Question: LOS in air attacks

[BigDuke66]

I would like to know how LOS is calculated in air attacks, I mean what height is used to calculate the LOS of the attacking aircraft?
I just wonder how much sense air attacks in cities make when targets are cornered by buildings.

[Imp]

Would it not be easier to do a test game & buy 20 or so aircraft to get a feel for it.

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by Imp

Would it not be easier to do a test game & buy 20 or so aircraft to get a feel for it.

Many end users seem to think that we have the answer to every code question right at the forefront of our minds and so can spoon-feed them with instant answers in 30 seconds or less.

However in reality the answers to these 'simple' queries are often buried deep in code that we have never ever bothered ourselves to look into - such as the basic LOS code here, for example. It came with the original code, it works, and so there has been no need to learn it since its not been tweaked (AFAIR). And its probably several spaghetti subroutines that call other bits of uncommented spaghetti, as SP has never used any of those simplistic shift-tables of the old Hex-based tabletop paper-shuffling wargames rules.

Imp's answer - to build a quick test scenario and then test drive it - is in reality the correct response to one of these "What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" type questions. Its what I do after a code change to see if it actually works as expected after all, as there is no way to go through several thousand odds lines of 'C' by eye and say straight away what exactly that really would do.

Items of help to the original poster before he goes off and tries a few tests:

a)Helicopters are lower in 'z' than low planes, so you'll need to have test cases with rotary and fixed-wing aviation.

b)Fixed wing air is allowed to 'automagically' find likely units in its attack area sometimes even if it's completely unspotted and not really in any LOS to the attacking plane and therefore logically unspottable. (Basic SP design from ye olde days of ye SP1 of yore - and not going to change).

c) Level bombers aren't worth a LOS test since they of course don't look for anything specific on the ground to bomb. They simply goto X,Y and begin offloading free-fall bombs (and only those) then go away. Hence the lack of any vision kit, F/C, R/F and any ranged weaponry on the level bomber classes.

cheers
Andy