Old campains where design fo earlier version of IL2. I think up to or before 4,01 or so (surrely in 2,04 ),
regular landing patterns where handled quite differently. Anyway there was a sudden change perhaps in 4,03up;
and now they are what they are today. No evolution or improvement, since then. Still IL2 is
impressive because it handles landings, compare to other flight sims. CFS-3 is horrible in that regard.
Bug: on very hight mountains maps, almost 100% of all AI driven aircrafts that are made to land by missions or
campains, crashs into the montains while following their landing flight path, or refuses to land because they are
too high when align to the runway. So they perform a "go around flight", which becomes a LOOP. Terrain avoidance
may be the cause of the too high situation. I've also seen AI aicraft from a campaign, loaded with bombs,
begin their mission, head streat out, hit the next mountain ridge and crash. Human error in making a mission, or this use to work?
Probably the flight model of the aircaft itseft has been changed.
Some ideas:
Improved terrain avoidance the first half of the landing patterns. A crude brief terrain following after an avoidance
while landing. Perhaps a swicht to landing at an opposite runway end (often it's bad as well; so I dont think this is
the solution). A mirror landing from left to the runway. A search for the nearest friendly runway, while adding
bad runways to a list of not to go to. More simply: looping aircrafts to a safe high enough altidude, then direct them
straight out of map, and game, opposite of the front lines.
By the way any damaged AI aircraft wandering far out of the game should be made to retired, or at least crash
land. This would lighten the load that the system have to handle.
How about straight in landings in narrow deep valleys ?
A landing mod would also lighten the load, by making aircrafts land and stop moving; even dissapear.
A simpler choice: make them dissapear after a predetermine number of loops (in high mountais only).
That is, if a sky dissaperance is possible, at all, without compromising other areas of the game; like now there's
new bug of suddenly missing flying aircrafts, everywhere. Or briefly move the aircraft dead center of a distant
temp-runway, making the aircraft to retire as usual.
Why not the actual runway? Because you may be landing there and have a surprise in front of you.
You will say you can do that in your FMB while editing missions; but what i'm talking about is this load of very good old campains
that have been compromised. (ex.: The Spanish Civil War which I never completed, because I started to make corrections in FMB.
and forgot about my carrier entirely).
Map editing, done that, changed runway land-take-off positions ec.t; once again a lot of time in FMB; not playing; lot of testing and
no satisfying good results; mountains are still there; I avoid changing them; any change is non standard anyway, so my own missions
become unusable by anyone esle.
mackdown: