|
|
|
|
#1
05-07-2011, 10:46 AM
|
|||
|
|||
Quote:
By modern standards, it's tiny - 22 people. I think it's incredible that an undertaking as exhaustive as this was created by such a small development team. I've read a lot of your posts nats and I fully understand where you're coming from. It's not anything like what you expected and that's fair enough. Maybe like you say it's better in your case (and other people experiencing huge problems) to come back in a few weeks/months and see how things have developed. 
|
|
#2
05-07-2011, 11:49 AM
|
|||
|
|||
Quote:
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)
|
|
#3
05-07-2011, 05:32 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
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.
|
|
#4
05-07-2011, 05:57 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
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.
|
|
#5
05-07-2011, 07:19 PM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Quote:
|
|
#6
05-07-2011, 07:33 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
When you get a game which you have to prepare by yourself to be playable for about few hours every time a patch is released, it's not because devs think you're an intelligent person and you can handle it. It means the game is poor.
|
|
#7
05-08-2011, 04:29 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
My system is a reasonably decent set-up. Quad core 2.33. 4 gb RAM. GTS 250 1gb RAM. 500gb RAID 0 striped discs for speed. Win 7 64bit. While I appreciate that is not state of the art it should be able to cope with the basics the sim has to offer. My sliders are set at medium settings. If I go much lower then I just end up with IL2 in quality. It's not just the FPS that is an issue for me. It's the feel of the sim. It just doesn't feel like i'm being immersed into a 1940 Battle of Britain environment. There are some really nice touches to the sim. The stream of oil from a bombers damaged engine. Impact hit flashes from cannon shells. The spiral trail of rounds. Actually hitting a 109 and seeing coolant from his rads. What's missing is that scramble from a recognisable RAF BOB period airfield. Listening to the controller vectoring towards the bandits (which should be something like "Tophat Leader this is Pinetree control. I have some trade for you over Maidstone. 20+ bandits at Angels 15"). Not "Red 1 attacking bombers, attacking bombers, attacking bombers. I'm out of ammo!" (try 2 second bursts old AI chap). There's not even any stirring music as you engage the enemy and those splash screens are decidedly eastern front in look and feel. What's with all the Panzers anyway. We weren't invaded and as for the Beaufighter, why? When I fly FSX with the A2A Spitfire. 3 pumps on the primer. Firing the coffman starter and waiting for temps to rise, or checking the trolly acc is attached. Listening to the Merlin engine purring away. Pushing the throttle forward and hearing a Merlin growl. Opening the canopy, hearing the whistle as I crack it open, then the wind rushing around the canopy when I push it back. Looking down on an accurate depiction of England. Not needing maps as I can see landmarks and other features. Flying the circuit at Duxford. Hearing the steam vent popping because I overheated her again. Buzzing the tower at Alderney and hearing the gulls flying past. I feel immersion and I don't even have anything to shoot at. When I fly COD over a stuttery unrecognisable sudo English landscape to do battle with a gaggle of, very nicely rendered, 6+ Stukas, in my Yak50 (well, that's what it sounds like and not very good at that). Opening the throttle wide and then wondering if i'm actually accelerating at all. Then having to wait for umpteen patches to get me to a level that probably still doesn't match the other sims out there. It grates when I've been told this will be the sim to end all sims. The new bench mark we have all been waiting for. 8 years. That's a lot of waiting. Something else I would like to challenge is the concept that what will really make this sim a big hit are all the modders out there waiting to provide me with campaigns, fixes, patches and all the other stuff to fix the sim. I was expecting some of that to be included off the shelf. Anyway shouldn't the modders happen after a sim is released and has been played out. After all this sim isn't free-ware. If the community was needed to make this sim a hit then why didn't the programmers realise this, drop design of some of the content and focus on the environment. Give us a superb and brilliant framework to work with. IL2 was a hit when I installed the demo. It was a hit when I bought the original, and the updates. Was an even bigger hit after all the fans produced updates to it. I just feel cod is design flawed. Has two many hang-ups from the original (menu system, simple formations, eastern block sounds) and two many missing elements from the original (lead in movies, music, playability). To go back to my original premiss. That's why I see this as being just a game. A great game potentially with the ability for mass fur-balls on-line. A great game of mods and add-ons. But it's not going to be an accurate depiction of the Battle of Britain. No watching the fuel gauges for the 109's. No feeling of being outnumbered for the Spitfires. No scrambles or climb to battle and being bounced for the Hurri's. No late evening patrols in murky weather and trying to find base. No Polish `flying circus` shouting "Repeat please" over the RT. Regards, Dog.
|
|
#8
05-08-2011, 06:35 PM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Quote:
regards robtek
__________________
Win 7/64 Ult.; Phenom II X6 1100T; ASUS Crosshair IV; 16 GB DDR3/1600 Corsair; ASUS EAH6950/2GB; Logitech G940 & the usual suspects 
|
|
#9
05-08-2011, 08:04 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
It seems that too many people expect CoD to be an all-encompassing battle of Britain simulator, but RoF you say is not supposed to model WWI and only needs to focus on the aircraft. Oh really? So why shouldn't CoD be allowed to do the same? A two year old sim that focuses on a conflict with a more or less completely static frontline on a single map (plus seasonal texture variations) can't give you the complete WWI experience of a single year of that conflict, due to a severely limited choice of units to use as "actors" in recreating those WWI scenarios and this is just what's common knowledge and a direct consequence of its subject matter (less complicated aircraft, weapons, systems, etc). I'm not even mentioning the design complaints and limited engine capabilities reported by people who actually have the sim. Two years on it seems that RoF still gets a pass for being developed by an upstart team, while all the judgmental attitude is reserved for the IL2 series. It's fine by me to have strict and high standards, as long as you apply them equally to all games you review and at similar points during their life. If you want to compare CoD with RoF, compare them at release. CoD has more flyables, more AI units and more stuff to do because the subject matter is more complex by nature, yet it's cheaper to own and improve on and with less restrictions on how you can play your game. Does the much touted dynamic campaign of RoF work in offline mode? I don't think it does, in fact the only thing you can do offline is fly single missions and scripted campaigns which is (ding ding ding!) exactly what CoD has and with a more or less comparable amount of flyables but most importantly, a much more varied selection of AI units and the ability to use a lot of them in a mission to help enrich the scenarios we want to recreate. I'm not telling you not to like it, i have been tempted to give it a go myself on various occasions. However, the way they develop and grow that sim is completely incompatible to what i expect from a simulation while on the other hand, the IL2 and CoD approach is much more suited to my taste-->long story short, it's a matter of taste too. What i'm trying to say is that today's RoF is nothing like the early days, but if we go by that line of reason that says "the only thing that matters is a comparison in the present", then RoF must have been pretty awful too in its early days because IL2 was so much more complete, optimized, hassle-free and with tons of content. As you can see, this school of thought only serves to create a skewed perspective, is not fair to any of the games/sims reviewed under such a "rule system" and completely denies any possibility of innovation in the genre. Why? Because if we compare sims with such a mind-set the older one will always win and there will be no room for anything new. RoF was worse than CoD upon release (not to mention the original IL2) so if people had compared it to IL2 the same way you now compare it to CoD, the verdict would be that it didn't have the right to even exist. And if people thought like that, it wouldn't have improved to become the much better sim that it is today. See where this is getting? All this is like taking a look at a litter of newborn puppies, deciding they are useless and opting to drown them in a pond instead of letting them grow, only because you can't go hunting with them just yet 
|
|
#10
05-08-2011, 09:50 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
Quote:
|
 |
|
|
Hybrid Mode
