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Originally Posted by zapatista
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the real question is going to be about the degree these fires (and smoke) will vary in BoB depending on what parts on the aircraft are damaged, and how long the fires will last, and if the fires and damage spreads etc.. so we get some variation in small fires and big fires, mixed with variations of smoke effect, and maybe some aircraft exploding mid air when bomb stores or fuel containers are affected by fire. from other snippets oleg has provided in the past, he is taking account of that to some degree, so fires in aircraft in general look very good to me so far.
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Exactly. Gettin a minor flame every single time is just like getting the same colour of smoke or a huge flame every single time. It's not only boring, it's also unrealistic. Just look at the youtube video of the modified Corsair, that thing has a constant smoke stream which varies in colour depending on what's burning, plus an intermittent flame stream which turns into a permanent one, then cuts out again when the plane goes inverted and finally gets extinguished as it picks up speed in the dive after the pilot bails out.
That doesn't mean I expect the development team to include a load of painstaking and FPS-costly calculations to do this according to what material is burning on the release version. I'll be perfectly happy if they only have 5 different fire types and 5 smoke types that randomly change from one type to another or cut out under some simple triggers. For example, "if airspeed>400mph then flame=0", simple stuff like that.
Things like fluctuating instrument needles, engines that run on the same power settings and yet they develop different temperatures, fuel consumptions and problems, all it takes is randomizers and we'll get a much more believable experience. This doesn't have to be 100% real, unless we somehow get cray supercomputers to run this, it just has to feel real and make you feel like there's things working under the hood. Later on, when we get more powerful PCs, it's just a case of replacing the random functions with precisely detailed ones that take more things into account. Like i've said in the past, we didn't have water=3 and perfect mode when IL2 was first released but we got it eventually. Show the guys who are coding this a little bit of faith, they've earned it after all these years
I like the screenshots in this update and i think they are good portrayals of "catastrophic damage, GTFO out of the plane" type of fires. Supposing that SoW will have a life as long as IL2 and the fact that it will be open to modding from the start, all we need is provision for certain effects and triggers. I can bet my right thumb that within a week of releasing the 3rd party tools there will be a few hundred modified flame textures for us to pick and choose from, let's not worry about things that will be easily fixed according to our taste. It's like buying a car and basing the decision entirely upon the color of the models that the dealer has in stock, without even considering what's under the hood. Just like this, it's the underlying structure of the game engine that matters most for long term updates and development. I can live with reduced detail in a few things while waiting for stronger PCs to come, as long as the important stuff is there (FM/DM, campaigns, AI, user-friendliness, moddability) and i know the engine has spare room for extra "modules" to be "plugged in" at a later date.
As for the comparison between IL2, SoW and WoP, correct me if i'm wrong but i think that WoP's maps are tiny compared to the ones used in IL2 and SoW. It's no wonder they can cram so much detail into it if they have a similar CPU/GPU to run it on that only has to render 50% the map sizes. When the 3rd party tools come out i bet we could see a BoP-level object density map, it would just probably be that tiny stretch of the channel between Calais and Dover in order to maintain acceptable framerates.
In retrospect, criticism and fancy ideas are always good to have for the long run, but when asking for things to be included on the release version let's at least try to keep it in perspective a bit. We need the dreamers with the wild ideas just as much as we need the totalitarian accuracy nazis and the guys who will compromise for less, so that the new sim will not only have the drive to evolve and improve, but also the revenue stream needed to fund this evolution. Just my friendly 2 cents as usual
