Some new official info from ubi forums
 

For those of you who haven't read it yet:

The Dev team are trying to answer all of your frequently answered questions. To kick things off here are a couple they’ve answered for you this week…

Community Answers – Part 2

Q. What options are available to skinners? For example, will they have any control over weathering layers and panel lines or is that hardcoded?

A. The panel lines and weathering are not available for editing. You can only do the overall paintjob. We felt that this was the most balanced decision, considering the fact that most paintschemes on online servers in our previous titles were horrible quick hack-jobs that made aircraft look atrocious. By expertly applying professional overlays on top of your custom skin we ensure that every single skin looks good. We even feel that this is historically accurate. As a real person approaching a real aircraft with a bucket of paint, you can paint over the existing structure any way you like, but you can’t re-rivet the skin or rearrange the panels.

Q. How many campaigns are there? One Spitfire, one Hurricane, one 109, one 110?

A. One British campaign, in which you fly the Hurricane and the Spitfire, and one German campaign in which you fly the 109, the 110 and the Stuka.

Q. How big are the bomber formations in most missions? Is the 'bomber unit' size scalable in campaigns?

A. We balanced our campaign missions for minimum spec machines, so bomber formations are pretty small. The largest mission is about 50 planes total, 21 of them bombers and the rest fighters.
If you have a more powerful machine, larger battles are of course possible.

Q. Are the airfields and surroundings 'alive' in campaigns - you know, vehicles moving around, crew figures, a NAAFI truck?

A. All life has to be hand-built by the mission designer. All our stock missions come with very busy airfields.

Q. Are there any animated characters in briefings, on the field before or after flights?

A. No

Q. Do kill markings get recorded on your aircraft skin? (Probably not, but it's nice to day dream.)

A. There are actually kill markings. They are applied as a separate decal onto some, but not all, fighters. You just enter a “kills” number into your plane options, and voila, it’s there.


http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/t...9/m/5151024809

Thanks:) Interesting

"considering the fact that most paintschemes on online servers in our previous titles were horrible quick hack-jobs that made aircraft look atrocious"

Sorry?? They appear to be quite out of touch with the community here. There are tons of professional skinners who would rather drop dead than produce a quick hack-job, let alone the number of improved internal and corrected riveting layers is boundless.

i have a lot of very weird and ugly skins in my cache folder from flying online in the VOW online war......................

anyway, could you imagine how big CoD quility skins would be for the network traffic ?!?!?!
so, "only" the colors have to be tranfered.
I belive its a good solution, even some crack skinners will not like it !

I am certainly aware of the fact that the basic idea is to reduce network traffic, yet lost why they do not state this as their main reason. The statement I quoted is simply offensive and not representative of the actual truth. Of course, there are atrocious skins, but they certainly are not the majority like it is conveyed by the above statement.

Yes, i've seen some terrible terrible looking skins. Oleg made a wise decision in my eyes. It should make skinning easier for the average user, thus giving us (the community) alot more quality skins to choose from for our own self-built campaigns and missions. All in all its going to be much more professional looking than 1946 is.

You are aware that the colour layer is the one that actually turns a skin into an atrocious one, right? Just because you can't alter rivets and weathering doesn't mean people will stop putting Hello Kitty stickers on them or black flames or whatever nonsense floats their boat. So this decision will have no impact on this whatsoever.

I disagree. Where the skinner doesn't have to go in and personally apply every rivet, and apply weathering by hand it's no doubt going to make the process alot easier. And, if people are really going to put hello kitty on their plane than thats just making them a big huge target. Not only for being shot at, but for being flamed as well. For those of us that actually take this sim more seriously, this decision by Oleg is a good one. This is my personal belief, i'm not necessarily sticking up for Oleg.

The skinners actually enjoy this process, that is why they are skinners in the first place. Painting a simple camo pattern is kindergarten level and will certainly discourage the top skinners of our community.

A bomber-formation of 21? I understand if the user can increase this, but that is just pathetic. I hope there is an easy way for the user to select formation sizes in order to increase them for the campaign.
I was hoping, with the improvement in technology, that it would be possible to have huge formation sizes like in BoB2. Of course, this could all change, but I was hoping for a larger size than this as a baseline.

Indeed, especially with Oleg stating that the formation dynamics are scalable and that planes further away from the player are simplified in terms of mesh AND flight model.

Maybe another big improvement that was sent to the back burner?

I'm sure access will be granted to the weathering layers eventually and i'm also sure that we'll be able to ' mod' the weathering templates very very soon after release!

Sounds like a good idea for online play given the size of the skins, I don't think modded weathering templates will effect online play if it has the same file name?

Oleg and Ilya know what amazing skinners IL2 has.

Well I'm sure they do, I'll agree with you on that one. But by taking alot of the guess work out of this it should allow for a better finished product. And besides, I was referring more towards the average user being able to make skins that they want, when they want them. Otherwise you have to go somewhere and make a skin request, and maybe it just doesn't turn out the way you want it. No offense to those who are skinners, but I would just rather do it myself instead of possibly getting "lost in translation" if you will. But I would expect the skinning community to stay alive. There are simply alot of users out there that just won't want to deal with making skins.

Another thing. With the insanely accurate and high detailed plane models, I would imagine that if the skinning process was the same as in previous versions of IL-2, than it would be a bit harder and alot more time consuming than it already can be. But of coarse, I'm no expert on this. ;)

Originally Posted by philip.ed
A bomber-formation of 21? I understand if the user can increase this, but that is just pathetic

21 bombers on the screen at the same time, that is amazing, things just keep getting better, counting the days

Yes, for those who have a passion for skinning, I'm positive that there will be options in the future to make the process more detailed. But like I've said, at least the average user will have the option to make their own skins now as well. :)

Exactly.

I was (actually for years now) waiting for official info on that aspect, but never found any word from the devs, so I don't consider this another "promised feature". If all planes on the map have the full flight, damage and AI models (with all the pros and cons of that approach) it's obvious that we won't get several hundred planes at once in a mission. A bit unfortunate that the Battle of Britain is the starting point for this new series, because some Eastern front scenarios wouldn't suffer much from such a restriction.

On the other hand it's nothing that raw CPU power won't fix on the long run.

I understood that part; hence me feeling that as a base-line it was still quite low (IMHO), and that I hoped the user could easily increase this ;)

They could simply leave them out of the online skin transfer and keep it offline only. After all, online problems only affect people playing online :-P

An unfortunate decision and I hope they reconsider it. Having the rivets/bump maps and the weathering layers available for skinners would open up completely new possibilities, especially if it was possible to increase the size over the default ones. I don't see what possible problem that could be for anyone.

To let the user increase this in a scripted campaign, they would have to make each mission at least 3 times to account for a bare minimum of low/medium/high aircraft density settings.

There's nothing stopping me from creating my own scenarios with 100 bombers in the air, or flying online in a server with a few dozen people if my PC can handle it.

Nevertheless, when the dynamic campaign is ready it would be a cool feature to be able to select the desired aircraft density.

Well as with most things to do with this sim, given time this will be something to be increased/included down the road. I can't even imagine how powerful hardware will be in a couple years. Just gotta stay optimistic for now.

Oh yeah,

I can't wait to see 100 bombers in action.

Although we probably won't see hundreds of planes in the air at the same time on a mid-range machine we can still create missions with triggers. Let's say a formation of 30-40 bombers approaches, your squadron shoots down about 50% of them -such kill rates were rather uncommon though- the loss of a certain amount of planes then triggers a second wave of bombers which you are vectored to by ground control. Now, I don't know if this will be possible but if that's the case then we might no be able to have huge single formations but several "smaller" ones in portions. That happened quite often, the luftwaffe sent out several "smaller" bomber formations against different targets to screw up the RAF fighter command as much as possible. Also they sent formations in delay so one came in first and maybe 20-30 mins after that a new one would come in so that the RAF fighters wouldn't have enough time to land and refuel/arm. Super large formations weren't as common as many would like to believe. Personally I don't care so much for hundreds of planes in the air at the same time, sure it looks fantastic but I wouldn't be able to shoot down more than a couple anyway:)

Surely the skinners will still be able to weather their skins in the same way as before. All that we'll have to do is to turn the COD weathering off (ie set the slider to zero). Skinners could even release a 'clean' skin for use with the COD weathering and a pre-weathered skin.

Similar to producing il-2 skins with national markings or without - you had to make the apprpriate setting in il-2 to turn off or keep the built-in markings.

The weathering will also have a specular map (where the underlying metal is exposed), which may not be available to "normal" skinning. So this approach wouldn't provide the same options and quality as the built-in weathering system.

Yes Kendo I agree

that sounds like a good idea to put weathering to zero. This would work best for user created missions and campaigns as the official missions/campaigns will already have the weathering levels set for all a.i. planes...but it wouldn't be too big a job to re-set all the official mission weathering to zero if the player wanted to use custom skins.

This will also help with unit emblems and nose art - in the screenshots i've seen so far these do not have any weathering/rivets/panel lines and look false against the otherwise great skins, with the greater detail/quality custome skins in COD we'll have better quality emblems/nose art as well for custom skins.

Templates for panels/rivets is another story !....we'll have to wait and see.

But, if the plans for an SDK hold up, we should see entire new aircraft created (which requires this level of access).

You can use triggers to spawn planes on random paths in case the player gets close, which reduces the overall amount of planes that show up in the mission at the same time. Not the best approach though if radar and ground vectoring are implemented. But triggering waves of new enemies when the first wave is shot down? Sounds closer to Space Invaders than a realistic mission setup...

Anyway it's all speculation until we know how many planes a high-end CPU can cope with. For sure not all BoB missions were multi-wave attacks with several hundred bombers. But being tasked with attacking a lone recon flight on September 15 would be a bit strange :(

Sure but the SDK won't come with the release, and no details are known so far about who will get access to it at all. But yes this would certainly require full access to all modeling features of the engine. Even more reason to open up the skinning process already before so people could get some practice in that field ;)

Well, as the rivet layer will be placed over the colour layer pre weathered skins will look kinda odd. But lets wait and see.

"Q. Are the airfields and surroundings 'alive' in campaigns - you know, vehicles moving around, crew figures, a NAAFI truck?

A. All life has to be hand-built by the mission designer. All our stock missions come with very busy airfields."

Sounds great, I would love to have a situation where I belly land and smash into the naafi wagon or maybe some peeps watching the guys come home :grin:

[QUOTE=BigPickle;224547][I]"Q. Are the airfields and surroundings 'alive' in campaigns - you know, vehicles moving around, crew figures, a NAAFI truck?

A. All life has to be hand-built by the mission designer. All our stock missions come with very busy airfields."


I'm looking forward to seeing detail like this. I know that Luthier has said he is gutted that there aren't many 'human' figures populating the ground in-game e.g running from strafed vehicles etc. But again I think this answer suggests that the potential is there for future development. Thanks for posting the FAQ answers..... Stuka campaign anyone?:)

Hmmm , no dx 11 , no animated figures , no large formations , no proper sound , no proper weather systems or realistic looking clouds and NO skinning , so you get........LOL

im wondering about the campaigns, whether you can play out an entire campaign with one particular type of airplane, ie: every mission flown with a Hurricane... or a spit... or 109 etc etc.... OR if we will be forced to shift from a few mission with one plane then being switched over to a few missions with another...

Hard to argue with this...

But business strategy wise, it seems to pay to release a basic product and then patch it later and SELL lots of DLC....Rise Of Flight, Napoleon TW, Train sim...etc..

We will have a great sim...over time




" doing the easy thing is never the same as doing the right thing.."

I guess more add-ons will be payware than they were in the past, but then again i don't think the majority will be individual DLC items as much as feature a wider selection of content for the appropriate price.

There are many reasons why itemized DLC sales don't fit well with a flight sim, but the main one is that it's better to be charged for a few planes you don't fly in the package and get a bundle of extra stuff to help you recreate a theater of operations (or at least a reasonable part of it) in a well done manner, rather than buy individual add-ons and then find out you have to sit the odd mission out because the server switched to a mission for which you haven't bought any of the flyables in the planeset.

I hardly ever fly the majority of aircraft in IL2 but i'm glad i have them for such occurrences, plus it raises my appreciation for the less well known aircraft when i do. If i was buying them individually i would probably only have the 190 series and a couple variants of each well known type like the P51, P47, Spit and Bf109/110.

Also, when the only sale item is a single flyable at around $10, it pushes the developers to work mostly on flyables and neglect other aspects of the sim that are required to flesh it out properly, like for example AI ground and sea units or new and updated maps. With a full on expansion for $50 however, the developer can command the same total price but has more freedom in what to include and this broadens the scope of the simulator. Even in the case of small DLC packs, it would be better to get a couple of new flyables and some "supporting actors" for $30 than getting just three flyable aircraft without an appropriate context to fly them in.

Just my opinion of course, your mileage may vary.

Good idea....especially if there is a refuel and rearm option where you could catch the some of the later enemy formations going to or returning from target.

I have to admit I figured the base line would be much higher. I knew the developers would be having frame rate issues with all the highly detail content, but didn't think it would be this bad. The good news is it can only get better. I will have a fairly high end system to allow for more bombers, but really don't care that much, as we will be lucky to shoot more than one or two down. It was nice to see hundreds of bombers in the sky but that view doesn't last that long before your more than busy with the few bombers and fighters around you to notice anymore.

Realist FM/DM Huge map. 12 highly detailed planes, all the ground equipment which is also highly detailed. Competent A.I.....you know the major things involved with a high level combat flight simulator. We've been told they will try and get this stuff patched in sooner rather than later. Find it odd you pick on the negatives and just claim that it means the whole will be worthless. Pick the things that are ancillary to a detailed flight sim, and rail on those as if they are the end all be all.

Yes, it's disappointing we won't have them at launch, but they are not the most important aspects of a combat flight sim. Quit pretending they are. We don't even have a complete picture of what will be there yet and what won't. Quit jumping to absurd conclusions. Do you know what it must look like to someone from outside these forums who comes here to get some info and see that the "fans" of the game are only talking about the features that AREN'T (assumption on our parts btw) in the game. They assume that if the fans don't like the looks of things then well the whole thing won't be worth buying. Pull your head out of your tail pipe.

The onus of selling this game to the general public to see that we get future content falls on us as much as it does the publishers and 1C Maddox. You can't seem to see the forest for the trees. I don't care if your pet aspect isn't there quit being a negative nancy and at very least wait until we have the final product in hand before you lay down your judgements.

DX11 is bloated BS, I don't care at all for people on the ground, if you read correctly you can scale up the formations to your liking/pc power, define "proper" sound, clouds are a nuisance anyway and I don't care at all for skins :)

What I'm waiting for: the damage model which will be the most complex and detailed in history, the enormous amount of aircraft and engine systems (again most complex for a WW2 sim, only Black Shark is more detailed) and the numerous ways you can screw them up (workload, yes!!), the new complex flight models, the lighting, the new AI without Omnivision™, Throttle of God™ or Bionic Radar™; 6DOF and other ways to interface (I hope force feedback rudders), solid trees and most important: a pilot with a barf bag.

In time they will have the resources the synthesize the sound of the DB601 and the Merlin, but even now the russian engine sounds great. Too bad not a single Jumo 210/211 on the planet is available.

To each his own ;-)

I agree. Imagine Adler Tag as a pissy little skirmish. :(
Over the last couple of weeks I've seen every feature I've been hoping for is actually going to be absent. Cliffs of Dover is looking like nothing more than Il-2 with a new pair of tits.

Inconstant wimps ;)

Seriously guys, if our fantasies have run wild for the past half-decade and we are disappointed we need to take some responsibility for this.

The sim will be better than Il-2. It will be the most detailed WWII sim in history. It will have much higher standards than any commercially oriented developer could produce. It will be imperfect. It will have limits. It will have elements which don't feel right.

Part of it is taking it like an adult - not seeing the glass as 10% empty.

Although I must say that I was really looking forward to the Yaks and the La-7, but could never get into these aircraft in Il-2. Also, Oleg really neglected ground attack after the initial release (buildings, trains are all too vulnerable, rockets had laser like accuracy, ships had simplistic damage models). Plus, you can't fly high enough for the contrails to work (despite contrails being added as feature and heavily advertised).

I could go on - but I eventually learned to look at the positives and to respect Oleg's dedication. He isn't perfect, but he is a cathedral builder and a sim pilot.

Soon ... very soon ...

Check this link:

http://www.wingsmuseum.co.uk/jumo211...estoration.htm

I just love when people just write "bad sounds...lol". Based on what? Your personal experience sitting in a ww2 fighter plane/youtube clip with crappy microphones?

All of you out there crying due to absent massive bomber formations:
Give the great mission/campaign creaters we have in this community 1 week after release and you will have a fully fledged super massive bomber formation mission/campagin.

But please don´t come here crying and bitching over your poor frame rates if you don´t have top of the line rig á 2500$

1C is pretty clever here. They will give the mass of flight sim audicence a time of their live without having to sell their mother/wife on ebay due to HW cost. Our genre has always been yelled at being so cpu/gpu intense and unplayable on mainstream rigs.

But in time, we will have better HW and CoD will grow on us and I wouldn´t be surprised if we, before the end of 2011, can enjoy a mission sitting in our beloved Spit/Hurri/109 going through a large bomber formation without hick ups.

Its the reality today boys and girls. You cant have everything at release. No other flightsim was perfect at the beginning with all features enabled. Just realize that and you will be fine.


Its early in Sweden and Im grumpy ;)

A bit weird to have one german campaign for those three planes. So you first fly the Stuka and then become a fighter pilot and switch between the 110 or what.

Doesn't make that much sense to me.

I'm definately more interested in multiplayer but did plan to atleast give the german campaign a try, but when you get to only fly the Stuka in the first missions and then get "promoted" to fly the 109 later on or even switch planes in every mission (like bomb radar station in mission 1 flying a Stuka, then fly escort with the 110 in mission 2), then that's not what i expected.

In this case, i can understand the request for a dynamic campaign.

Wow , I feel so enlightened , by all of your meaningfull responses that I have now seen the light , all these things that are missing are a good thing they will greatly enhance my ummmmmmmmmmm , ummmmmmmmmmmmm ,ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Yes we know, u are a 100 times better at this than Oleg and Team. :blahblahblah:

What was your flight sim called again? Oh, thats right, u build "your" stuff based on other people success isnt that so? :rolleyes:


Easy fix: Dont buy it and keep doing what your doing now, im sure there will be at least someone using it a year from now.

Agreed, a bit underwhelming. User made will campaigns will fix it, to bad most of us wont be able to run it for a year or two (or maby we can, time will tell)

At least we know its due to PC restrictions and not the game itself.

Would be intresting to know what the maximum numbers are as it stands now. In game "if pc isnt an issue" kind of thing.

Yawn...

Trying hard to show your superior careface..? Come on you can do better than that chippy.

"chippy" ? , carpenter ?....I think not Doogle.

Q1. Paintschemes only - seems reasonable to me

Q2. 2 campaigns - that's one more than I thought

Q3. 21 bombers in formation - way more than I could ever shoot down (or get near) unless I had all setting on Easy - and can be ramped up based on comp spec - seems reasonable

Q4. Airfields are 'alive' - excellent, sounds awesome and will make large improvement on IL2 where I thought airfields were bland and lifeless

Q5. No animated charaters - Good, this is a flight sim, not an RPG ;)

Q6. We get kill markings on some fighters - excellent

All these points seem like good news and improvements on the original IL2. Along with almost all the vids and screens I've seen so far!

I don't think I'll be making any negative comments about the game until the it's installed and I've had at least a couple of hours gameplay in the campaigns.

....unless I can't install the game for some reason...then I'll be making comments alright :grin:

I think this polarization is getting old. It's neither the criticism nor the admiration that's annoying, that's natural, expected and should be expressed. It's the way some people go about expressing it, thinking they are the holders of the universal truth and turning everything into a black and white discussion: "it will be awful", "no it won't, it will be the second coming of baby Jesus", "you fanboy!", "you hater!" :rolleyes:

My personal opinion? It won't be bad, it won't be perfect, it will be balanced in its content and with today's medium spec PCs in mind, but will also give you the tools to do more if you have the hardware.

Also, how about some perspective? We are comparing a sim in its infancy with other sims that have already been running for a few years, that is, the lifetimes of each one are different and this skews the comparisons because in a constantly updated product bigger lifetime=more development time in total.

You can't compare today's CoD with today's IL2 or today's RoF because of the above reason and you can't compare today's IL2 and RoF with the CoD of 2-5 years in the future because we don't have time machines.

What we can do is compare sims at similar points during their life and within the content of that time.
So let's take a look at that:

CoD on release:
Around 12 flyables
A lot of AI units (air, sea and ground)
Mission builder which keeps the old interface to help us churn out missions fast, along with some improvements
Scripted campaigns
Various enhancements over what is a well known previous series from a well known developer team, which makes it easy to quantify the changes and gives an idea of what to expect (FM/DM, engine management, AI, graphics and sounds,etc)
Very popular subject, even if done in the past by many others

IL2 on release (the original in 2001):
A good amount of flyables (don't remember the exact number, i think it was 7-8 main types per side if we don't count the sub-variants)
Sufficient number of AI units
Mission builder which at the time was totally non-intuitive and totally different from the kind of interface one would expect
Scripted campaigns
Totally unkown product/developer at that time
Completely unknown subject matter (eastern front)

RoF on release (the original, not the Iron Cross Edition relaunch):
Four flyables
Four AI aircraft, plus a couple of each type of ground unit per side
Capable mission builder which at the time of release nobody could get around, lack of documentation for mission builder
Campaign was a random string of missions downloaded from a master server where the player's flight of 5 would invariably meet an enemy flight of 2-3 and if you strayed off the path a bit you might trigger a recon 2-seater, its duration was not selectable and it would often give unrealistic and non-historical encounters, especially after the add-on DLC planes were released, for example: you are flying a Nieuport 17 in late 1917 and you meet up with some Fokker DVIIs
Developer known from some work in the IL2 community (i think they made DF server admin tools for IL2), but other than that nobody knew much of them
Known subject but niche-within-a-niche in a way (everyone knows about WWI but most people fly WWII or jets)


See what i just did there? I used common sense. ;)
So my mystical arcane powers of logical deduction, granted to me after i sacrificed a trainload's worth of virgins (what? it's obvious such powers are in short supply around here!), tell me that if IL2 and RoF are still going, then CoD will do at least just as well, if not better :-P

Nice example on how to look at something from more than one perspective.

With regards to the massive bomber formations I'd like to add that my rig back in 2001 (Athlon 900Mhz, GF2MX, 512MB RAM) couldn't run at a decent frame rate with lots of planes at the same time in original IL-2. Yes there have been massive hardware advances the last few years but the complexity of games goes 1:1 with this. Ok, you could have hundreds of planes at the same time in CoD but what do you trade trade it for? simplified engine complexity? simplified A.I? Cuz you're gonna have to trade something away. Hardware is evolving and so are games with it and thank God for that, I don't want to play tetris on my triple-core rig.:)

Blackdog_k: Wish I'd seen your post before I wrote mine, didn't have to write mine LOL!

+1 1/2

LOL, Blackdog is trying to use logic around here, again.......Silly lad.

Best post in decades.
CoD potential is what we have to look at. I am anxious about release. But more anxious thinking of what will be CoD in a year or two. Imagine: the desert, nigthfigthers vs. nigthbombers, early ww2 in Europe or even SCW, all things we miss in il-2 will be there, waiting around the corner. We gonna love this sim.

Yes, but that takes a lot of patience. Which sadly I'm realizing not many people have at this point. It's not something that happens overnight. More than likely we won't get another installment for a couple years, but until then we will get plenty of patches of coarse. Constant improvement is what made the original IL-2 what it is today, and I expect CoD to be the same way. CoD is still in it's baby shoes, and will be for awhile yet. But rest assured, it's gunna be awesome! :-P

So I guess on the 128 player servers we have to make sure only 20 people take a bomber. Otherwise its going to stutter like the King. Im not overly concerned in truth, they did the best they could with an old game engine, it could run a little better if they ever do fix DX11. At least now we know why they kept IL2 in the title because it will appear like a small upgrade to the original.
Maybe they might reduce the price of the initial title by 50% seeing as we are only getting half the game.

Are we assuming that everyone is running minimum-spec machines, Tree?

Yes, the 128 player feature is just a marketing gag.
In fact, you can only play with 49 other people. ;)

If the engine doesn't profit by more then 4 cores, you can really call it old.

Just so you know, or maybe forgot from the other thread, DX11 won't necessarily make the game faster anway - just prettier - when your bottleneck will be the CPU crunching all those planes and objects. It does have the potential to speed things up for simple objects like, say, terrain or water by using tesselation but you can't use it very easily for detailed objects like planes.

Thats correct but as we have seen in some of the earlier vids, its the terrain that cause's all the stutter, hence the reason for the DEV's having to take so much out of the game. Calling the game SOW Battle of Britian would of been a mistake with the amount of aircraft we can use, its more of a Channel skirmish.

Maybe you should skip on buying the game because it doesn't meet your expectations. :rolleyes:

Or you could wait until they add all these missing features before you buy. You were expecting it to not ship until next year anyway so that shouldn't be a problem.

We'll post a video for you once in a while. On Fridays. Every other one. Maybe.

LOL! Human controlled aircraft = No A.I = Less for CPU to calculate = Better performance. Sorry Tree but you have got to try harder then that.:)

P.S It's also good that you mentioned DX11 because we all know by now how important it is for saving CPU cycles :roll:

Thanks buddy, thats very kind of you.

Fixed.

Actually, no. It's not so much the terrain causing the stutter but the positional updating of all the objects (houses in cities especially). As Ilya said, even if each building is one pixel only, we would still get slowdowns. Drawing the terrain and mountains polys isn't that tough and could relieve some bottlenecks with tessellation I would think.

Add in some civilians and vehicles and things would get progressively worse.

So I think it's best to look at it as a nice update for a future patch and your next gaming rig. Of course that won't stop some mission designers with $5k computers adding all that sh*t in their missions before then.

I guess that it doesn't matter how good your video card is if your cpu isn't up to the task. You may have detail and everything turned up to the max and everything will run smooth as silk with a few planes on the screen but on a very formation dense mission that video card can't help you even if it's DX13 and has supertessticleation II enabled. Same goes for RAM, you need your parts to be level. My guess of course but it isn't rocket science really.

I think they should open more layers for skining sooner rather than later. At least for offline. Official Il-2 skins were not exactly impressive. Just looking trough some of the skins delivered with 1946 addon makes one shake his head.:(

;)
I don't understand the answer, 1 German pilot campaign and you fly the 109,Ju87 and Me110,do you get moved about to different planes as a single pilot [not likely in the real world] or is it 1 campaign for each plane,which then make 3 campaigns not 1. :confused:
As ever from them clear as mud. :wink:

this is the same question I asked before.. I posted it here...
http://www.google.com/moderator/#15/e=59ba5&t=59ba5.40

the deadline for posting questions is the 21st... you could vote for my question to make sure it gets answered.:)

Im really hoping for a campaign setup like the old IL2.. where you choose whether you want to be a fighter or a bomber, then you choose which fighter squadron you want to fly for.

I really hope we arent bounced around from plane to plane... going from a 109 to a 110 then to a stuka seems very odd.

"Deadline for questions is Monday February 21st at midday GMT."

doesn't have to be:

Questions will be answered on Monday February 21st at midday GMT.

I don't recall anyone saying that the disappointingly missing aspects are a good thing. What the noncomplainers have been saying is that the decenters are making a mountain out of a mole hill. Oleg has said the smaller bomber formations are in the base campaigns so that even midrange systems can play them. The dynamic weather will be put fully implemented as soon as it is ready for prime time. We aren't asking for you to not be disappointed, we are too, but just please stop being complete jerks about it. No one is happy that those features are missing, but before anyone can say it is going to ruin the game we need to at least wait till you have the game in hand.

We got a huge life out of Il2 Sturmovik because 1C Maddox continued to support their game, the community made mods and campaigns, and the online aspect. It lives after a decade because of 1C Maddox and this community. Now there seems to be aspects of that same community that are intent on destroying this new outing before it even hits shelves.

The nocomplainers...lol

Hey the self-destructive tendencies of the flight sim "community" aren't new; just ask some previous producers how much they enjoy a more relaxed relationship to their customers now. With some more effort Oleg will soon be driven away as well, and then we can all go back to whining about the sorry state of the flight sim market, and how everyone is only after money anymore these days and no developer has some enthusiasm left for us ;)

IMHO nobody here can and will destroy this game, the biggest whinners will be the first to buy it.

BTW, I'm suprised that nobody bitches about for example the lack of a bomber campaign.
It could be much worse, I guess.

bombers flying offline at daylight...1940 ??
most propably not realy fun, the AI fighters, enemy AND friendley, can ruin your fun to easy. I personally cant imagine having fun flying a bomber offline in a campaign, at least not with these very vulnerable types of 1940.
For me it is flying fighters offline (what i very seldom do) and bombers online to win a map/mission :)

It was just an example I gave. I don't care about SP at all...

Sorry but what are the limitations with regard to the weather system? I see it mentioned here that there will be no dynamic weather system but after re-reading the OP I don't see it. Please could someone clarify.

Oleg, or Luthier, said that the game is still using placeholder clouds. Not sure whether there will be a dynamic aspect, but Luthier did say that the clouds will change form to some degree...

Ok, but is it confirmed that there will be wind? I was so looking forward to that added challenge in the actual flying bit and using correct runways, possible field inspecting etc.

I do think that if the clouds can be represented in a good and improved way that it'd make a HUGE difference to the overall experience. Understandably not the easiest aspect of the sim to perfect.

There will be wind, Luthier said it just wont change direction or speed if I recall correctly.

Luthier said a few weeks ago that the dynamic weather would ship with the game but could only be utilised through the FMB. He said it could be used at your own 'peril.' On the large map it brought everything to a halt but might be playable on a small map. In game weather would be restricted for the time being to mondirectional map wide wind.

That's exactly what i remember them saying as well. So in summary, there will be two types of weather: a more or less static weather probably defined in the mission parameters/FMB, plus an early/beta/unoptimized version of the dynamic weather.

Static weather will be used in the missions and campaigns that ship with the game to ensure compatibility with lower-spec PCs, while making our own missions in the FMB we'll be able to use any of the two we want, so if your PC is up to the job you can use it and see what it's like.

I expect that static weather will be the most used initially, even by community mission builders, in order to ensure a wider audience for the community created content. I know i wouldn't bother making a historical single player campaign or hosting a multiplayer server that would only run well for maybe 5% of the the game's fliers.

What i will definitely do however is make a small, custom mission in the FMB with dynamic weather, turn down my other settings to lighten the load on my PC and give it a spin to sample what i can expect in the future. I expect a lot will do the same and through experimentation, hardware advances and patches we'll not only be able to find out how to tweak our systems to use it but also beta test it for the devs as it goes through its paces.

I heard a rumour that when they were testing the dynamic weather system, they put in all the enviromentally correct parameters for the South East of England and it rained every single day for the entire period of the campaign, thus negating any possiblity of actually flying.

Also, as the weather conditions for every single day of the Battle of Britain is readily availiable having a dynamic weather system would be rewriting history and spoil any chances of the virtual pilots getting sun tans as they waited for the scramble to be sounded!

What they didn't factor into the weather model was that the Summer of 1940 was unseasonally warm and that their model was infact completely correct.
Cheers! ;)

I think you misundertand the point. While I agree that there are many very talented skinners in IL2, that does not make them the majority. I agree that the majority do (or did, a few years back) those kinds of awful skins; very talented skinners... I know many, but I can count them with my 2 hands. Awful skinners? I don't know any, but pick the average Joe, give him MS Paint and a few minutes, and check what he is capable of :( . I don't have metrics so speculating about the actual figure is a bit pointless imho. I have seen many, MANY "quick hack-jobs" done in Paint, the kind of skins that don't even have any rivets/lines on them, just colors applied with a brush. Those skins (which can be cranked in a minute or 2) would have looked a lot better had the "internals" been separated from the paint layer.

Since the skins will sport lots of fancy new visual effects, at least the quick hack jobs will look a lot better... because let's be honest, people are still going to do them!

done :)

I agree with you but I guess it really depends on how many of your wingmen bite the dust! ;)

Haha!!

Now imagine flying your mission VFR on top and then, if by some chance you survive, you've got to hope for a hole to punch through to get under the cloud base and make it back in one piece. Epic! :D

It would be nice if kill are actually painted on the plane afther landing befor next sorty in df servers.
And ofcoarse be stricken when the pilot was killed.
this may trigger a more sensible behavior from gamers online, so they will not carry out kamikaze attacks or perform rams.
furthermore maybe als resetting points to zero when killed would work.

just my 2 cents.

While they don't even care about he points?
I don't think they intend to Ram you, those guys are just rookies suffering from target fixation - and some are just playing a different style.

Happy days, so you,ve actually tried it then Tree, member of the Beta team, or just moaning for the sake of it?

I think you'll find a pessimist in that corner :)

The 21 bomber comment almost undoubtedly applies to the offline world. And given the reasonably low minimum specs and the fact that the devs have to build missions that work well on all computers I don't doubt that smaller bomber formations were used. I think original IL-2 campaigns used bomber formations of 4 or perhaps 8 at the most.

That hasn't stopped any of us mission builders pushing the limits a bit with 30 and 40 plane formations where appropriate.

In the online world the removal of a substantial number of AI routines means that we can have many more bombers. Just like IL-2 of today. It's really not all that surprising.

Not even going to read the whole thread - 21 bombers? That is utterly pathetic. Seriously, and the whole cpu bs is also, it doesnt take cpu power to have a damage model unless it is being damaged, otherwise there isnt any calcs. AI aswell, and bombers fly in formation so the ai for them I would imagine is less intensive also.

But come on 21? Whats the point of making it for really crap machines that will not be around in a year anyway? Will this be change able in the scripted mission?

Oh and to the people who are talking about AI - why can shogun 2 total war have 56,000 units fighting on screen with motion capture animations and pathfinding in an enviroment full of obstacles with many properties, COD cant have more than 21 bombers flying in a straight line? Oh and then you have the tactical ai commanding the troops, unit ai, physics calcs etc etc etc. The machine limitation excuses are BS, a modern lower end quad core can easily hack it. There has only be 1 genre ever to push CPU limits and thats a small number of RTS's (unfortunetly now pretty much just TW series and a few other smaller titles) and stuff like Civ5. CPU's havent been the bottle neck for years, gpus have. Currently there are only a couple of titles that push pc's because of the big console market which means comp software lags behind 5+ years.

That's the number of bombers in the single player campaign, so the owners of low-end CPUs can play it reasonably well. (Pentium® Dual-Core 2.0GHz or Athlon™ X2 3800+)

That's right, I know it's hard for some here to understand but a lot of people don't have (or can't afford) i7 rigs with sandy boat mumbo jumbo latest super computer gizmomagadgets graphics accelerated ENIAC 5478. It's a good thing because it will allow people who aren't living in the first world to play the game at a reasonable level, people how might have bought previous installations in the IL-2 series.

I hate to be the one to say it but, intellectually speaking, let's just say you're bringing a knife to a gun fight.

It might be better for you to stick to trying to figure out why the colours look to bright or something.

It's a pointless argument. It is set up for less than quad cores etc. to be playable by the large majority of the community/prospective market. If you want more, create your own and in any case I'm sure they will be available from the community very quickly. By the way, many of those older PCs DO have a CPU bottleneck, even in IL-2.

Arguably Oleg could have created a top-tier campaign version with
150 bomber AI formations but how many PCs could play it and how much longer do you want us to wait?