Quote:
Originally Posted by Zappatime
Well, in Luthier's words, it has to be:
A. Cool 
B. Major
C. Able to make its competitors squirm
So here's my 3:
1. First person scramble along with all those 'shelf loads of crew animations' that Luthier mentioned a while ago.
2. Dynamic weather (though we all thought we'd got this when we bought CLOD in the first place)
3. Playable AA ground crew or, at a push, playable air-sea rescue for downed crewmen.
My money's probably on dynamic weather, though thats been talked of a lot as a feature that was not finished and hit fps badly. Luthier's comment makes it sound totally new and unique, i.e. Not something previously talked of as planned or originally intended, but its hard to imagine theyve had the time to implement something completely new AND major, I hope he meant it!  |
That's pretty much my guess as well.
As for the dynamic campaign, it would work both online and offline and have the ability to pre-plan sorties from within the game lobby and not having to go to the FMB: if the map is populated by scripted actions, it's not much of a deal to create a friendly AI group and give it a few waypoints, in fact it can almost be done already.
Send a blenheim over to france, if it gets back you get some pictures (that's another one along with pilot rescue, photo recon). Then, assuming something important is there set up more blenheims to bomb that place.
Have them start as an AI flight but choose one aircraft as your own (plus maybe a spare in case the first one gets shot down) and set it up with a password.
You are still at work, but your bombers are starting up and warming their engines. You go back home, eat dinner and your bombers are over the channel now. By the time you sit in front of the PC and join the server, they are almost at the enemy coast. You select among your previously marked aircraft, enter a pre-selected password and spawn into your bomber.
Not very crucial for the short distances we currently fly, but it would enable us to fly the interesting parts of long missions in the future, without having for example to sit down for a 6-hour session to Berlin and back. At the same time, the actual aircraft in the sim would not be magically spawning with airstarts and the opposition would have a way to shoot them down and affect the outcome of the mission, results and casualties would be tracked by the campaign engine and all would have an effect on the final outcome.
Add ground spawning areas for ground units and infantry, have those areas move according to frontline changes and supply routes and you have something that can draw in pretty much everyone, sell in huge numbers and be absolutely awesome to play:
Are your trucks bombed before reaching the spawn area and your marshalling yards in rubble and congested? Then you have no supplies to move forward and the spawning area stays the same.
Are your supplies reaching the front? Then as soon as you capture new ground and hold it for some time, the spawning area moves forward so that ground players can join the action easier.
Of course, supplies would not be just for show...if fuel or ammo is not enough, you might have to start a mission (air or ground) with reduced fuel and rounds in your aircraft/tank/etc.
Call me crazy but that's where i think this is all going, plus why it took so long to develop and had so many problems
We already have scripts with moving frontline markers and AI units spawning behind those markers (check the battle of France scenarios running on the Repka servers, it's exactly the basic premise of what i described above), as well as the difficulty options for the server to control if we even can spawn our own aircraft or change positions within a multi-crewed bomber, heck if we even can change sides.
In a couple of years time we could be having online campaigns that span weeks or months and strategic planning would be somewhat important in winning. Maybe we'll have to register which side we'll fly for before it starts and then we can't change sides for the duration of the campaign, because a server-side add-in takes that date from the website and assigns us to the team we selected each time we join. The possibilities here are endless
