Of course, the language barrier is also a factor ;)
Anyway, i'm glad we're all coming to our senses again.

My one simple suggestion at this point is to go out and play the game, drop some settings if you must as a workaround for known issues but just go ahead and fly.

I avoided flying online because other people had told me of the sound bug and i was busy testing things offline anyway for the most part but guess what, i hadn't actually tried it for any length of time apart from a short test run a couple of patches ago.

Tonight i got on skype with a buddy i recently got back into flight sims (started him out with IL2:1946 and he then purchased CoD too) and we decided to try some multiplayer. I wasn't in the mood to start fiddling with the FMB so we just joined Syndicate to have a ready-made sandbox to fly in.

He had some trouble with his freetrack setup, i had some trouble due to running Skype on top of the sim with my limited 3GB of RAM, we had a couple of cases of spawning on the same places which resulted in our aircraft colliding, but after some experimentation (2-3 tries all in all) and taxiing a few yards away from the spawn point before the second one of us spawned, we got into the air and flew two sorties of about one hour each, maybe more.

The first one we started on 303 Polish squadron's airfield so as to be away from the furball area and have some time to get things running properly and distance to grab some altitude. It was completely hilarious, between fiddling with my compass and directional gyro and keeping tabs on the whereabouts of my less experienced buddy who was all over the sky, we ended up back-tracking twice over a meeting point before we got familiarized with our surroundings and started navigating towards Dover in a loose formation.

We encountered a couple formations of ghost contacts (dots that disappear as you close by), he ended up blowing his governor and at that time i got bounced by a 109. Not sure if he was AI but he might have been, as we descended in a left-hand spiral all the way to the deck with me evading his shots. After a while i tried to suck him into some scissors and force an overshoot, i over-controlled my Huricane and entered a spin. The result was getting a fuel leak and getting wounded. My buddy was safe on the ground by that time in Hawkinge, i landed with 1 gallon of fuel in the main tank due to the fuel leak (remembered to switch to reserve just in time) and he told me on skype to taxi next to him.

I jokingly said something about snapping souvenir photos, he said it was a good idea and i ended up getting screenshots of his nosed over Hurricane from within my cockpit. His engine had just quit a bit before touch-down and that's why his propeller blades were not all broken when he nosed over. In fact, his Hurricane was balanced on one of the prop blades itself!

Next sortie we decided to spawn in Lympne, got our bearings faster, set up a CAP circuit between Folkestone and Dover to protect friendly ships and then we saw a flight of AI Blenheims going across the channel so we decided to escort them, hoping they would draw some attention.

That's when my buddy started having trouble with keeping station again and drifting away. At some point and while dividing my attention between the bombers i was circling over to my low 4 o'clock and him wandering off to my 9 o'clock i hear him say he's being shot at. I tell him to go full power and race to his direction, as i pick up a contact behind him.

He managed to stay alive, i closed the distance and decided to spray and pray a bit to discourage his attacker, so i managed to save the guy (felt like babysitting rookies for real). At that point a Spitfire joined in and scored some hits on the 109 so i thought it best to go back north in order to regroup and grab some more altitude.

Being tail end charlie and focused on guiding my buddy back over the friendly coast (he's terrible with navigation :-P and being unfamiliar with the map makes thing complicated for me too ), the 109 which at that point had either downed or evaded the Spitfire gave me a good rake from possibly point blank rage. My screen went black in an instant and i saw the damage and pilot kill messages on the text window.

In one of the sorties (don't remember which), our airfield also got bombed as we were just starting our take off roll.

Long story short, i had so much fun that after having dinner i got back in, this time solo, picked up a 109 and set up a cap between Folkestone and Dover. Seems like most people fly low for the time being because i was trailing a contrail for an amount of time equal to half a fuel tank at economy settings up at 6-7km, along with the enemy flak bursts marking my position, but nobody was around for me to engage. After a while another 109 attacked me by mistake and damaged my pneumatic container, he told me he was sorry, i told him not to worry and to have fun and i set course for home since i was on half a tank of fuel anyway.


I got into only 3 fights, didn't get a single kill, died one time and had to RTB another one and it still was the best 3 hours of flight simming i've had the past few months. Just the sense of ambiance and sheer scale of the environment, the uncertainty and running for home flat out on a power dive from 7km amid the evening haze was enough for me.


As a side note, before spawning i set forest to very low (i already had it on low anyway), disabled music and voice in the sound options and didn't have any issue at all with the sound cutting out.

Just drop a couple of settings to ensure a stable game and go fly the planes that work, there's a good amount of fun in that while the next patches are baking in the oven, the servers are more stable (at least the one i was in) and i was surprised and pleased to see there were new people flying that don't even know how to start up their engines yet and everyone was helping them out.

Turn off your FPS counter, drop your texture detail a notch or two and give it a go, despite the remaining bugs and problems it still beats arguing with me on the forums ;)

I agree with this post. But am on the side of "pissed off" because when ever I made any constructive criticism/critical comments pre release I got jumped on and nuked. Maybe some of these huge faults could or should of been seen by the development team... Its frustrating especially because the screw up has/is so bad and was avoidable. In any case I think I have earned my right to whine at this point (even though I hardly post anymore).

i never intended to state that CoD is crap, far from that... i just had (and maintain) such high hopes on this one...

I waited 7 months in ROF just to be able to play a MP mission for longer than 10 minutes without a server crash or a master browser crash. I waited 2 years for them to fix an annoying ROF.exe error that would have you crash to desktop when an AI spawned. Now we just happily crash to desktop when a new mission loads. Still not fixed!

IL2COD is 100x the game engine ROF will ever be. The current mission I'm running has well over 200 AI and 15,000 objects in it. Go ahead and put 200 planes in a ROF mission and see if it will even load. Go ahead and put 500 objects in one see how long before it crashes the dedicated server when 40 people are playing.

ROF's potential is used up. Only a complete and utter redesign of their game engine (which they've admitted) will change that. If I wanted to make a bridge from one side of England through the English Channel to the other side of France I simply put it on the map in IL2. That's 100's of miles of bridge. Do you think the IL2 engine has any problem doing something like that? Now how about we add an invasion fleet of 300 tanks that drives over this bridge to invade England. Now how bout we put a few 1000 objects on the airfields to make them look alive. Then lets add several hundred AI bombers to go bomb the crap out of something. Then, heck, lets go ahead and even let players play on it. Guess what will happen? People will see a huge invasion fleet crossing the English Channel and go "lol @ Bliss"

The point in all of this, is the fact that you couldn't stack 50 bridges next to each other in ROF without the server having a seizure, let alone even think about having any amount of AI over the single digit category in a full ROF MP server, (and when I mean full about 46 players is all it will take before the server will crash). ROF is great for what it is. And it's an FPS plane shooter with some very good attention to detail on the planes. You exit the planes and you're left with a barren wasteland of emptyness. No amounts of coaxing through the Mission Editor will ever change that. No huge full scale representation of WWI will ever happen with ROF. There's people that have actually made complex scripts in ROF that will make a flak gun despawn unless there is an enemy plane around. In other words, this is done just to try to keep the game running.

For many people, that's just fine. For me, it's not. I get as much enjoyment from what's actually under the hood of a flight sim as to what's on the surface. And once you've made a few missions with ROF's ME and then go to IL2's FMB, you'll find ROF's editor isn't even in the same league or same planet for that matter as the FMB. There's more static objects to add life to missions like buckets and gas cans in the FMB than every single individual object in all of ROF's ME combined. Not only can I rotate any object I want, I can place then any height, I can cut away sections of the ground, deconstruct the map. I can do virtually anything I want in the FMB.
If I want to make a trench 5 feet deep and have it go across all of England I can.

Considering WWI was a huge ground war, you'd think you might have some ground objects right? Well, think again.

This is what potential is. This is what a real sim engine can do. Do you think I'm worried about a wrong prop pitch lever, a plane that doesn't perform correctly, brakes that don't work, or bad sound? Hell do you even think I'm worried about textures that don't load right? Heck no, because all of that stuff scratch the surface of what's underneath. And what's underneath is beyond amazing.

There's more going on in a JU88 cockpit than every single plane in ROF combined. And don't even get me started on the DM. Last time I checked I could still lawn dart a spad into the ground at 200mph and the plane looks like it could actually be fixed. You can't even damage a cockpit in ROF. It takes 4 bullets, yes 4 bullets to kill a pilot in ROF. It doesn't matter if you hit him point blank in the head from a stationary gunner - 4 bullets every time. You know what it takes in 10 year old IL2 and new IL2? 1 bullet to the head. ROF just only recently introduced an effect to make it look like your plane was leaking fuel or smoking. Old IL2 has had stuff like this forever. The FM is ROF is very nice. It does feel like you are actually flying, even though there are several planes that have needed a FM revision for over 2 years now.

So next time you even think about whining in here. Take it from someone who has one of the longest lasting dedicated servers on ROF and from someone who went through all the growing pains in that sim. Comparing the 2 is very laughable. One is an all around war sim. The other is, quite simply, an FPS plane sim featuring WWI planes.

And what I've talked about just breaks the surface of what's under the hood of IL2COD. I'm not even getting into the never ending moving front line dynamic online campaigns, or how you can virtually script up ANYTHING you want to have happen in a mission. And all this stuff works now, even in it's buggy unfinished state.

People have a very valid reason to complain for lots of bugs and problems. But I've been waiting for this for a very long time now, all because of what I wrote above. There's vehicle controls in options sections for a reason. This is going to be the ultimate all around on the ground and in the air sim in the future. No other sim will come close. No other sim can even do 1/2 of what this game engine can currently. Worried? Whining? Hell no. Enthusiastically waiting for the future and another patch.

But hey, maybe you can go back over to the ROF forums and tell them they should at least be able to model the different machine guns on their planes. Aren't there only like 3 or 4 guns total in WWI fighters? Yet they all have the same rate of fire and same ammo? Let me guess, maybe after 4 years after release they'll fix that as well? Nah, probably not. They have to work on making compasses or fuel gauges to sell.

Now even after all that you'd think I hate the game. Well I own every single plane and field mod. It is the most expensive sim I've ever played. But don't go and try to compare the 2 here. It's laughable. ROF plays much smoother than IL2COD, but I'd wager a guess that will soon change.

Good post Bliss. I hope your right about COD too. i really really do.

Just because I do not want to start next flamewar about who is better - I agree that clickable cockpit is very complex in COD, but it is not all about existing, missing, bugged features only. What I am trying to say all the time is the balance - balance between simulation and game. The formula is very easy:

Fun = simulation x game

simulation is everything around - cockpit, weather, land, wind, FM, DM, radio etc.
game is = UI, MP, campaign, career, squadrons etc.

What I am saying is that the way of the perfect simulation and very bad game above it, is wrong business strategy. You can tak away dynamic weather(as we can know from meteo statistics, what was the weather each day of BOB) and give there better UI.

So this is my point. It must be fun. this is the goal. People want to play - they do not want to fly with the totally simulated Hurri or Bf109... They want to fly like Clostermann, Hartman and others. Like these guys. And this is that crucial difference between ROF and CLOD now. But I am not saying ROF is better or not - for me personally it is, but who cares about my opinions - I am saying that the future WW2 sim should be focused primary on "fun" as I described. It is not easy, of course - that's what makes a game a legend. Now CLOD can be repaired, but content will just make it some kind of air Quake as previous IL2 series. Let's include there such nice offline campaign at least as beta campaign in ROF now. Everyone will be happy, whiner will shut up.

Look, I dont know what happened during BOBSOW, CLOD development. Why Oleg left. His 2001 IL2 was a revolution. But not CLOD. I am just thinking that maybe someone ordered them to give that initial code to WOP and they started again from scratch. But they had no time and money left to move it to such level like you can visually see in WOP. I am just wondering what happened there.

To be honest, i dont think we will ever really know whats happened with COD.
Not unless you get Oleg, Luthier and maybe a few others round a table with a few bottles of vodka. :)

if only we can have some info.... since the last patch we don"t know what they work on.... no news about an estimate date for patch....

really they miss a lot of communication. sincerely the last news with the team is really stupid.

we want info no a familly album....

well hope luthier and co will learn to communicate better!

What Bliss said, we will see where CLOD will be in a 2 years....Then we will JUDGE

all I said up till now is my CURRENT experience with the game and my OWN "feelings"...

Funny that some still believe that in the end everything will be fine with CoD.

In my opinion the patches released until now, are just tinkering.

What will be in 2 years? No one is interested in two years anymore.

As long as there is no complete investigation with the community, the trust is lost.