Let us adjust how many aircraft we want for the campaign

[TacKY]

In the campaign, allow for people to be able to adjust how many planes they want to be on screen and in combat. The 21 bombers can be a good base but don't leave that as fixed. Not everyone wants to play MP to get their large formations of planes and if you decide on having a dynamic campaign then this feature is a must.

[CharveL]

It would be nice in a way for those of us with better systems to run them but really, cpu gets eaten up pretty quick with AI as it is with IL2 let alone with all of the extra, higher fidelity parameters in CoD. Not to mention the inherent balancing difficulties that may affect the whole campaign.

Not to worry though, there are bound to be dozens of large formation missions made by the community within a week of release I'd imagine.

[JAMF]

How about a track benchmark, like TheBlackDeath track, and the results set the number?

[White Owl]

I'll be very surprised if the game won't let you open up the stock campaigns in the FMB and fiddle around with things to your heart's content.

[Feathered_IV]

I remember how Microprose, European Air War had hundreds of aircraft in the air at the same time. Will historically realistic formations be impossible in CoD. Is is going to be a sort of BoB lite?

[The Kraken]

I remember how Microprose, European Air War had hundreds of aircraft in the air at the same time.

With later patches and mods, yes. On release however, the standard bomber formation size was 24, both for BoB and other campaigns.

[Stiboo]

Remember that's the bombers only, you then have to add the escorts and RAF fighters which brings the total to 60 - 70...

it sounds like COD will have the same limit on aircraft numbers as IL2 , ie - 128 aircraft ( 4 flights of 4 Squadrons on each side).. but only multiplayer has been 100% confirmed at 128..

My point is we may not be able to increase formation sizes much more anyway, even if we want to...

I often dream that one day we'll be able to merge a game like Gary Grigsby's Battle Of Britain strategy game with a flightsim like COD...every single aircraft, pilot and unit being controlled by the a.i. or human...one day...

back on topic, the lack of big formations really becomes a pain when you start to build campaigns from 1943 onwards when you need to replicate the 8th Airforce missions or big carrier battles in the Pacific..


..

[B25Mitch]

Think of Moore's law, with the processing power doubling every two years. In two years that 21 bomber formation becomes 42. In four years it becomes 84. And in 6 years time you could perhaps expect to see 168 bombers on screen at the same time.

BUT

This only works if you ensure you don't fall to the temptation of maxxing the graphics when you recieve your semi-annual system upgrade!

This is one of the main benifits of a large online war. Since each player's computer is running the complex simulation for their own aircraft, the information that needs to be transferred is much less complex. Instead of struggling to run simulations on the fifty-aircraft formation on your screen, your computer can simply recieve location and rotation information from each player, and position their aircraft on your screen accordingly.

[Heliocon]

Think of Moore's law, with the processing power doubling every two years. In two years that 21 bomber formation becomes 42. In four years it becomes 84. And in 6 years time you could perhaps expect to see 168 bombers on screen at the same time.

BUT

This only works if you ensure you don't fall to the temptation of maxxing the graphics when you recieve your semi-annual system upgrade!

This is one of the main benifits of a large online war. Since each player's computer is running the complex simulation for their own aircraft, the information that needs to be transferred is much less complex. Instead of struggling to run simulations on the fifty-aircraft formation on your screen, your computer can simply recieve location and rotation information from each player, and position their aircraft on your screen accordingly.

Thats overly simplistic, ever heard of lag and ping? That slows down a game far more than any "ai" does.
So tired of hearing excuses, the largest market is currently quad cores (majority), and AI is not an intensive task for a flight sim if it is programmed in a intelligent manner. But then again, this is coming from a company that gave their game the acronym COD, possibly the stupidest choice in the marketing history (yes yes its ubisoft but there are plenty of other publishers).
COD, if I search COD what will come up in google I wonder?

Second off the increase in power applies to all components GPU's included, which does not effect CPU performance at all unless it bottlenecks.

also the law is for every 18 months not 2 years :P

[Heliocon]

Think of Moore's law, with the processing power doubling every two years. In two years that 21 bomber formation becomes 42. In four years it becomes 84. And in 6 years time you could perhaps expect to see 168 bombers on screen at the same time.

BUT

This only works if you ensure you don't fall to the temptation of maxxing the graphics when you recieve your semi-annual system upgrade!

This is one of the main benifits of a large online war. Since each player's computer is running the complex simulation for their own aircraft, the information that needs to be transferred is much less complex. Instead of struggling to run simulations on the fifty-aircraft formation on your screen, your computer can simply recieve location and rotation information from each player, and position their aircraft on your screen accordingly.

consolidated

[Blackdog_kt]

To do as the topic title says, the game would have to ship with more than one version of each mission for the campaign, since it's going to be a static one. Effectively that means:

1) they will need to do multiple copies of the same mission for all missions in the campaigns and
2) even if they do, it's not going to be possible to scale up incrementally unless they provide a mission with 21 bombers, the same mission with 22, the same mission with 23 and so on...

That is, since the missions will not be dynamic, don't expect a slider in the options that you can drag to globally change the bomber formation size one aircraft at a time. If they did something like that, it would probably be a case of having 2-3 settings with fixed parameters. Something like "light/medium/heavy aircraft density", which would then "call" the relevant version of the campaign missions. This means that even so, you could be stuck on low because the medium setting might be 3-5 bombers too much for your PC.

The easiest way to do it on a customized basis and be able to scale it according to your own PC is to open up the FMB yourself and increase the amount of bombers manually, then save the mission.

According to some previous feedback on the FMB it's now possible to set a higher amount of aircraft per flight than the four we had in IL2, so it's not going to be much work.
Whereas in IL2 you'd have to create additional flights of 4 bombers each and carefully set them up to fly in formation with the existing ones without colliding with each other, in CoD it might be as simple as opening the properties for the existing formations and simply changing the numbers to a higher value. So, if we have two formations of 10 bombers on a certain mission, we could just set each of them to 30 bombers for a total of 60, save the mission and do the same for the next one, very fast and efficient compared to the old FMB.

It's so simple that i expect a modified version of the stock campaign with higher numbers of AI aircraft for high end systems will be one of the first community projects, being done very short after release and circulating on the relevant websites, like mission4today for example.

[T}{OR]

Somehow I believe we will have this option from the start, if we are to read between the lines.

With later patches and mods, yes. On release however, the standard bomber formation size was 24, both for BoB and other campaigns.


I wouldn't rely on mods in CoD. ;)

[David603]

I wouldn't rely on mods in CoD. ;)
Why?

There will an official and freely available dev kit, a system for approving the accuracy and quality of mods to be used in "Maddox certified" online servers, etc, etc.

The modding community should be even stronger for CoD than it is for Il2 now :grin:

[Strike]

I would certainly appreciate scalability for both higher end and lower end users. It's nice to be able to fly a campaign that has say... 1 flight contains max 4 planes for a slow computer, and perhaps 1 flight contains around 12 planes for a high end computer...

Otherwise people will have to fly quickmissions and set number of planes to what their CPU can handle. I think many people will decide upon wether to buy a new computer after they have tried it out a bit, to see if it's worth the PC upgrade :)

[The Kraken]

I wouldn't rely on mods in CoD. ;)

Nope, not really; of course unlike with EAW (which I was referring to), it will be easier to increase the number of planes in a mission (there was no mission editor in EAW after all). How much CoD will be open to "official" 3rd party work is something we'll have to see, but the mission editor is a given ;)