[gap]

Originally Posted by kapuhy

A little late but I finally deciphered what the argument of Strafe function means today. It's altitude. Plane will attempt a strafing run keeping close to specified altitude.

At low or negative values this parameter doesn't seem to make any difference, probably because it is overridden by need to avoid impact with water.

Cool, thank you for letting us know

Originally Posted by kapuhy

Edit: Another complication I see in my testing is that if a plane has fixed machine guns, it will attempt to aim at target leading it to not keep ordered altitude. This might be connected with fighter planes crashing into sea way more often than heavier bombers.

Good point. Fixed aircraft guns have a small elevation/training angle, in the order of few degrees (otherwise they would never fire). Maybe increasing their elevation angle and/or tweaking their firing arcs might alleviate the problem

Originally Posted by propbeanie

Most interesting find - I wonder what "height" the planes begin to get "jittery" and attempt to avoid collision with the water? In SH4, I attempted to have a grouping of torpedo bombers come down to wave top for their anticipated attack runs, and instead they continued to fly at least 200m up. In the game though, with a Betty TB that had spawned from one of the AirBases, while my sub was on the surface travelling (a different experiment), I observed the Betty TB approaching in the distance, most likely at its default 500m height, then "spiral" down, and instead of coming in from my 270 relative, where it had been approaching from, came in from my 235 and was no more than 50m off the water for its attack run, though it did drop too soon, and the torpedo was easily avoided... but if the game can have a plane do that, why can we not call for that behavior?? lol

Originally Posted by kapuhy

I'll be testing this, but I suspect it will turn out to be their respective minimum height as set in sim file. It would make sense, why else have minimum height set for a plane if you're not using it as a trigger for AvoidImpact action? If so, the jittery behaviour might be result of basically telling the plane "Strafe at around 15 to 20 meters but no lower than 50".

I agree with kapuhy, minimum height might be the main "culprit", but other unrelated AI routines might also interfere. Their existence can be easily tested by setting min. height to very low values