Simulation or Shoot-em-up?

[usr]

Originally Posted by nats

And most importantly everytime I play I get my sense of belief ruined by something - either its the rubbish scenery over London, or the extremely short view distance of ground objects, or the lolly pop trees, or the cruise engine bug, or the stutters whenever anyone first shoots at a bomber, or the rubbishy looking Channel sea (since when has the Channel been reflective), or the complete lack of radio commands. You just cant do ANYTHING in the game at the moment without meeting bugs and unfinished bits and pieces.

"Sense of belief getting ruined by some technical problem or another" is a very important point. I'm fully on your side with the general concept. This is exactly what is happening to me and probably most others too.

But keep in mind that even the old IL-2 also had lots of potential immersion breakers, even after a decade of ripening. E.g. AI breaking at 400m, light-speed gun sound propagation that made it possible to dodge supersonic bullets by ear and so on, the list could be continued for pages. It did not keep us from loving the sim. Why?

The all-important difference here: we also had many years for adjusting to those shortcomings, for developing blind spots and basically accepting those details as genuine parts of our "virtual reality". Now when something new comes along, we still won't notice immersion breakers a lot if they happen to be the same ones, but if they are different ones they, sadly, will stand out prominently.


PS: you say you did not own RoF until a few weeks ago - well, i've bought it on the day of the european release, and after few days i was happy to write the money off rather as a donation to the flight sim cause than as an actual purchase. It felt exactly as you are describing CoD now, a collection of immersion breakers with serious lack of game wrapped around a core made of technical problems. I've heard it's supposed to be much better now, but i did not really bother anymore. I guess the nats-RoF relationship was being very lucky by skipping over the rough phase (on a related note: the pay-by-plane model is totally unattractive to me: if they'd group them into consistent scenario packs, even with the same average price per plane, my willingness to sink more money would be much larger)

[Blackdog_kt]

So, the summary of the thread goes a little bit something like this:
a) it's not a sim because we can't get two hundred bombers on screen with playable frame rates, not currently at least

b) comparison to another product that was a total mess on release as well.

No offence to anybody, but if RoF managed to get where it is today with a bunch of fundamental flaws built-in by design (like the 2km visibility bubble and the inability to track a big enough number of units), i have no worries that CoD will get where it needs to go.

I've seen youtube vids with 1000 aircraft in the air at the same time. This doesn't mean you can do it on a dual core with an on-board GPU, it means that the engine lacks limits and as we get better hardware the amount of things we can see will increase.

As for what is a sim and what isn't, it depends on how you define it. It seems like a lot of people expected realism by numbers of units and visuals alone (which we all know are the most taxing combination on a PC), they got skirmishes and now they claim CoD is not a sim.

Well, i was expecting the focus to be on flying and operating the aircraft, so in that sense it's very much a sim to me.

It might not be an exact recreation of the BoB, but it's a very good recreation of certain aircraft that flew during that time and some scenarios they would be employed in.

I might not have 1000-bomber raids just yet, but on an individual, per-aircraft level the amount of detail is much higher than anything that came before it.
In that sense, i prefer to fly a correctly modeled bomber, have my current system capped with 40 of them and then add more as i get better hardware in the future, rather than getting the ability to have 200 bombers on the current build by simplifying the aircraft systems and damage model. Getting a nice 3d-model without all the other stuff to let me run a lot of them on screen would do nothing for the long run, because it would just be a "shell" of an aircraft without any character.

In other words, i prefer running a scaled down version of increased realism, rather than a 1:1 scale version of decreased realism.

I don't see why people are surprised really. It's always been like this. I remember when i got my first ever IL2 version back in 2001, the attention to aircraft detail was so much better than anything else before it but it brought my system to its knees. I couldn't run missions with more than a couple dozen aircraft for the initial 1-2 years of IL2's life.

What i did was fire up European Air War when i wanted some massive battles and fire up IL2 when i wanted attention to detail, until i got to a point where i could run IL2 with an adequate amount of aircraft, then i stopped flying the older sim.

I don't see how anyone can expect CoD to have the content of an already running 10-year series, while at the same time being easy to run on mid-range PCs at increased detail levels (not only visual detail) on a massive scale. These things take time and if you can't have everything at once, you pick and choose what makes more sense in the long run.

I'm just glad they decided to focus on the inner workings of aircraft and built an engine that's geared around that and future expandability. Graphics can be made prettier 5 years down the line by swapping a couple of textures with higher resolution ones, but rewritting the damage model from scratch at a a later point in time (where there will possibly be extra aircraft modeled) is a much more massive undertaking.

[jojimbo]

lets be patient, luthier and his team are working round the clock and once we middleware simers can play reasonably well on medium (which still loks really good btw) we will start to get some good user campaigns going.
cant wait for an epic scale BoB realistic campaign like the old cfs1 days.

would be interesting to have the ability to mod the terrain though, i would rather a photorealistic terrain texture with nothing on it, than laggy trees and houses, just have eye candy for the airbase.