Scramble: Battle of Britain News

The Scramble engine is built from the ground up to make capturing content from your matches as easy as possible. Every moment of each Scramble match can be scrubbed through with our rewind system, and the action of every Scramble match can be saved to a small replay file that players can share with friends.

Watch the video and read the full article below to learn more.

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[h3]Full Match Replays[/h3]
Scramble matches save as a small text file composed of a scenario definition and the control inputs for every aircraft. After loading a replay file, Scramble will re-simulate its match turn-by-turn with the ability for players to interrupt and take control of any turn. The turn-by-turn simulation and interrupt features are useful for post-match analysis and for exploring alternate tactics. And players have access to the same cinematic toolset and turn/match rewind features during a replay as they normally have in a live dogfight. The Scramble replay system lets players come back to any match at any time and find the perfect screenshot, gif, or video.



[h3]Sharing Replays[/h3]
Match replay files are lightweight and easy to share over the internet; demo players have been sharing match replays in our Discord server since June. If you download a friend’s match replay file you can relive their favorite matches in the Scramble engine from your own PC, you can act as a film director and capture footage of their successes and failures, and you can interrupt and control their aircraft yourself on any turn to fix their errors or challenge their scores.

[h3]Cinematic Toolset[/h3]
The rewind and scrubbable nature of Scramble gameplay makes it perfect for staging screenshots, gifs, and video. Our already robust cinematic toolset will continue expanding throughout the life of the Scramble engine, and below is a list of some of the features that will be available at launch.



Scramble currently features a free camera for movement around the sky, a dolly camera that will travel at an offset relative to the selected airplane, and a hardpoint camera with a list of preset camera positions for each aircraft. Scramble gameplay can also be viewed from our tactical mode, where the action unfolds in isometric perspective like a diorama and the player can move a cursor around the sky to investigate detailed information about different airplanes.

The Scramble camera allows positional and orientation control both in world space and in reference to a selected object, and camera orientation can be defined relative to the horizon or relative to the roll angle of the selected airplane. The camera allows players to smoothly adjust field of view for zoom and the camera can remember preferred zoom levels in different camera modes.

The Scramble camera can be commanded to track a selected airplane or a target aircraft in any of its major modes. And players can toggle UI layers on and off including both the 2D HUD and the 3D worldspace UI.

Thank you for sticking with us! For now, Flight School stops here. We've truly enjoyed training our pilots by sharing the features and development phases of Scramble, and we encourage you to continue giving your feedback on the demo to help us implement enhancements in the game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1530450/Scramble_Battle_of_Britain/

New call for pilots!

We are thrilled to announce that a demo update will be released for Scramble: Battle of Britain during the Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Steam Festival on September 16th.



Get ready to take on adversaries in the iconic BF109 and experience all the improvements we've made based on your feedback.

Join us for an exciting adventure in the summer skies of 1940!




Play now:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1530450/Scramble_Battle_of_Britain/

Greetings, pilots.

We're excited to announce that sign-ups for a new beta testing phase of Scramble: Battle of Britain are now open.

You can now seize the chance to be among our beta testers and help us shape the next features. Please follow the instructions below if you want to send us a request to join:

• Create a Slitherine account (if you don't already have one)
  
• Register for the beta at this link

Get ready to take control of the 1940 summer skies.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1530450/Scramble_Battle_of_Britain/

[h3]Flight school is back with another advanced topic today, designed to help Scramble pilots master their skills and excel in dogfighting. Watch the video and read Jon’s notes below to prepare for your next match.[/h3]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Dogfighting with Energy Management[/h2]

Hi pilots, I have another heavy physics lesson for you today; our topic is Energy Management. There are whole schools devoted to the study and development of dogfighting tactics, and the learned among you will surely have forgotten more about aerial combat maneuvering (ACM) and basic fighter maneuvers (BFM) than I will ever know, but since all these theories rest on the principles of energy management, I hope that a thorough investigation of its physics foundation will be of benefit to a wide audience of Scramble players.

Godspeed,
Jon

[h3]Airspeed and Aerodynamic Control[/h3]
Since the middle of the First World War, fighter aircraft have employed guns fixed to their airframes, and a pilot must orient their entire aircraft to bring these guns to bear on a target. Aircraft generally orient themselves through aerodynamic control – the manipulation of the surfaces or shape of a body as air moves around it to inspire forces and moments to act on that body. We define the rate and quality of this air moving around a body as “airspeed” and, regardless of the aerodynamic design of an aircraft or the qualities of the air moving around it, the laws of physics demand that some energy be transferred between aircraft and air, that the energy differential between them be lessened, and thus that every instance of aerodynamic control and every resulting maneuver incur a cost in energy that is mostly paid through airspeed.

[h3]Fighter Energy Stores[/h3]
The energy of movement for fighter aircraft is concentrated into three major stores:

• Kinetic energy is the energy of a mass moving through space – it is the energy of speed – and it is proportional to the square of the velocity of this mass. Airplanes can exchange kinetic energy with the air through which they move to adjust their orientation, as mentioned above, and they can also convert kinetic energy into potential energy by increasing their altitude (climbing).
  
  
• Gravitational potential energy is the energy stored by a mass at some height above the surface of the earth – it is the energy of altitude. An aircraft that climbs through the sky can be thought of as banking some energy as altitude, and this energy will eventually be converted to kinetic energy as airspeed when gravity accelerates the aircraft back toward the surface of the earth.
  
  
• Chemical potential energy is stored in fuel, and it may be converted to kinetic energy by an engine through combustion and the driving of a propeller through air to create a thrust force.
  

In general terms, the conversion of fuel into airspeed is a slow process, while the conversion of altitude into airspeed is a fast process; an aircraft accelerated by its engine and propeller may take over a minute to achieve a speed of three hundred miles per hour, while an aircraft diving from high altitude can achieve the same change in airspeed in as little as ten seconds.

Scramble dogfights happen two and a half seconds at a time, and even the longest Scramble matches (the record at the time of publishing sits at 140 turns) start and finish on a time scale that is fairly trivial for the conversion of fuel (chemical potential energy) into altitude (gravitational potential energy). Scramble players will find it difficult throughout the course of a match to regain airspeed purely through level flight and full throttle; there just isn’t enough time to meaningfully climb.

[h3]Spending Energy[/h3]
Dogfights in Scramble, as in real life, may wind and loop, but they will eventually descend from their starting altitude to one nearer the sea, and this descent is emblematic of the spending of airspeed energy on aerodynamic control and the transfer of banked altitude energy to restore airspeed.

Since altitude banked at the beginning of a dogfight is functionally a finite resource, pilots should be careful to spend energy on offensive or defensive maneuvers that shift the dogfighting advantage in their favor. Most offensive and defensive maneuvering falls into the categories of either pointing your nose at a target, or preventing your target from pointing their nose at you. And most costly maneuvering involves either pulling hard on the control axes (spending airspeed) or cutting throttle (reducing energy added via fuel burn).

Some common examples of costly maneuvers are:

• Pulling hard to line up a shot on an enemy
  
• Aggressively maintaining position on the tail of an enemy
  
• Pulling hard to spoil a enemy’s shot on your aircraft
  
• Aggressive maneuvering to slow down and cause an enemy to overshoot
  
• Cutting throttle to slow down and case an enemy to overshoot
  
• Cutting throttle to avoid overshooting an enemy
  

[h3]Drag and Efficiency[/h3]
Every aerodynamic maneuver has an airspeed cost, but some maneuvers are more efficient than others. Drag, the aerodynamic force opposing an aircraft as it travels through the air, is the force that determines this cost in airspeed. Drag generally increases as pilots command harder pitch, yaw, and roll control inputs, but drag is proportional to the square of velocity and thus it increases dramatically for aircraft maneuvering at high airspeeds.

Every aircraft type in Scramble has a unique aerodynamics definition and thus every aircraft has a unique performance envelope that varies according to airspeed, control inputs, throttle, damage, and more parameters. Some aircraft will perform high-G turns more efficiently than others at a particular airspeed, and some aircraft will be able to pull a higher pitch angle before incurring massive drag penalty than others, but players will generally notice drag increasing substantially, for all aircraft, at pitch inputs beyond eighty five percent. Players hoping to fight efficiently should be careful to keep from sustaining aggressive pitch or yaw maneuvers for multiple turns in a row.

[h3]Analyzing Energy and Tactics[/h3]
Scramble is a dogfighting game, but it is also an analysis tool. This makes Scramble distinct among dogfighting games, where the state-of-the-art is to analyze your performance after the match, and often outside of the game engine itself by importing flight tracks into standalone analysis software.

Scramble draws 3D ribbons in world-space to represent both the predicted flight paths of airplanes and the historical paths aircraft flew during previous turns. The flight ribbons of Scramble are the game’s most iconic imagery, and they are also the first read of flight dynamics and gameplay mechanics for most players; it is natural to expect control inputs to resolve themselves in the sky, so we attempt to render major warnings and aircraft states alongside the flight ribbons:

• Aircraft in a low speed state will render a ribbon with inverted white chevrons.
  
• Aircraft projected to stall will render a ribbon with connected red warning chevrons
  
• High-G maneuvers render ribbons with dashed black lines to indicate airframe and pilot stress
  
• Predicted firing solutions render ribbons with orange markers resembling the firing aid reticles
  
• Unconscious pilots render ribbons with solid black lines
  
• Damage, failure, and debris events all render as positional markers in 3D space
  

We have spent a lot of resources designing the HUD UI of Scramble to make players aware of the energy states of their airplanes. The Scramble HUD is inspired by dial gauges typical of aircraft instrumentation, but rather than rendering linear airspeed and altitude the Scramble HUD renders airspeed energy and altitude energy on symmetrical scales, so players can watch energy trade between airspeed and altitude live as airplanes climb or dive. These energy dials are scaled so that one full dial of altitude energy corresponds to roughly 350 mph of speed energy - quite fast for an airplane. Every fill of the altitude gauge is banked as a discrete dot while the fill itself resets, so each dot also corresponds to roughly one fully exhausted airspeed gauge of maneuvering. Scramble displays energy gauges on the HUD for both selected friendly aircraft and targeted enemy aircraft, so players can quickly distinguish the total energy states of friends and foes.

In addition to art and iconography for analysis, Scramble invites players to review the action of previous turns, or of the whole match, at any point during play. Players can scrub unbroken or frame-by-frame through the maneuvers of every aircraft, and all 2D and 3D UI will dynamically update to reflect the currently rendered simulation frame. The turn-based nature of Scramble allows players to pause and reflect on the tactics being employed against them, and the review phase paired with free camera or the tactical view should help players discern details and vulnerabilities that only the most thoroughly trained pilots can interpret in a real-time dogfight.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1530450/Scramble_Battle_of_Britain/

[h3]Welcome back to Flight School, our dev diary series unveiling the most important elements of Scramble: Battle of Britain step by step. Today, we are introducing an advanced topic to help our demo pilots train their skills as the game takes its best shape.[/h3]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



Aerial gunnery is a challenging skill to master in real-time, even with a pilot’s ability to constantly adjust their orientation to maintain a target within their gunsight. The turn-based design of Scramble further complicates this problem by locking aircraft controls for seconds at a time, limiting player authority to minimize targeting errors. Consequently, the Scramble Engine makes some simplifying assumptions to abstract gunnery in a way that rewards traditional dogfighting tactics while still leveraging the analog simulation pillar of Scramble’s design.

[h3]Projectiles & Damage[/h3]
Scramble represents projectiles as clusters: each cluster simulates along a ballistic trajectory and has a base damage value that adjusts according to impact velocity and distance traveled. While aircraft guns in the real world are tuned to converge at a point in space in front of the airplane, yielding a very narrow 3D hit box hundreds of meters along their trajectories, Scramble simulates a more generous damage region that universally expands as projectiles fly farther along their ballistic paths. This expanded hit region allows Scramble to both maintain its simulation foundation while rewarding tactical foresight.

Every projectile in Scramble carries a structure of data representing the active pilot traits at its time of firing, so upon impact the base bullet damage can be increased or reduced according to the pilot traits.

Scramble aircraft are modeled down to the subsystem level, with the entire body of an aircraft split into small hit spheres that are assigned to the subsystem who most closely shares their position. Subsystems can be marked as dense or penetrable, so the skin of a wing or fuselage will allow a projectile to continue its trajectory, possibly impacting a more dense subsystem in an ensuing simulation frame.

[h3]Subsystem Damage & Failure[/h3]
Every subsystem on a Scramble aircraft has a total health value, critical damage threshold, performance impact while critically damaged and while failed, and a potential list of other subsystem components that either feed it or rely on its functioning for their own performance.

As an example of coupled subsystems, engines require fuel to run and radiators to remain healthy. A failed radiator will immediately move engine damage status to critical. A critically damaged engine has reduced thrust output and can only continue to survive at a reduced throttle state.

Control surfaces and structural subsystems will degrade aerodynamic stability and performance when critically damaged or failed. Damaged ailerons impact aircraft roll performance, and damaged elevators will limit pitch authority and may induce roll and yaw biases. Critically damaged control surfaces may fail completely when commanded during high-G maneuvers, so players should be careful to minimize maneuvering along damaged control axes while at high speeds.

[h3]Leaks, Fires & Explosions[/h3]
Most aircraft in Scramble have both oil and coolant radiators. Damaged oil and coolant systems will leak black and white smoke, respectively, at a rate proportional to the damage they have accrued. Fully failed radiator systems will damage the engines they feed, so subsystem failures tend to cascade into engine failures as dogfights drag on.

Fuel tanks are positioned and sized according to historical references, and punctured fuel tanks will leak for the duration of a dogfight. Fuel leaks can catch on fire, and empty fuel tanks receiving additional damage will result in a catastrophic explosion.

[h3]Debris[/h3]
Every component that falls off an airplane in Scramble contains unique aerodynamics and damage definitions, and will continue simulating until impacting the sea. Aircraft can collide with visual debris and will receive damage proportional to the debris size and closing velocity.

An aircraft that loses its right wing will begin to roll aggressively to the right side while its heavy wing flutters behind on its own simulated trajectory. If this same aircraft then loses its left wing, the rightward roll will dampen, and the body will continue on a mostly ballistic trajectory until impact.

Close-range shots are the most sure method of inflicting damage in Scramble, but heavily damaged aircraft tend to leave a wake littered with dangerous debris. Pilots attacking at close-range should plan ahead to ensure they exit the engagement clear of any resulting debris field.

[h3]Live to Fight Again[/h3]
Scramble aircraft degrade and fail bit by bit, with coupled subcomponents and plenty of feedback to help players manage the risk of keeping their pilots in the fight for additional turns. The most valuable resource in Scramble is a pool of healthy, experienced pilots, and players will find that leaving combat to fight another day is a far higher rewarded strategy than maximizing kills. Our goal in developing this richly simulated combat engine is to facilitate player stories that mirror the emotional and tactical richness of pilot memoirs from the Battle of Britain.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1530450/Scramble_Battle_of_Britain/