Possible new eastern front maps - some food for thought

[Lagarto]

Apparently the old IL-2 engine can handle a lot. The latest Solomons map is huge by IL-2 Standards, spanning nearly 1,000 km - much larger than the Leningrad map (the distance from Tallinn to Leningrad is just over 300 km). Of course, most of it is water
Anyway, an MTO map of that size would cover entire Sicily, Malta and a big chunk of Tunisia (it's roughly 270 km from La Valletta to Palermo and 400 km to Tunis) - AND with most of it being water.

The red, diagonal line is 900 km long:

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Lagarto

Apparently the old IL-2 engine can handle a lot. The latest Solomons map is huge by IL-2 Standards, spanning nearly 1,000 km - much larger than the Leningrad map (the distance from Tallinn to Leningrad is just over 300 km). Of course, most of it is water
Anyway, an MTO map of that size would cover entire Sicily, Malta and a big chunk of Tunisia (it's roughly 270 km from La Valletta to Palermo and 400 km to Tunis) - AND with most of it being water.

The game engine is impressive given what it was originally designed for. No doubt about it! But a 1000km map isn't a problem when the majority of it is water and uninhabited islands. That's exactly why you can get away with doing that map in such a grand scale.

Looking forward to a map that has Rabaul on it some time too!

[JtD]

If I have to chose between a huge map and a detailed map, I'd rather have the detailed map.

[Pursuivant]

There are a vast number of modded maps which range from acceptable to very good, as well as a number of retextured maps which make no-so-good stock maps (i.e., Singapore, Pearl Harbor, Sands of Time) look wonderful. Modded textures for spring, autumn and winter/summer also vastly expand the number of maps available.

For new maps, I believe that a Kharkov map is in the works by a Russian mod team.

What I'd prefer over new maps, though, is getting the details right on the existing maps. A simple change, which might actually reduce the number of objects, would be to create simple block-sized building objects then rework the map plates so that there are more city blocks and fewer individual houses.

I'd also like to see the some of the older maps get a facelift. Sevastopol and Stalingrad had buildings or building complexes which were important to the campaigns fought there, which should be modeled in the game. Right now, there's nothing that makes those cities distinct.

Especially for Stalingrad, I'd like to see the city center reworked so that it looks a lot more urban, and has some of the more important buildings associated with the battle, such as the Grain Elevator, the GUM Department Store, Pavlov's House and the big factory complexes like the Dzerzhinsky tractor works or the Red October steel plant. The German airfields surrounding the city could also be better modeled.

As for size, I think that the maps are the right size.

While it might be possible to make Eastern Front maps bigger due to relatively low population density, most missions there were flown at low level, so you need more eye candy. And, realistically, the forces involved on the Eastern Front were enormous, so a realistic mission might have hundreds of objects in it, which slows things down even more.

By contrast, a Pacific Islands maps can be enormous. They're mostly water and a few barely populated islands, and most of the air combat fought over the Pacific took place at middling to high altitudes.

[Lagarto]

Personally, I am for bigger maps. You can always add more eyecandy yourself, through FMB - especially now, when there is possibility to copy/paste hundreds of objects with one click, and computers are much more powerful than they were a few years ago.
To me, one of the biggest immersion killers is to climb up to 5000 meters and be able to see all four corners of the map, as if you were flying "over a game board on the coffee table", as Treetop64 put it very accurately

And Rabaul map... that would be something, a one like this perhaps:

[Fenice_1965]

I think one of the greatest miss is a Sicily, mediterranean map, with the Malta Area. It's not so large and could be easily put in in one of the next patches.

[Lagarto]

Could we have a word from DT on the subject? What's up the pipeline?

[Aracno]

Originally Posted by Fenice_1965

I think one of the greatest miss is a Sicily, mediterranean map, with the Malta Area. It's not so large and could be easily put in in one of the next patches.

Some mates of various italian squadrons are working on this:



They started from the med-map done by Maraz, already available.
You can found their WIP post here: http://www.maw-superaereo.it/forum/i...tto-mappe.html

Not sure when will be finished and it will be too large for a TD standard, but now you know that someone is working on it