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iBeta's Realism Patch 3, Merlin's B-1B Cockpit.
by Bob "Groucho" Marks
iBeta Reality Patch v3
When I first began getting leaked word about the proposed changes in RP3 a couple weeks ago, I was honestly nonplussed. The primary changes (said the scuttlebutt) involved making the radar “less user-friendly, more realistic.” That confused me, as it seemed an odd place to focus attention. “What? Why screw around with something that didn’t seem broken? Boy, those guys must have hit a developmental wall to muck about there.”
I was wrong. Hey, it happens. As it turns out, the tweaks implemented in RP3 fundamentally change the way the serious F4 jockey flies and fights in the Falcon world. As many of us have suspected for a long time now, the AI are cheating bastards, particularly when it comes to sensor use.
Ever wonder why a MiG-21, flying at 20,000’ and equipped with a Toys-R-Us radar set, would detect you while you flew in low enough to pose a collision hazard to gerbils? It turns out that the radar scan volume in AI aircraft uses the entire azimuth and elevation limit, unimpeded by such realities as bar scan / elevation / beam width limits that the human-flown radar is saddled with. This is reportedly a hard-coded thing, beyond the reach of text and binary file editing.
Even then, iBeta team member Sylvain Gagnon says that giving the same constraints to all AI aircraft would be a frame-rate crippling modification. On top of this, it was determined that equipment shared radars between them. For example, the MiG-21, the AH-64D Longbow helicopter, and the Fan Song F control radar for the SA-2 carried radars with exactly the same performance values. Even by ignoring the fact that Cold-War Russian radar systems used Texas Instruments and Motorola chips, those disparate systems sporting the exact same performance parameters is stretching immersion a tad.Flushed with their discovery, the iBeta team set out to see what could be done to rectify this imbalance. First, they sorted out and differentiated the different radar packages, then assigned them as close to real world capabilities as possible. These capabilities are discussed in the RP3 Read Me file, and listed in detail in the Radar Properties.xls Excel spreadsheet located in the iBeta RP Docs directory.
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