be factored in as well. Spread of disease also needs to take into account the air circulation caused by flapping of a butterfly's wing in China which needs to be multiplied by the number of butterflies in the world at a given moment! [:D]

[Dili]

Are germs modeled in the game? I mean Halsey was sick during the Battle of Midway. Obviously this played a role in the decisions made there. Shouldn't the game model such incidents? After all there were maybe a dozen major sea battles in the war. One out of those dozen major sea battles had a key officer ill in it. That means 1/12 of the time key officers should be made unavailable to the player due to illness. That is a significant number and needs to be modeled!

Well i agree. There are many Officials that collapsed and or got ill in War.

[witpqs]

Halsey had shingles, which is caused by a virus of course. Do they call viruses germs, or is that reserved for things made of cells? We're going to need a new level of abstraction. Damn.

[BigJ62]

All I ever wanted was bats, sharks and the yardbird construction page.

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

And you're both ignoring the fact that the machine gunner is wearing transparent aluminum bullet proof goggles. [:D]

Exactly!

See my lectures on statistical modelling, multiple regression--especially the comment about 70 parameters being estimated from 41 data points--and the handling of proportion data. (For those of you who find that statistics makes your head hurt, my take-home message is 'don't get too detailed if you lack the data to calibrate the details'.) [:-]

[mdiehl]

my take-home message is 'don't get too detailed if you lack the data to calibrate the details'

Beer!

[GaryChildress]

ORIGINAL: herwin

(For those of you who find that statistics makes your head hurt, my take-home message is 'don't get too detailed if you lack the data to calibrate the details'.) [:-]

Probably a good idea but then I doubt any game made by anyone would qualify to be anything more than Axis and Allies. WITP covers the ENTIRE Pacific War. The entire Pacific War is a LOT of data and numbers to go through for any mere mortal or collective thereof.

My Dad's favorite motto is, "if you're not going to do it right, then don't do it at all." All I can ever think of in response is that if everyone followed my Dad's advice nothing would ever get done in the world. The world is full of less than perfect attempts at doing things. Granted criticism is needed to spur development but when the critics start disillusioning the doers, then the results can be counter-productive.

The whole AE gang probably deserve more than just medals for their monumental (and if I'm not mistaken UNPAID) efforts. It's got to be disheartening to be bringing the community something you once felt very proud about only to find that it isn't quite good enough. I can definitely see reason for some of their frustration. Heck if I were in Don or Joe et. al's shoes I would just get frustrated a quit. Thank God I'm not on the development team and the people who are are more dogged than I am in their efforts!

Anyway those are my feelings on the matter. I hate being the one to stand in the way of progress by discouraging dissent or criticism. But I really do sense that the AE team is getting frustrated and they really shouldn't be. They are probably the most dedicated members of the entire WITP community. IMO there isn't enough applause in the whole world for what they are doing.

In any case, let the critiques flow. Maybe critique is a good thing. However, I will rather be grateful for what we have than discontented from what we don't.

[Anonymous]

That is true and i'm sure they work very hard. But there are people who are smarter and know more. I am looking forward to Herwin making his mod. will it come out soon?

MO

[GaryChildress]

ORIGINAL: Osterhaut

That is true and i'm sure they work very hard. But there are people who are smarter and know more. I am looking forward to Herwin making his mod. will it come out soon?

MO

Is herwin making a mod? [&:]

[John Lansford]

There were very, very few major warships that didn't have armor protecting the "critical areas"; the magazines, control areas, main guns, engine rooms and sufficient hull area to keep the ship afloat.  A bomb or shell that the computer decides would hit one of those areas should then determine if it would penetrate the armor covering it.  No HE bomb or shell should be capable of penetrating the armor protecting these "vitals" of a major warship because they were not designed to do so, and in fact, many AP weapons would not either because the armor was too thick.  I never have any problem with my cruisers' 8" AP shells not penetrating IJN BB or CA belt armor because I didn't expect them to do so except at the closest ranges, for example.

By the same token, however, an AP bomb of sufficient size should be capable of penetrating deck armor of some warships, and damaging "non vital" areas such as superstructure, secondary, AA and torpedo mounts, and some hull/flotation areas, because deck armor rarely covered the entire ship (and never the superstructure where most AA/secondary weapons were mounted).  Near misses functioned more as low-order torpedo detonations than they did bombs or shells, and should be treated as such.  I don't know if the near misses responsible for sinking ships IRL actually penetrated belt armor or if they just caused so much cumulative damage that they overwhelmed the damage control teams' ability to keep the ship afloat, but ISTM that it's a serious enough effect that needed to be looked at in both WitP and AE.  Requiring an HE bomb to "penetrate" the belt armor before it would cause damage as a near miss is unrealistic, because the damage/penetration model will never allow such a weapon to do that and most AP bombs won't either.

[Anonymous]

he writes wargame programs for the American goverment and writes articles on wargame programs and tells how the War in the Pacific game is not good and must be changed. He is much smarter than everyone else and I am assuming he is writing his own mod. I am sorry if I am wrong I do not know.

MO

[treespider]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

My Dad's favorite motto is, "if you're not going to do it right, then don't do it at all." All I can ever think of in response is that if everyone followed my Dad's advice nothing would ever get done in the world. The world is full of less than perfect attempts at doing things. Granted criticism is needed to spur development but when the critics start disillusioning the doers, then the results can be counter-productive.

I think Teddy said it best ....see below.

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: Osterhaut

That is true and i'm sure they work very hard. But there are people who are smarter and know more. I am looking forward to Herwin making his mod. will it come out soon?

MO

I reach (UK academic) mandatory retirement age in three years. In the interim, I'll work on various pieces when I have time. For example, I have a stack of notes on the far side of my desk describing a ground combat operations model for a WitP-scale game. However, my biggest priorities at the moment are (1) to do my American taxes, (2) write four research grant proposals, and (3) write a good paper on my academic research.

I wouldn't mind doing what 2x3 games does.

[GaryChildress]

ORIGINAL: herwin

ORIGINAL: Osterhaut

That is true and i'm sure they work very hard. But there are people who are smarter and know more. I am looking forward to Herwin making his mod. will it come out soon?

MO

I reach (UK academic) mandatory retirement age in three years. In the interim, I'll work on various pieces when I have time. For example, I have a stack of notes on the far side of my desk describing a ground combat operations model for a WitP-scale game. However, my biggest priorities at the moment are (1) to do my American taxes, (2) write four research grant proposals, and (3) write a good paper on my academic research.

I wouldn't mind doing what 2x3 games does.

Why don't you volunteer some of your expertise for the AE team? Sounds like they could use you.

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

ORIGINAL: herwin

ORIGINAL: Osterhaut

That is true and i'm sure they work very hard. But there are people who are smarter and know more. I am looking forward to Herwin making his mod. will it come out soon?

MO

I reach (UK academic) mandatory retirement age in three years. In the interim, I'll work on various pieces when I have time. For example, I have a stack of notes on the far side of my desk describing a ground combat operations model for a WitP-scale game. However, my biggest priorities at the moment are (1) to do my American taxes, (2) write four research grant proposals, and (3) write a good paper on my academic research.

I wouldn't mind doing what 2x3 games does.

Why don't you volunteer some of your expertise for the AE team? Sounds like they could use you.

They already have enough of my advice. The hardest problem they're fighting is the AI, and I can make more of a contribution to that by pushing my professional research than I could by getting in their hair. The following is the summary of a proposal I'm currently working on. Can you see the application to game AI? The underlying mechanisms seem to use a massively parallel processing architecture. Emergence is key to how it works, which suggests a reason why traditional AI is buffaloed by the problem.

Proposal to model sound-guided behaviour:

There are three mechanisms of sound-guided and triggered behaviour—reflexive (such as the startle reflex), habitual, and goal-oriented. Reflexive behaviour seems to involve stimulus-response arcs but with some control by the central nervous system. Habitual behaviour uses learned action values that reflect back-propagated reward values and seems to involve the basal ganglia. Goal-oriented behaviour seems to involve the planning of actions to gain rewards followed by back propagation of current reward estimates to modify current action values. How these mechanisms might be integrated is a problem that would contribute to the development of biomimetic robots (and AI for other applications). Daw suggested that action values are a weighted average of the values associated with different mechanisms and potential rewards. We would like to suggest that the weightings be adjustable based on the variance associated with each reward and the success probability of each action. This mechanism would be much like a Kalman filter in concept.

[GaryChildress]

ORIGINAL: herwin


Can you see the application to game AI?

Sorry I got up to the first sentence then fell asleep. Do you have an executive summary?