SoW proposal: Merging different realism preference players online

[Blackdog_kt]

I can see your points and while i disagree on certain items i could see a use for it, of course based on the only fundamental truth in gaming "let's make it a toggle and not mandatory, so everyone can be happy".

Some things i probably misunderstood as well, some i liked and some i disagree with, but in any case thanks for explaining

One final note though on the actual complexity and how many controllers you might actually need. This post of yours was what got me thinking.

Originally Posted by MikkOwl

Would you be able to go through a long startup procedure, different for every plane, bind controls for all kinds of features (maybe twice as much as now) including fuel primer pumps and propeller blade pitch angles for every engine, individual radiator flaps for the coolant of every engine, and individual oil cooler flap for every engine, individual fuel primer pump lever for each engine, individual buttons for changing fuel tanks, for pumping fuel between tanks, manual fuel pump, manual oxygen controls, manual selection of engine start power source (including a button for switching the aircraft battery between each of the engines for start).

As you can see, even people like you and me, with G940, can probably not handle all those things, because it is too complicated if we want to learn more than one plane, with all the keyboard binds we have to use and so on.

If you want to force people to have to bind all those things, and learn to use them, then it will divide the pilots when it is just unecessary. Even if some of those things above are done automatically for some pilots it does not affect the gameplay for the others. And that is why this proposal is useful - they can still fly together, at quite high levels of realism.

This sounds a bit harder than it actually is. I have a simple MS sidewinder precision pro and i can do most of these things in IL2 already. You don't need separate throttle,mixture,prop pitch and radiator controls for each engine. The solution is already in IL2.
Press "select engine 1", start it up with the controls provided (manual or auto). Press "select engine 2" do the same. Press "select all engines and start rolling. If you take damage and need to throttle back one engine to "synchronise" their power output and avoid the need to trim for assymetric thrust, simply select one of them again and move your throttle and prop pitch sliders a bit back until the needles overlap. That's why most allied twins have a single gauge with two needles and also why 4 engined heavies have two gauges with two needles each, as long as needle #2 overlaps needle #1 your engines are producing identical power.

Seriously, it's only a month since i started delving in that stuff and i don't even own the sim i practice and learn these things at, i just fly it whenever i visit a friend on his PC and it's way easier than it sounds.
Wanna know how to start a P47 in real life? It's done in a mere 5 steps!

1) Hold the brakes just in case, battery and generator on, this thing won't start without some juice right?

2) Select the main fuel tank and turn on the boost pump. It can be the auxiliary too, but again just in case, we select the fullest tank. We need some fuel, plus we need some way to move it from the tank to the engine. Normally the fuel is sucked in by vacuum when the engine is running but now it's not running yet, hence the boost pump.

3) Turn on the ignition (both magnetos) and set mixture to rich (ie, full). Again, the fuel might be getting pumped but if the fuel valve on the engine is closed (mixture lever) we can't start. If everything's working as it should you get the specific fuel pressure that the manual says. Unless there are random failures implemented in SoW it will always be correct and even if they are, i doubt that many servers will run with those enabled. In single player, if you want to you can enable it and pause while you read the manual. Even easier, every gauge and needle in the cockpit has a green zone to tell you what normal operation is without having to memorize all kinds of numbers.

Again, it's all pretty self-explanatory up to this point as long as you ask yourself "what does an engine run on?".

4) Prime engine 2-3 times for warm conditions, up to 6 for cold conditions. You have a thermometer in the cockpit that tells you how the weather's like.

5) Time to engage the starter! Ever jump-start a car? You know, get it rolling downhill on neutral with ignition on, then you suddenly punch a gear in to force the pistons to turn and make it start? It's exactly the same principle and crude enough to fit the brute image of the Jug
The starter is a just big disk with a lot of inertia. You spin it up with power from the battery (switch left to "energize" label), when the high pitched wine you hear has stabilised and not "rising" anymore in tone it's at its full RPM. At that point you move the switch right to the "start" label, the disk connects to the engine via a clutch of some sort and transfers its spinning energy to it, turning it around.

You got fuel in the engine (we primed it and set all fuel systems to on), you got power going to the spark plugs and you just gave the thing a good kick to get it rolling. Congrats, you have a turning propeller in front of you. From this point on just keep the needles pointing inside the green arcs and you'll be just fine

Now let's see how we can do this without the need for click-pits that are usually disliked by combat simmers. I'll assume no fancy hotas, just a normal stick like the Sidewinder series and a keyboard. I'll also try to suggest ways that will retain functionality between different airframes and not be specific to one aircraft at a time, so that we can cut down on the amount of total controls needed. I will only look at controls that don't already exist in IL2, so that we can get an idea of how many extra we'd need.

In step 1 the extra controls are battery and generator. In multi-engine planes it would be "select engine 1" and then "toggle generator" and so on, eliminating the need for multiple keyboards assignments of the same controls per each engine. So, we have 2 on/off toggles so far.

In step 2 we have a fuel selector. Let's work this with two controls, like the flaps up/flaps don function we already have. One is "fuel selector up/clockwise" and the other is "fuel selector down/counter-clockwise".
Allied birds have rotating ones, i think some axis birds have levers, hence the double function for each one, so we can keep the necessary controls to map to a minimum. Just look inside your cockpit, decide where you need to turn it and press the corresponding key. Critical control on one hand, but if you're changing tanks at the last possible moment before combat you're already doing something wrong, so no reason to fret for having to glance down to the cockpit floor for a split second.

Why not have a single control that will cycle the selector through all of its possible positions you might ask. Well, because most fuel selectors have an "off" position too and that's not something you want to encounter before combat while you are changing from drop tanks to internals.
Also, some planes have more than one fuel selector, for instance the Jug in our example has one for internal tanks and one for drop tanks. A control to select them one at a time similar to engines could work in this case, "selector"+"1", "selector"+"2" on the keyboard and so on. All in all 2 controls to rotate the selectors and one control to choose between more than one selectors. We're up to 5 total so far.

In step 3 we have magnetos and mixture that are already modelled in IL2, so no change there. Step 4 brings us the primer, one more new control for a total of 6.

Finally, step 5 is the starter, which as you notice is a three-way switch with energize, start and neutral positions. In order to cut down on the amount of keyboard bindings, why not make this sequential? This can't harm anything (unlike a sequential fuel selector control like we discussed before). Furthermore some planes have a single starter button, some have a two-way switch and some a three-way one, so if we can simplify it it makes sense to go ahead and do it. So, in planes with a starter button, pressing the key we mapped just corresponds to pressing that button. In planes with multi-position switches, each press of the key corresponds a different switch position, done in the logical sequence. In our example of the Jug, pressing "starter" key would move it from neutral to energize, pressing it again would move it from energize to to start and pressing it one final time would return it to neutral.

In total, we need only 6 new keyboard bindings for a totally authentic start-up of this warbird. Others will require more (for example, the mk.IX spitfire is a bit weird) and others less. Case in point, we all have seen those Luftwaffe mechanics crank up the engines on those 109Es. What are they doing? Well, the 109Es (and possibly later models too, i'm not sure) also have an inertia starter, but they don't spool it up from a battery. It's the mechanic that spools up the starter with the hand-crank, before the pilot engages it to start the engine.

In this case it would make more sense to have a "ground crew" tab in the comms menu to request things like an external power source or a mechanic to hand-crack the starter and....OH MY GOD, it just hit me after writing all of this diatribe. I'm off to post the idea in the poll thread about systems modelling

[Jaws2002]

That's a good way to ruin it for those that go trough the pain of learning to do things right.
My interest for IL-2 died when everyone and his little brother started using their own home brew online. It killed it quick for me. The feeling that we were all on the same playing field was gone.

[MikkOwl]

Originally Posted by Jaws2002

That's a good way to ruin it for those that go trough the pain of learning to do things right.

Would you really feel that everything was ruined for you if, for example, you used manual fuel system priming pump levers and fuel cock levers when someone else had set an aid on to automate that part? If yes, why is that? If no, why not?

My interest for IL-2 died when everyone and his little brother started using their own home brew online. It killed it quick for me. The feeling that we were all on the same playing field was gone.

Although not entirely related: why do you feel as if the playing field was no longer level with user custmisation?

[Jaws2002]

Originally Posted by MikkOwl

Would you really feel that everything was ruined for you if, for example, you used manual fuel system priming pump levers and fuel cock levers when someone else had set an aid on to automate that part? If yes, why is that? If no, why not?

Flying ww2 aircraft was long hours of a lot of hard work mixed with brief moments of sheer terror. The better trained pilots had more time with the head outside the cockpit. Aids and automatic game features eliminates the need for traning. In most cases, traning is what made the difference between hunters and pray. The guy that has the game do the hard pilot work, like watching gauges, follow correct procedures, keeping the engine at the correct settings, has more time to look around and do the fun part of flying. That creates a very solid advantage online.

Although not entirely related: why do you feel as if the playing field was no longer level with user custmisation?

Because it wasn't. Some people flew with heavy fluffy clouds, othes without, some people used home brewed weapons, some tweaked their engines to their own wishes. The game died right there for me.
Even the large mod packs have their own people pushing certain flavours of reality. Theres no level playing field for a long time in IL2.

[Tbag]

Just stick with 4.09m then!

[Jaws2002]

I stoped playing Il-2 for some time now.

[Jaws2002]

I'd love if they'd model all plane's systems as they were and as they worked. It may be impossible to operate in a multiengine aircraft but for single engine fighters is not that bad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfbU5DtUPb4