Friday 2010-10-01 Dev. update and Discussion

[Blackdog_kt]

I think this is because we don't have a dedicated moderating team. Nearmiss is just one person and he can't be everywhere all the time.
The double edged sword about forum moderation however, is the fact that those who spent a lot of time on a forum and could possibly moderate are usually also the same people who can't keep a level headed attitude and totally lack the qualities of a good moderator

I commented on the update previously but in an effort to get things back on track i'll just say that i can't wait to see the multi-engined birds in action, that wellington is making my hands sweat
I usually fly 190s in IL2 but since there's no focke wulfs in BoB i'll have to choose a different ride.

Sure, i'll fly the fighters too, but with the improvements in FM/DM and systems modelling that are coming along i think i'll greatly enjoy flying a more complex aircraft on a regular basis. If this is coupled with improved multiplayer capabilities for online flying and a "smarter" dynamic campaign engine that can maintain a good balance between triggered events and free flowing action, i think we'll be in for a treat.

Just think of the kind of missions available to twin engined aircraft for the timeframe that SoW will focus on, there are some unusual mission types that have almost never been done properly so far.

Me 110s: Starting with the more common stuff here. Apart from the usual air combat, during BoB Erprobungsgruppe 210 (is that even the correct spelling? ) pioneered some experimental and very effective ground attack tactics in the Jabo role. If the AI in single player is multi-layered as has been told in some old interviews and we can be vectored by radar in multiplayer, then things will be pretty much interchangeable between offline and online with regards to the amount of cool tricks we can do.

Here you go then, jump in that 110 and fly at wave-top height across the channel without the advantage of increased visibility range that high altitude flying gives you. You can't fly by the landmarks and map if all you see around is water. Draw up a flightplan that you can distribute to your wingmen (AI or human), view and edit in flight so that you know what the route legs are. Then after take off, tune that direction finder antenna or have your navigator do it and vector you (either a human navigator in multiplayer or an AI one, i wonder if there will be some scripting support so that we can create crewmen functions). Just as you pass over the radio beacon you can see the needle in the instrument reversing. You call up your inflight map and take a look at your notes, the target is at a bearing of 300 from the beacon so now you know where to fly. Nearing the coast you lose signal reception but it's almost time for the pop-up anyway. Merely miles from the radar towers you are targetting, you climb up to 2000-3000 feet to take a look at the landscape and orient yourself. Your squadmate calls "there it is, 10 o'clock low", you instruct full military power and go on a shallow dive, the entire flight releasing bombs in a single shallow pass, leveling off at tree top level to dodge the flak. Swinging around in a wide arc you settle on a south-easterly heading and cross the coast outside the range of the flak batteries. A few miles later your navigator's voice crackles in your headphones "we've got reception from the NDB again, follow the needle and it'll take us straight to it, then after reaching the beacon vector 120 for home base". For extra cool points, do it with a single 110 as a pathfinder leading a flight of Jabo 109s.

Do17: Not flyable initially, but famous for its low level attacks.

Ju88/He111: Apart from day bombing raids the 111 was also heavily involved in the night pathfinder role. Try to fly a precise heading, altitude and airspeed, because the points where the radio beams intersect to signal bomb release are fixed and don't account for different altitude and speed. The rest of the formation drops on your command.

Blenheim: Good old suicidal low-level bombing runs across the channel, targetting occupied ports and airfields. Flak bursting all around, 109s whizzing by and you're stuck with one of the most vulnerable aircraft of the time. You'll have to rely on some pretty clever routing and high speed, low level flying to maintain the element of surprise and ensure survival, but that makes bomb aiming a bit difficult. Quite the nice challenge. Need i say more?

Bristol Beaufort: I don't even know if there are plans to include it at some point, but the type flew a lot of mine laying, torpedo/anti shipping and bombing sorties during BoB. Similar missions for the beaufighter and mosquito (if and when they are included) with the addition of night fighter sorties.

Avro Anson: It could make for a cool twin engined trainer and light attack aircraft in coastal command colours.

Hampden/Wellington: The start of bomber command's offensive. They too could be used for mine laying and anti-shipping strikes, but longer ranges and heavier payloads make for some pretty daring raids if a map is released to support them at some point.

Various types: Photo reconnaisance work.

I'm not going to lie. If the aircraft systems are sufficiently modelled then 5 years down the line i'm looking forward to a big enough map so that i can get a couple of mustang escorts to scout out ahead, assemble my flight of twin engined bombers and tear across occupied Europe at tree-top level, all the way from Norway to the Ruhr valley. And that's coming from someone who spends most of his time in IL2 flying luftwaffe birds

[nearmiss]

Everyone that is what I would call a viable member of this forums wants the updates and discussions with Oleg or Luthier. That is the crux of the matter that has been bantered around a good part of today.

The developers don't have to post updates or respond to anything on this forums. I don't think any of us wants to have a repeat of the old ORR days at Ubisoft.

Moderators have tried to keep On topic discussions in the update threads, but discussions get side tracked. After the first few hours it is very rare for Oleg or Luthier to make additional responses. IMO, I don't blame them.

Regardless, from a moderation standpoint all the fire is out after the update has been posted for a couple of hours...everything else afterward is just so much "smoke" and verbs.

It is important to have on topic discussions as long as Oleg or Luthier are posting the thread. When the negative stuff starts in they get back to work, which is more productive than trying to answer nonsense whines.

Report the junk postings, especially when the updates are fresh posted. Moderators get immediate email notifications and can usually deal with the trouble postings very quickly. Otherwise, we don't always hang on the forums... we have things to do as well.

[tintifaxl]

Thanks for the pictures of the Italian aircraft! Very much appreciated.

[Baron]

Thank you very much Oleg and team for this weeks update despite the move and all.

P.S. The extra vid was in my opinion way beyond nessesery.


If u think about it, 95% of us enjoy the hell out of friday updates and relize its a work in progress. Consructive input is one thing but we also know you and the team actually knows what u are doing, please keep that in mind and keep up the good work.


Thx.

[kendo65]

Haven't posted on the update before now as I was just too pissed off with the attitudes of some people here to be bothered.

As others have already said, to get such a level of ungrateful whinging after being told we may not even get an update at all made pretty bad reading. No wonder Oleg got annoyed.

I suspect part of the problem we're hitting now is a growing mismatch between what people have been able to imagine the game would be and the approaching reality of what it actually is. You can detect an air of disbelief in some posts - "that isn't the 'real' terrain/smoke/texture/clouds - Oleg's holding it back to nearer release date..."

We've all had plenty of time, unencumbered by too many inconvenient 'facts' to create a fantasy of complete perfection - a cinematically-perfect recreation of 1940 aerial combat in which every facet that is most important to us is perfectly recreated - be it 100% accurate fm/dm, cinematic terrain, perfectly reproduced clouds, totally accurate aircrew uniforms, etc.

And we've been able to get away with this for so long because we didn't have evidence to the contrary.

Now the release date is getting closer and we find that all we are going to get is a very good flight sim! The best on the market no doubt and with room for growth and improvement, but falling short of perfection in areas where we'd begun to feel a sense of entitled certainty.

And so the disillusionment kicks in.

Anyway, I'm sure things will continue to improve up to release (and beyond). As others have said, until we really see this nearer to final production release on high settings without jaggies, etc it is next to impossible to judge its overall quality anyway - personally I am already pleased with what I've seen - it won't take too much more tweaking to get it very, very good.

But maybe we'd better get used to the idea that 'perfection' might have to wait a little longer?
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MD_Titus said it pretty well...

Originally Posted by MD_Titus

click link to view - too long to reproduce in full

...while also claiming the record for the longest forum post I've ever seen (narrowly beating Blackdog_kt's recent efforts. Blackdog always puts in well-reasoned and interesting posts, but God, they're long. One of these days I hope to read one all the way through )

[Trumper]

Originally Posted by kendo65

I suspect part of the problem we're hitting now is a growing mismatch between what people have been able to imagine the game would be and the approaching reality of what it actually is. You can detect an air of disbelief in some posts - "that isn't the 'real' terrain/smoke/texture/clouds - Oleg's holding it back to nearer release date..."

Well said Kendo, i think you may have hit the nail on the head here.It is a bit like Christmas, world cup final, [whatever you find that fits the idea] ,all the build up,all the hype all the tension and then a big let down at times.
I do also have to say that MAYBE Oleg has had a bit to do with it as well by drip feeding and hinting it is all WIP and not near finished so people assume there is still 50% more improvement to come,possibly on some things but i doubt it on all.
He does need now to make a decision on starting to show what is actually going to be a finished result OR maybe leave a few weeks until he can.
I daresay we will all buy the product anyway.
An easier idea is for Oleg to post any developments as he does now BUT then it is locked and all discussions about it are deleted,if there are any obvious problems that Oleg and his team need to know [ie accuracy ] they can be sent via PM or via moderators.

Originally Posted by Trumper

Well said Kendo, i think you may have hit the nail on the head here.It is a bit like Christmas, world cup final, [whatever you find that fits the idea] ,all the build up,all the hype all the tension and then a big let down at times.
I do also have to say that MAYBE Oleg has had a bit to do with it as well by drip feeding and hinting it is all WIP and not near finished so people assume there is still 50% more improvement to come,possibly on some things but i doubt it on all.
He does need now to make a decision on starting to show what is actually going to be a finished result OR maybe leave a few weeks until he can.
I daresay we will all buy the product anyway.
An easier idea is for Oleg to post any developments as he does now BUT then it is locked and all discussions about it are deleted,if there are any obvious problems that Oleg and his team need to know [ie accuracy ] they can be sent via PM or via moderators.

I think its more to do with some of the things Oleg has said, for example Oleg was very dismissive of the 'Wings Of Prey' terrain, claiming that SOW would be far better, to date its simply not unless of course Oleg is holding something back which seems bizarre if we are as close to release as they would have us believe. Cinematic, and real time weather have been promised along with manning AA guns and DX11 etc , but so far we have not seen anything of these at this late date, so i think a lot of expectations have been brought about by the devs, who it seems maybe struggling to live up to them. If Oleg says listen guys the terrain has had to be scaled down in order to make the whole thing playable then thats fine with me, but im still taking his last word on the subject in that it will be a lot better than WOP/BOP and until i hear or see otherwise I can only measure what i currently see with his last statement.

[winny]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

I think its more to do with some of the things Oleg has said, for example Oleg was very dismissive of the 'Wings Of Prey' terrain, claiming that SOW would be far better, to date its simply not unless of course Oleg is holding something back which seems bizarre if we are as close to release as they would have us believe. Cinematic, and real time weather have been promised along with manning AA guns and DX11 etc , but so far we have not seen anything of these at this late date, so i think a lot of expectations have been brought about by the devs, who it seems maybe struggling to live up to them. If Oleg says listen guys the terrain has had to be scaled down in order to make the whole thing playable then thats fine with me, but im still taking his last word on the subject in that it will be a lot better than WOP/BOP and until i hear or see otherwise I can only measure what i currently see with his last statement.

This is at least the 8th time you've mentioned the terrain in this thread. What is your point? Why can't understand that what you are seeing is unfinished. Oleg has already said he doesn't want the competition to see it too early.

Now it's the devs fault?

Are you saying that Oleg is a liar? Are you implying that they are not going to have better terrain than BoP/WoP? Have you seen this game running at max settings? Or maybe you think you could do a better job?

I'm not saying you can't point out what you like/don't like. But you have to take the updates in context. You simply cannot compare these rough screenshots to the final product. You should take this into account before you decide to keep on and on about something that is basically irrelevant.

Originally Posted by winny

This is at least the 8th time you've mentioned the terrain in this thread. What is your point? Why can't understand that what you are seeing is unfinished. Oleg has already said he doesn't want the competition to see it too early.

Now it's the devs fault?

Are you saying that Oleg is a liar? Are you implying that they are not going to have better terrain than BoP/WoP? Have you seen this game running at max settings? Or maybe you think you could do a better job?

I'm not saying you can't point out what you like/don't like. But you have to take the updates in context. You simply cannot compare these rough screenshots to the final product. You should take this into account before you decide to keep on and on about something that is basically irrelevant.

Oleg has never said he doesn't want the competetion to see it, anyway , what competetion? If what we have been told is true the game is all but finished other than bugs, so the imaginary competeion will see it soon anyway? Doh!!

[kendo65]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

I think its more to do with some of the things Oleg has said, for example Oleg was very dismissive of the 'Wings Of Prey' terrain, claiming that SOW would be far better, to date its simply not unless of course Oleg is holding something back which seems bizarre if we are as close to release as they would have us believe. Cinematic, and real time weather have been promised along with manning AA guns and DX11 etc , but so far we have not seen anything of these at this late date, so i think a lot of expectations have been brought about by the devs, who it seems maybe struggling to live up to them.
...

I think that's a fair point, but the main thing is that we've all filled in the blanks where there was a lack of information. We've assumed standards that maybe were just too high.

The reality was always going to have a hard time matching the dream we've all built up about this. It's inevitable given just how sky-high the expectations were. In our dreams it really was perfect.

A few months back people were resisting the idea that when they bailed out over England they wouldn't be able to interact in a completely life-like way with a fully realised miniature 1940s world - with cars, buses, cows in the fields, people walking around, etc as they made it back to their airfield on foot or swam the Channel.

Now Oleg did mention buses and traffic on the roads, also animals - but not in the way that some people latched onto it.

In truth, the landscape isn't scaling the heights that I'd hoped for (dreamt of...?) yet either, but unlike some others I don't think it's that far off. A little tweaking of colours / lighting to get away from the pastel effect - some of the 'polishing' that Oleg referred to, and some higher quality settings, AA, etc.