FORGET DRONES, THE SKIES STILL BELONG TO FIGHTER PILOTS
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Even for an AI flying a military fighter is WAY more complicated that driving a car on a street. How often do you have to do trigonometry in your head to plot an intercept, in a car?
I was a PC game developer. I've done both flight sims and car sims, and written AI code for both. Flight sims are way easier. Doing math is simple. The issue is other moving objects that you must track and predict their actions, and then change your own actions based on that. As the number of moving objects goes up, the computation required goes up exponentially.
In the air, the number of objects you have to track is very small compared to a busy city street with pedestrians, bicycles, other vehicles, traffic lights, road construction, debris in the road, etc. All of these objects can do random things at any time.
What I mean is, that if an airplane is going to quickly turn left, the plane is going to bank and it will be a smooth change in direction, speed, roll, etc. When watching a car parked along side the road it could suddenly dart out with no warning. A child can run out between two parked cars and you have no warning.
In the air, the only thing you'll see is fixed terrain, and other aircraft. In the air, your path is 100% predictable given your thrust and control surface position. Much fewer moving objects to keep track of. The ones you see are all aircraft and/or missiles which you can predict the path of based on their speed, attitude and so on. Much easier problem.
That's fair. You obviously have more experience than I in terms of development experience and making these things work logically.
May I ask what flight Sims/ car Sims you've worked on? Not trying to do or anything, I'm just a big fan of simulation and particularly high fidelity military Sims.
I suppose despite the extra complexity of fighter systems and subsystems and management of those systems in comparison to car systems, while more complex wouldn't be that hard to automate. Also despite aircraft having an 3xtra dimension to travel in as compared to cars, the navigation of a car could be more complex due to physical limitations such as physical size, turning circle, obstructions etc. But things like landing, air to air refueling, maneuvering in formation I would think are still complex?
I'm not really arguing with you, more like getting thoughts out...
No, because that would identify me. But they were back before there was such a thing as a graphics card.
Late 80's early 90's.
Cars have suspension systems. Each wheel is mounted on a spring. Then you have terrain constantly pushing up on letting go of the springs. At the time the driver can accelerate or brake, adding more forces. And turning means lateral forces on the wheels. It has got to be perfect, otherwise it looks like crap.
Cars are easily 10x harder to simulate that a plane, which only has the smooth forces of lift and drag on the wings and control surfaces. No complex dynamic system of springs.
Cool, well thanks for your responses. It's pretty neat to have a developer here on the board that made a game I have likely played!