Daidalos Team's Room -QUESTIONS AND REQUESTS ONLY on IL2 Authorized Addons

[Azimech]

Originally Posted by hiro

Ask Oleg if you guys can fix the FW 190 cockpit (the bar you know).

Better idea: make those parts more or less transparent or translucent, selectable in options and server. like they did in Rise of Flight. Kills the whole 8-year old discussion, decreases the need for 6DOF and everyone can be happy. I like to dream, don't I?

[JVM]

Hello Team Daidalos!

I would like to give propose my thoughts on a subject which is rarely talked about (and generally to say "you have to use it all the time") in an useful way: the issue of trimming in a PC sim...

To begin with, it must be remembered that the only function of any trim is to decrease as much as possible the efforts the pilot has to exert on his controls. The most important one is the pitch trim, just followed by the yaw trim and then the roll trim.
All flying machines by WWII and after had at least the pitch trim, many the yaw trim (notable exceptions being for instance the Bf 109 and the I16) and much more rarely a roll trim.

To fly properly (=efficiently), tirelessly and to be able to shoot precisely you must be in trim at all times, as it allows you to fly the aircraft with very little effort on the controls (around the control "trimmed" or "zero effort" point) hence with maximum precision.
It is easy to recognize when you are in trim: when letting the relevant control free (or more simply relaxing the effort on it), there is no change in the aircraft attitude; if the aircraft tends to adopt a different pitch or yaw, you were not in trim: you were maintaining the aircraft in its then-attitude by exerting an effort on the control(s).

The difficult thing with the trim is usually one is barely conscious not being in trim, for many reasons like very busy with the environment (someone is shooting at you, you are making a complex maneuver, or are preparing your machine for landing and whatnot...) or not feeling your own force!
It is not second-nature for would-be pilots to trim all the time and in real life their instructor will spend long amounts of time to explain and cram the necessity of trimming, and I can tell you it is sometimes still needed to give reminders even to career pilots since a very long time...

I am sorry for people who did not need these explanations as I know many of you are aware of trimming value!
You must be wondering by now what is my point?

It is very simple: the "controls" we have available as PC simmers make a terrible job of helping the virtual pilot trimming properly its plane...to the point of abomination in my eyes, and it has always been a killer of immersion for me! I see already the dust cloud made by the battalion of "people who have no issue with trim in Il2" running at me, so let me take cover first and don my armor...OK done!

In real life you meet two sorts of trim control:

- the manual one, usually a wheel the size of your hand (or sometimes a sliding lever like in many gliders which have only pitch control), for all trimmable axis’s

- the electrical one, usually a simple rocker switch.

The latter will be found in many light aircraft and transport aircraft: it is precise but slow (it controls an electrical motor itself adjusting the trim control) and not suited for rapid attitude changes;

The former one can be emulated by, well, only a wheel!

The problem here is the only possibility to emulate a wheel which has a range of 270° rotation (or sometimes much more) and which is moved by hand with extreme precision and quickness is only a pair of keys, a hat-switch or at best a minuscule rotary moved by a thumb on 45° range with disproportionate efforts...and we are supposed to fly properly that way?
There is no hope to have the requested precision and ease of use any real life aircraft would grant you...

So what can we done (be patient we are almost there)?
Ideally a trim control block would be ideal, but there are few in existence and they are, if you want something realistic, expensive...but I think there is a way to give the virtual pilot the desired effect, but it requires some programming by Team Daidalos:

I propose to create two "auto-trim functions", kind of...for yaw and pitch.

- My goal here is not to ask for an "always trimmed" button or config choice: this is not realistic at all; only modern fighters like F-16 or Rafale have this kind of feature (and I am not sure this can not be deactivated on request?),

- not it is to get an "insta-trim" (but that would be a lesser evil) where you get trimmed immediately when pushing a button,

- but a "delayed auto-trim" emulating the real life action of turning a wheel until you feel the aircraft is trimmed (in real life, by feeling the effort decreasing on the stick or rudder, in virtual life by letting the stick back to center without the aircraft changing attitude).

It would work this way: as long as the pilot pushes his "trim" button, the trim value goes at a certain "realistic" rate of change from the value it had when the button was pushed to the value it should have for the stick position to be centered to maintain the pitch or yaw angle value of the aircraft had, again when the button was pushed. When the button is released, the change stops at the value which was obtained at this time.

This will in essence replace the hand movement you cannot have on a trim wheel which does not exist by a push on a single button, with the same resulting trimming precision, obtained in the same time as with a real trim wheel...
For pitch trim, for instance, the pinkie button when present would be ideal (as a matter of fact the real life Glasflügel gliders have exactly this type of trim: a pinkie and instant trim at release...if the computation above is too complex to program this would be an acceptable solution also).

I think such a function will help virtual pilots a lot in landing easily (trim position is paramount here!) and also helping them shoot a lot better...this would also free the rocker-switches, keys or hat-switches for functions for which they are better suited.


Again sorry for having been so long...

Cordially,

JV

[Juri_JS]

Originally Posted by Bloblast

Is there the possibility to put the new planes in the current dynamic campaign?

I have tried to add the Fokker as flyable plane to the Finnish Dgen campaign, but it didn't worked. It's disappointing that we can't use the new maps and aircraft in Dgen.
An update of the Dgen.exe file would be nice.

[kennel]

I dont think currently we will be able to use any of the new content for offline dynamic campaigns until DGEN is altered and from what I have read it doesnt sound promising.

Lowengrins DCG on the other hand may work but it will take some work with alot of trial & error.

Is the dynamic generator side of the sim being neglected because of lack of resources? Or is it considered unimportant in comparison to the online experience. There are some brilliant DGEN campaigns out there, I own BOE, Ostfront & the Last days as well as the free to the community dgen campaigns by Ian Boys, Boelcke, Veltrut, Jumo & Enjoy.( there are others but I cant remember the authors names) I have seen a definate improvement in the AI performance since the new patch & it seems really strange that 4.09 gives new planes, new maps & a better performing AI & yet currently these can only be used in static campaigns or online.

It seems strange, however you never know what is around the corner with IL2
Team Daidalus has proved that so heres hoping.

[csThor]

The problem of the DGen is that it's not a Maddox Games in-house development. It was made by Starshoy, who hasn't been seen for ages, and AFAIK there is noone around who really knows what the exe contains. And given the structure of development back then when FB was in the making I doubt anyone but him has the source code or has gotten a look at its innards (AFAIK, again).

As for the offline vs online argument. I am an offline only player. Online with its ever-present sportive dogfight-contest, fighter fixation and late-war addiction is just not my cup of tea. As such I am of course interested in giving offline players enough "meat on the bones" to enjoy that part. However, and this is my very personal opinion, I am not a fan of the so-called "dynamic campaigns" in spite of having been part of the development team of "Ostfront". I greatly prefer decent hand-made campaigns, which are IMO much better at creating immersion than the DGen/DCG products. The latter aren't dynamic in the sense I need a campaign to be dynamic - while playing a mission. They produce the same canned missions a FMB user can dish out, but regarding briefing, ground-object placement and coordination of air assets a human mission builder is just infinitely superior to either of the campaign generators.
As a result of this I have not concerned myself with dynamic campaigns for a long, long time and so I don't know about the latest developments or the state of DGen.exe (for example). I don't know if Daidalos' coders can do something about DGen, but given their workload on currently-running projects I doubt they can throw more than a cursory glance at it. If it's easy to do, I guess it's doable. But if it takes someone to really "reverse engineer" the thing I don't know if there's hope for the patient.

[Azimech]

I support JVM's trimming proposal. A whole battery of control modules in the room doesn't look very pretty and is expensive. A single button is a nice idea.

[Aviar]

For some strange reason, I also support JVM's trimming proposal. In part, because he explained it so well. He made some very valid points.

Actually, I can see it as part of the Difficulty settings...or possibly a conf parameter. This way, the players who may disagree with this option would not be forced to use it. Heck, we already have settings such as External View and No Cockpit. I don't see Auto-Trim as being any more outrageous than those options.

Aviar

[C6_Krasno]

If I didn't miss anything in the last patches, there is a little online bug which haven't been fixed yet : when, in a coop, a multi-engined plane loses one engine, the other players see all the engines down, not only the destroyed one. It is just annoying, but a fix would be nice, though I don't know at all if it is easy to fix.

[Metus]

Thank you for the new patch !

No other game fascinates me over such a long time period as IL2 does.

Is it possible to make the new airplanes viewable in the "View Objects" ingame screen?
Maybe it's just my installation but I cannot find them
I don't need the text; only want to see them if it's too much work.

Thank you.

PS: Looking forward to further patches

[TheGrunch]

Originally Posted by Aviar

For some strange reason, I also support JVM's trimming proposal. In part, because he explained it so well. He made some very valid points.

Actually, I can see it as part of the Difficulty settings...or possibly a conf parameter. This way, the players who may disagree with this option would not be forced to use it. Heck, we already have settings such as External View and No Cockpit. I don't see Auto-Trim as being any more outrageous than those options.

Aviar

I agree, actually. I do think JVM is overstating the difficulty of trimming with a decent rotary, though, I never have any problems trimming with the rotaries on my X45. The range of HOTAS rotaries is usually far more than 45° (on the X45 it's just a bit more than 270°), and therefore it's very easy to trim. Thing is, though, the majority of people don't have a stick with rotaries, so I don't see it as any more of an unfair advantage using auto-trim than for example allowing padlock vs. people using TrackIR. I'd just prefer if it wasn't perfectly accurate at trimming every time, like it is for the AI.