Blackdog's description might well be the way CoD develops. I remember reading somewhere that the devs understood that the longevity of IL-2 was mostly due to the online wars - makes sense that they should build on that. Whether it is true or not? Don't know...

I also think it'll be the dynamic weather. Would be fantastic to see proper cloud formations and their effect on the weather, would really bring the channel battles to life as I doubt they were always so sunny and relatively clear. :P

I suppose it could be the dynamic weather, but its a feature already known and in the sim, albiet not working yet. Its not a big secret to the competition.

voice activated commands to the ai would be awesome!!!nice idea!it first came to my mind when someone posted a video with some software doing this some weeks ago. i thought..why not implement this directly into game!?

If it's a real jaw dropper then it's odd they couldn't hold off with the US release as it may have helped with sales?

As they didn't I imagine it will probably be something for mission builders, modelers or something and not something that the average player would use but which will definitely benefit the game in some way in the long run.

HELICOPTERS! they have added helicopters.. my dream has come true

1) Mediterianian theatre of operations (they have almost the enitre planeset already. Only need to add CR42 and Glad) I am talking battle for Yugoslavia/ Greece here and maybe even crete and not the North Africa campaign.

2) The Royal Navy, criusers, destroyers and battleships (swordfish and carriers as well) and Germany gets the Uboats, destroyers and Bismark... Help with battle of Norway scenario?

3) Most likely in my book is translucent water with depth. Like Oleg showed us in one of the ship demo's Instead of the water being a flat layer as is the current place holder water it will now enable ships to sink properly :grin:

It's not a case of can't, it's a case of working on other things. The AI's roll rate was fine initially, some people complained the AI was too easy and we got the new roll rate as a result to make it harder. I know, stop-gap solutions and all that, but we're getting there: if it was that easy to change it in one patch, it won't be hard to change it back in another one :-P

Back on topic though, my description was more about long term possibilities. Luthier said at one point he had a few hundred pages of design documents simply detailing how a dynamic campaign should work and that it would take at least a year for it to come to fruition, so it's not like my little scenario is something we can expect in the next patch or two.
I just like to see a few yards beyond my nose in terms of what's possible with the sim (and by possible i mean as of right now, people who can code in c# are making it happen as we speak, the rest of us will have to wait for the SDK), instead of focusing completely on short term issues to the exclusion of the awesome things that loom ahead in the distance.

As for this mentioned mystery feature i don't know if it's going to be the weather (since that is not new), but weather will affect gameplay in more ways than one.

First of all, altimeters and everything that comes with it. We would need the correct pressure from the tower controller to calibrate our altimeters and even if it's set for us on mission spawn other things can go wrong during the course of a mission.

Flying low through the soup to evade bandits? Not reliable anymore if there are pressure changes. Back in IL2 if i knew a certain part of a map i could fly blind through the clouds, simply by knowing the minimum safe altitude. Well, with truly dynamic weather and ambient air pressure changing, that altimeter might show different readings every time i go through a cloud.

Level bombing? Same as before. Flying to the target only to have your altimeter showing an incorrect value because the weather over the target is different, using that wrong value in the bombsight and missing completely.

Then it's the effects on CEM. Engines will be harder to start but able to be pushed for a longer time during cold weather, flying in low ambient pressure limits the initial manifold pressure available to the pilot, which in turn lowers the supercharger's ceiling and drags down performance across the board, etc etc.

Come to think of it, i don't know what the new feature will be but i wouldn't mind if it was the weather, in fact i can't wait for another slew of "my plane is porked/bugged" threads with the real cause being a completely valid and realistic feature :-P

These two make sense...very likely it could be something like this. Members have been begging for some RN ships for some time now, so it would be really nice to see the RN in the channel.
Some of the ideas put forth are realy good, but I don't think the team has the time for implementing something really major at this point.

The graphics & sound are being worked on extensively, so I'm guessing it's something along those lines. It could be some online feature though, but my guess it's going to be a visual implementation of some sort.
So my guess is, in order of likelihood, one of these:

1) Proper translucent water
2) Fully dynamic weather
3) DX 11 support

the bailout sequence would be nice to have.but they already showed a video with it, so its nothing really new.i think they just took it out of initial release because of the many problems they were facing.we will get this feature sooner or later anyway i think.
but i think luthier is speaking about something different, as he refuses to say more, it has to be something never mentioned, or an unexpected big step forward in developement.
so it could be that vehicles are driveable now and aaa can be controlled by the player.
but i dont think it will be the dynamic weather or the dynamic campaign, cause those features are neither secrets nor really new.we had dynamic campaigns in il2 and the dynamic weather was already mentioned six years ago. so the "competitors" already assume that those features will be implemented sooner or later.

but of course luthier's terms could be exaggerated.