Quote:
Originally Posted by nearmiss
The Offline player has NEVER been the priority user with IL2.
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That's kind of strange...i seem to recall mr Maddox himself stating that the amount of online players are nowhere near the amount of copies sold, which points to the fact that the vast majority of players are mostly offline pilots.
I think it's just a case of one group receiving a much higher visibility. I mean, if a million people are onliners but they have forums, tournaments, mission and skin packs and so on, they are well-known and exposed. There could be 5 million people who fly mostly offline and nobody would know about them because, well, they just don't spend enough time online to have this kind of exposure. Heck, some may live in remote parts of the world where even a dial-up connection is a luxury. That is, nobody outside the Maddox team would know about them...because if one had inside info, like an accurate number of sold copies to compare to the amount of average hypperlobby IL2 users over a period of 10 years, the comparison is pretty easy to make.
I think we'll be pleasantly surprised, i mean TD is already looking into visibility/clouds issues for the AI. With the addition of improved engine management and G-load stress limits, i doubt they would work so hard to release such highly anticipated features if they weren't sure they could ensure a level playing field to make it fun and rewarding to use.
I don't know how much work it would be to rework the AI routines, but what i do know is that forcing some limits on the way the AI work their engines could be done in an easier way that would still work...just edit the upper limit of throttle values for AI pilots and they'd fly normally. I wouldn't care about their lack of overheat and nobody would need to script complex routines to make the AI judge when to throttle down, if they flew by default in a regime where no overheat occurs to begin with. This could suddenly make the AI massively less challenging, as they would never push their aircraft beyond the safe limits, but then again there are shortcuts. Instead of coding an AI that constantly monitors their temperature gauge, we could just have a trigger that said "when attacked, go to 110%+wep for a specified time, then go back to the restricted/normal settings". For example,
Take off: Full power (110%) for 30 secs-1 minute, or until a certain combination of altitude and speed is reached.
Continuous Climb Power: What the operational manual states as max continuous power, which conveniently enough is the 100% setting in many planes in the simulator.
Cruise: The same as climb (ie, max continuous power), or slower depending on the speed values set by the mission.
Dive: Let them manage it themselves like they do now.
When attacked: Full power for up to 1-2 minutes, then back to max continuous power (ie, 100% without WEP).
This is just a quick and dirty "algorithm" that doesn't take into account things like the loss of manifold pressure with altitude or vice versa, the fact that boosted engines made for high altitudes can be damaged if the throttle is moved all the way forward when on the ground or flying in lower altitudes.
For example, some P47s could make 52" of manifold pressure at almost 25000 feet (or was it 27k? don't exactly remember) and this was the "never exceed" WEP limit, to be used sparingly in emergencies. That was with full throttle and full turborcharger at high altitudes. If one was to shove the throttle forward when parked on the taxiway it would probably reach and exceed the 52" limit before the throttle lever reached its full travel distance, maybe even before the turbocharger kicked in, since the outside air pressure (which is what is inducted into the engine, ie its "starting" pressure before turbochargers boost it even higher) on the ground is so much higher than that on 25000 ft. In fact, it was forbidden to engage the turbocharger below 8000ft for fear of over-boosting the engine.
As you can see, it's quite complicated and i certainly wouldn't expect TD to spend enormous amounts of time on getting it right for a 10 year old game engine. We know that certain things are iffy in the way that IL2 models the piston engines, we have accepted this drawback and we are very glad to see TD working on it for free.
What most people are interested to see is not a sudden appearance of a new, extreme realism combustion engine model when the base engine models this area a bit sparingly to begin with (in SoW on the other hand i would welcome it, it's a new product after all), but to see the new improvements and features apply equally to player and AI. To that effect, having some "quick and dirty" methods like the one i described above would be enough to satisfy the players (well, most of them at least
)without TD having to over-work themselves by writing completely new AI modules for engine management.