Post made by Jason at Sim HQ

[ZaltysZ]

Originally Posted by zapatista

another piece of the puzzle we are missing is what exactly happened mid development that caused the lost 2 or 3 years which became the Achilles heel in this whole CoD project ? time wise this is the period we know oleg fired some people, or some left on their own (taking part of the code ?) and the RoF project was started. are all those facts linked, its all speculation at this stage, but those missing years caused the whole delay mess that landed us where we are now.

At the beginning BoB was further developed from IL2 and new features were built on top of it. However, someone thought it would be great idea to abandon Java (in which IL2 was written) and OpenGL. It might turn out it was indeed a great idea (in the long run), but usually such changes (revolution instead of evolution) mess whole project badly in the beginning, especially if you have small team and there were/are staff changes. That probably slowed development by 1-2 years at least.

[tintifaxl]

Originally Posted by ZaltysZ

... However, someone thought it would be great idea to abandon Java (in which IL2 was written) and OpenGL. ...

It was just the GUI/Menus etc. that were written in Java, the game engine itself was in C(++). I think they took the same approach with Clod, although they exchanged Java for C#.

You're completely right about OpenGL.

[zapatista]

Originally Posted by ZaltysZ

At the beginning BoB was further developed from IL2 and new features were built on top of it. However, someone thought it would be great idea to abandon Java (in which IL2 was written) and OpenGL. It might turn out it was indeed a great idea (in the long run), but usually such changes (revolution instead of evolution) mess whole project badly in the beginning, especially if you have small team and there were/are staff changes. That probably slowed development by 1-2 years at least.

you might know more then i do about the programing parts, but there were 2 steps in that delay

first the initial one was when they for a couple of years worked on improving the il2 code and were building BoB (as it was then called) as an advanced version of that same game engine (which has happened with several game engines successfully iirc)

a couple of years into that they decided on a complete rewrite from scratch. this in itself i wouldnt have seen as a major problem, and in the longer run s significantly to our advantage (as flightsimmers)

the 2e delay happened a couple of years after that roughly, when there was some major internal upheaval in the development team, some people were fired by Oleg, and there was a significant change in programmers working there (and RoF suddenly had lots of new staff with great idea's, but that is my personal speculation about 2 intersecting time lines, it roughly occurred at the same time)

others here might remember more about those 2 events, but its the combination of the 2 and in particular the 2e delay that lost 2 or 3 years that was the big killer imho