M1A2s Randomly Throwing Track

[Mirzayev]

I modified the Platoon Recon scenario that is shipped with the base game to use the arid terrain theme. During the course of the mission, I had two tanks throw their right track with damage to the right road wheels fairly early on. Both were under the control of the AI. A 1-2 was executing a march order at fast speed, while A 1-3 was executing an engage order at slow speed. I couldn't see anything within the terrain (large jagged rocks uneven terrain, etc) that would result in such damage to the tracks. 

 

Attached are the mission files, some screenshots, and the AAR. There was no event during the AAR indicating damage to the tanks, so that rules out any possible enemy action. 

 

 

Platoon Recon - M1A2 SEP Arid.sce Platoon_Recon_-_M1A2_SEP_Arid_6452_010821COLTON-PC2320.aar

Edited January 9 by Mirzayev

[Rotareneg]

It's probably the rocks, you might try changing the theme so the rocks are .1 m tall instead of .2 and see if that helps? 

 

 

[Mirzayev]

Maybe, but having the AI not recognize this as an "obstacle" isn't great. Losing 50% of your combat power at the start of the scenario because the AI controlled vehicles don't know how to drive on rocks to avoid damage is not a good feature, IMO. 

[Apocalypse 31]

Having a visual representation of the rocky terrain would be nice....

 

We have a new terrain engine

 

Or is that too much to ask?

[Rotareneg]

The rocks are visible, they're even in your screenshots. As far as I can tell, the sim just checks if the terrain tile has rocks in it over a certain size, around 20 cm and larger, and then randomly gives damage if the vehicles go too fast (which the AI in a formation inevitably will do as they try to maintain their position in the formation.)

[Mirzayev]

Update:

 

So I tested out the terrain by driving very aggressively (top speed, doing donuts, etc.) While I WAS able to throw track three times, there was NOT a specific area that I could find that caused it to occur. I would throw track at a certain spot, repair the vehicle, then drive a different vehicle through the same spot at the same speed at the same angle, and nothing would happen. If this indeed is a random result based on driving over "rough" terrain, I would highly encourage relooking it. 

[Apocalypse 31]

38 minutes ago, Rotareneg said:

The rocks are visible, they're even in your screenshots

1.The rocks in that screenshot wouldn't cause a 72ton vehicle to throw a track

2. Are we sure that is a 1:1 visual representation of the data related to the terrain?

[Mirzayev]

Managed to replicate at completely different spots. I played the mission like an ABOLC Student in the simulator for the first time. Plan was to get in a line at close interval and just charge at top speed. I tried it once and no vehicles lost track. Tried it again and 2x did. Interestingly, I never went at top speed the first time playing this modification of the mission. Not sure what is causing it to throw track, but to me it seems like RNG. 

 

 

Edited January 9 by Mirzayev

[Rotareneg]

2 minutes ago, Apocalypse 31 said:

1.The rocks in that screenshot wouldn't cause a 72ton vehicle to throw a track

2. Are we sure that is a 1:1 visual representation of the data related to the terrain?

1: And they'd definitely be enough to destroy the wheels of a pickup driving over 100 mph, which I just tested without any damage, so that doesn't really mean too much at this point. I think it's just as Mirzayev said, there appears to be a large amount of randomness to the ground cover rocks effects, apparently scaled by their size and density in the terrain theme.

 

2: As far as I can tell, the ground cover rocks aren't exactly "real", they basically just represent that a 12.5 m terrain tile has rocks in it. The rocks you paint onto the map separately in the map editor work differently: They are always visible (they don't disappear if you turn your ground clutter slider down) and always cause collisions with vehicles. 

 

From testing before, ground cover rocks 10 cm or smaller didn't seem to have a chance to damage tracks, so if you want to avoid that happening just edit the terrain theme to not have rocks above 10 cm in areas you want people driving. I'm not saying that's realistic or not, just that it's the way it seems to be right now.

 

[Ssnake]

I could imagine - not having the specifics at hand - that we're looking at a low probability of damage which might happen only rarely. Then again, it seems to happen with some regularity in THIS scenario, which makes me believe that it can't be a common issue, otherwise there'd be a ton of these reports since last time we changed anything in this area, which is years ago, possibly 3.0 (2013!) or even earlier.

Maybe there IS something in the terrain theme file. This would be the first thing I'd check. If you could extract it from the scenario file and post it here, and then (ideally) tell us on which terrain types your units did throw track (we only have approximate locations; e.g. you could change the mission options to show theme colors, and compare that with the places where it happened, to narrow the search space). If it happened in completely different terrain types or only on one or two of them, that would already give us a clue.

[Rotareneg]

It's the Grass-A terrain from the stock _eSim_Arid.thm. I think it just doesn't come up often because most themes don't have rocks large enough to trigger it without being really obviously rocky.