Think out of box
 

Any game about the AVG would definately need the individual pilots, Smith, Hill, Boyington etc. Glad to hear about your advice:)

I have been a plastic modeler for many years and doing them you get an attitude of "imagineering." I never had full blueprints of an aircraft but I would use the best resources available and make my models.
IL-2 went through many modelers who started aircraft only to say, "I don't have any resources on the port side cockpit so we cannot finish the plane!!" It seems this kind of attitude was pushed by 1C.
Hopefully a more imaginative approach, along with historical insight will be used in SOW to make it appealing to the "masses" who will really make or break our sim-pasttime. Supposed correct ammo loads are great (if there is such a thing) but the amount of work hours spent on that instead of gameplay will really be wasted in the end.

Luckily for us, while the right side of a cockpit may have prevented useful planes from being flyable, there were apparently tons of images of cockpits for the lerche, etc. Gotta keep up standards! ;)

Related to SoW, I personally always wondered why not have some planes simply have "player as PILOT" as the paradigm. Meaning that the other positions simply do not matter. Better to have a % of the planes with only cockpits (and bombadiers for level bombers) done at the high level required, and have the gunners, etc be AI.

More flyable planes with less work.

Sorry tater for not getting back earlier, but I was on vacation at "Hotel Mama" ;)

Anyway to have "user-made maps" for Il-2 (in the sense you mean) it would have had to have been a design decision well before the project "Il-2 Sturmovik 1.0" was ever made public. Oleg said that they never planned to have more than "Il-2 Sturmovik 1.0" (plus bugfixing patches) and were simply surprised by their own success. It's not really fair to blame them for "bad planning" when their own plans were thrown out of the window after the initial release. What could have been done was to structure the 3rd Party process a lot better (both plane and map wise) but I'm not sure if I'm reading too many of my own wishes into that. I still don't know how several people actually got the tool so it might have been a case of "I know someone who knows the designer's favorite hairdresser's second-grade cousin" ;)

EDIT: Since you posted while I was typing. Don't blame Oleg for the content choices of RRG. The late addons were drawn up by Saqson and luthier.

Weren't the same people responsible for PF?

The Kate was axed (flyable) for lack of a couple pictures, right?

Regarding maps... I don't think a folder with a 9 TGAs, a plain text file, and a file type created by the FMB (that we all have) really requires all that much in the way of special coding.

Just like all the years we begged for cut and paste and grouping in the FMB, and it is, um, not hard to do. Guys really busted their chops to make great missions and campaigns when this already existed but simply needed to be turned on... sigh.

Make the archetypical german AAA battery. Select. Paste, drag, rotate. Paste.

Or Palm grove on guadalcanal (the Cactus Diary" Campaign). PLace 2000 individual palms by hand, OR, place a short row, copy. Paste. Select the 2 rows, copy. Paste, select the 4 rows, copy, paste, etc.

All for lack of a couple lines set from =0 to =1

tater

This is the SCARY part. Now he is looking for info on the Do-215, which maybe 100 were made!? And RRG is making a Korean war game-Oh brother I can't wait to see how that turns out!

I still put all of these bad decisions squarely into Oleg's lap. Sorry but I still have a bad attitude since the Pacific Theater is my favorite-maybe after The Med.

tater

I think you're putting the blame on Maddox Games too easily and without knowing all the facts. None of us know all the facts regarding what really happened during PF development and ... *cough* ... "The Grumman Incident". And those who know won't talk about it.

To be honest I do not believe that the Kate was left out for a lack of sources. IMO Oleg and Ubi pulled the plug on any additional PTO content after "the Grumman incident". You know the old saying: "Burnt child dreads the fire." Without Ubi's marketing faux pas and Grumman's corporate greed there may have been a chance for further PTO stuff but that "incident" proved to be the final nail to the coffin.

Now what to make of those experiences? IMO Maddox Games needs to draw two fundamental lessons from them:

a) They need to get away from their pure "engineer perspective" and get someone who looks at the product through the eyes of a gamer.
b) They need to cooperate with people who know the historical facts about certain operations. If they want to make a large AddOn with the MTO they need to get in touch with people who can tell them which objects/planes/ships are necessary and where the maps (if a single full-size map is out of question) need to be located.

My 0,02 € ...

Theshark888

The Do-215 was, along with the Do 17 M and P, the main long-range recon plane of the Luftwaffe during the BoB. It does have a place and IMO simulating the recon role with proper aircraft would certainly add to the game's depth.

Thor, your points 'a' and 'b' hopefully will have been learned.

The question is though Thor, is the Do215 really necessary at this point? Are there other planes that are not modeled yet that would be more appropriate for them to be modeling? As you said, the Do17M and P are also recon planes and the Do17 is already modeled, so is a duplication.

Another question is the Do215 to be AI or flyable?

Where can I find a list of the BoB/SoW planes?

The Do-17 M and P are very very different from the Do 17 Z the bomber units had.

http://www.airwar.ru/image/idop/bww2/do17m/do17m-5.jpg
Do 17 P/M

http://www.aeronautics.ru/archive/ww...refuelling.jpg
Do 17 Z

The former had an elongated "glass bow" and a reduced defensive armament. In fact they were "earlier" Do 17s dating back to the mid-1930s. The Do-215 is a lot more "Do-17Z-like" as it was essentially a Do 17 Z-1 with two DB 601 engines. And unfortunately there is no "trustworthy" list of what is to expect in SoW:BoB plane-wise.

No matter what happens, somebody will ask "Why was Z plane included but X plane was left out"?

We can only speculate, but we've known for some time that at least part of it is: does somebody want to model it?

I personally would like Oleg and his team to think like simmers: what can we do to make this more correct? Where should we look for reference? Who has documents that could help us? How can we create a more believable simulation?

csThor, the "incident" you mention happened AFTER PF was released. The only changes would have been to stuff that they expected to patch in after the "gold master."

BTW, Trademarks do not protect a company from anyone using the mark as long as the mark is not used to deceive. Meaning you can use another's name, and even profit off of it, as long as it is clear your product is not actually authorized/produced by the holder of the mark. Ie: "Charger works with Nokia™ phones" is fine. Both the package, and it actually working with a proprietary product. Copyright is another issue, you need to make damn sure you don't claim to own their name on the box. If my box has a ©2001 TaterFactory Inc. All Rights Reserved on the bottom, AND has copy on the box that says "chThorCo ButcherBird fighters included!" without remarking that csThorCo and all rights belong to csThorCo... then I am very much F-ed.


tater