Just FYI, SOW is not dead

[mazex]

Thanks for the update Ivan!

As long as we know that Oleg and his staff are working hard on the game I'm content to some extent. What we do NOT know is if Oleg spends 20 hours a day trying to raise funds to keep the project running and pay the bills on his table... It does not matter how good the simulator COULD be if the costs go beyond the expected income from it. Flight simulators for the PC market are unfortunately not the most lucrative products of the gaming industry. There is someone that pays for the development of this product because they expect to get more income from the sales of the game than the money spent developing it - and if they are not worried right now I would be very surprised. The comments heard in the past about the fact the Maddox Games NEEDED to get the game done in 2007 and then 2008 makes those fears boil for some of us at least, when the release date seems to move even further into the uncertain future...

There are a lot of people that get angry for some reason when other people start to have doubts about the state of this project. Being a manager of a development department myself I am very aware that EVERY project faces a risk of being canceled up until the day of release. Every project has sponsors and when their spreadsheets starts to show red figures for too long they finally pull the plug. I have seen projects with budgets of completely other proportions that got the axe after too many millions where poured into them without the expected progress. When information about a delayed project starts to thin out it's rather natural to start asking questions...

Anyway - I'm glad to hear that the team is working hard and I really hope the the financial backing for the project is there to finish it they way we know that Oleg and his team are capable of!

/Mazex

[Skarphol]

I'm glad to hear that the project is still alive and all that, but wouldn't it be a little bit better to show some images a little bit more often than they do now?
I would be happy just to see some more pictures of the allready shown planes, like the Sunderland, Tigher Moth, Bf-110! Just the same planes from a different angle would keep me fairly satisfied for a couple of weeks. And the images we have seen on this forum doesn't really show any progress anyway, so there is nothing for competing flightsims to gain from the pictures shown. What we have seen so far on this forum are merely models of planes with higher number of polygons than we have allready in IL-2. If you fly alongside a Bf-110 in SOW:BOB at a distance of 150m I bet you wont be able to see any difference from flying along the same plane in IL-2 from 150m. So there is nothing to loose by showing some pictures, but I think it is a lot to gain in keeping the interrest up in the community. And it can't be that much job to send 5 screenshots to the mod of this forum every fourtnight.
Just my two cents.

Skarphol

[BadAim]

For my $.02, I'll straddle the fence decisively.
I can testify from Personal experience that tossing a few pictures into a hastily composed e-mail really is to much to ask after a 12-16 hr work day, especially when I haven't seen my kid awake in two weeks and my wife keeps a photo handy to make sure she recognizes me when I do get home.
I also understand the conspiracy theories all to well, hell it took us over 30 years to fugure out that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. (and some still don't believe it)