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Revvin
03-21-2011, 09:33 PM
While we all (well most) wait patiently for the release would it be possible for one of the developers to release a key command list so that we might start making profiles for our programmable joysticks and throttles?

desmodronic
03-22-2011, 09:13 PM
Bump for a sensible post, be nice to have a CH Products keymap waiting for when the download finishes :)

Royraiden
03-22-2011, 09:28 PM
Nice idea.

nearmiss
03-22-2011, 10:36 PM
Ubisoft gets the boxes guys...

That might be a question for them. I saw a video where a guy was unboxing the Collectors edition. He was also flipping through a manual.

So, you'd think UbiSoft could share the pdf file, which is probably on the DVD.

Better still, you might see the same video and go to the guy youtube channel that made the video.

He might share the PDF file.

Once the pdf is out there it will circulate fast.

Blackdog_kt
03-22-2011, 11:52 PM
There was a list in one of the Friday updates not too long ago. It showed some interface screens, the key commands list was among them.
I don't know if it's complete or not mind you, but it would be enough for a bit of a head-start.

However, there is a whole lot of different philosophy on how the controls work in CoD compared to IL2, at least according to what we've been told by people who attended the Moscow and Kiev gaming expos and had a chance to try out the sim. The end result is a more thorough simulation of the actual pilot's workload, something that everyone who flies at high difficulty settings will have to adjust to and plan for.
For starters, don't invest too much time on macros if you plan to often fly full switch. There's a difficulty setting (anthropomorphic modeling) that takes into account the impossibility of a real pilot simultaneously operating multiple controls with just two hands in a non-HOTAS WW2 warbird with questionable ergonomics.



Some examples... (incoming wall of text, proceed at your own peril :-P )





I'm not 100% sure about this, but i seem to remember early Spits having manually operated landing gear. In any case, let's assume they do so that we can examine a sample situation.

If you have a macro to assist you in landings that cranks down the manually operated landing gear and drops landing flaps at the same time, it's possible that you won't be able to operate anything else until at least one of these actions is complete: you might move your stick and/or adjust your throttle to fine tune your approach, but the game will refuse to act on these inputs until your virtual self has finished cranking down the landing gear and lowering the flaps. Since the flaps on the Spit are a simple on-off switch, it won't take much time to select landing flaps and free up one of your virtual hands to use another control.
However,that still leaves you with just one usable hand (as the other one is still cranking down the landing gear), which means that you won't be able to operate the engine controls and the stick at the same time, which is exactly what you need to do during a landing approach to control your glideslope, speed and rate of descent. Now, if you have one of your HOTAS buttons mapped to send a continuous gear down command for X amount of seconds (which is the time you know it takes for the gear to fully extend), this completely deprives you of the ability to free up that virtual hand until the action is completed.

Similarly you can't fly the plane, adjust the trim and fine-tune your throttle all at the same time in a 109, because the pilot's left hand will be occupied with the trim wheel and the right hand will not be enough for the rest, he will either have to keep his right hand on the stick or the throttle. And the game simulates that if you set anthropomorphic modeling to on.


I guess this is why (again, according to feedback from people who tried it at the gaming expos) a lot of commands are not toggle commands like they were in IL2, but continuous ones: the landing gear/flaps/etc is actuated for as long as you keep the button pressed, take your hands off the button and it stops. This gives us the ability to interrupt the action and free up a virtual hand if we need to react to something else.

As you can see there's a lot of different variables that pertain to the design and ergonomics (or lack thereof :grin: ) of each individual aircraft, which in turn affect how many things the aircraft can do at the same time. For example, with a 3-way "set and it stays there" flap motor switch a pilot could set the flaps to start lowering and do other things until they reach the correct position, then he would need to set the motor to neutral/off again. With a spring loaded 3-way switch in a different aircraft, the same pilot would have to keep his hand on the switch for the flaps to extend. Quite possibly he would be extending flaps in stages, taking his hand off the switch (and as a result the flaps would temporarily stop deploying) to operate other controls and then resume flap extension.
Most warbirds of the day didn't really have the convenient preset notches on a lever that can be found even in a cessna today (this is the way IL2 modeled it, but it's not really how it usually worked). Unless it was a full flaps/no flaps thing like the spitfire, in an aircraft with variable flap settings the pilot would usually set the motor to extend/retract and either judge the correct amount by feel or read it off of indicators on the wings: the P-47 had numbers on the flaps indicating degrees of extension and the FW-190 used a cut-out indicator with numbers rolling by as the flap extended. Something as simple and trivial as dropping combat flaps in our sims was a lot more complicated in real life :grin:

Well, CoD will model some (a lot? a little? all of them? who knows?) of that stuff when we choose higher realism settings and it may do it to the extent that each airframe's individual ergonomic quirks are modeled.
All of this means there's a high possibility that we might get caught off guard a lot of times until we get used to it, especially when switching from one aircraft to another.

I might be lining up the perfect landing approach and mess it up because i forgot that my virtual hand is occupied cranking down the gear, so i can't use stick and throttle simultaneously with the remaining hand. What would a real pilot do in such a case? Take his right hand off the gear controls, place it on the stick and move his left hand from the stick to the throttle. If after correcting his glide path there was still time to lower the gear, he would reverse these movements and keep cranking it down to finish the landing, otherwise he would go around. In all likelihood though, he would probably line up a bit further away, to safely extend both his flaps and his landing gear in sequence long before he was on finals.

However, assuming we do mess up initially, we can do just the same thing as he would: take our finger off the "gear down" key to free up a virtual hand, so that we can fly the aircraft properly. If the manual controls were toggle (on/off) controls, we would have to sit there unable to do anything until the entire action had finished. That's why it makes sense to make these functions continuous actions, we can interrupt and resume them at will if we need to free up a hand to fly the plane, instead of crashing a few yards short of the runway threshold while our in-game avatar is happily cranking down the landing gear :-P

In all likelihood however we'll have to fly properly for a change and plan a bit earlier than we need to act, just like a real pilot would. I've typed a ton of stuff, you're probably dizzy if you've read this far and guess what? We've only talked about a couple of examples that have to do with landing.

Imagine what happens in combat, especially if we consider a complicated fighter like the P-47: throttle, mixture,prop RPM, turbo-supercharger, intercoolers, cowl flaps...you have to set all of these prior to executing a simple boom and zoom bounce and reverse these changes as you climb back up. Also, many of these controls don't respond instantaneously or are affected by effects with conflicting outcomes.

The turbo takes time to spool up/down and you might overboost the engine when descending into higher pressure air, or find yourself wallowing in the sky with not enough power during the pull-out. The oil, carburetor and cylinder temps will drop due to lower throttle settings and increased airflow during the dive, but at the same time you are descending into lower, warmer air. Are you diving 5000ft lower? Then the effect is small, as temps usually change a couple of degrees celsius every 1000ft. Are you diving on a hostile formation 15000ft lower? Then when you slam the throttles forward for the climb back up to altitude, keep in mind that your cowl flaps and intercoolers were closed before the dive and the air around is about 30 degrees celsius hotter than it was at the top of the dive.

All of this is exactly what many full switch pilots had wanted for years, a proper simulation of a real pilot's workload that will affect the way we fly and fight to produce gameplay that is closer to the memoirs and combat accounts we read in the history books. Coupled with the feedback about the improved FM (someone who tried the game in Moscow said the aircraft actually have weight and inertia now, you can feel it and the effect of low airspeed in fights is more pronounced), i have a feeling that some new kinds of virtual aces will take their place alongside the existing master marksmen, tacticians and ACM experts : the guys who plan things well in advance and those who can operate the aircraft at or above its operating limits without breaking it ;)

I hope i'm making sense here, just wanted to provide a heads up (admittedly a lengthy one even for my standards :grin:) on the upcoming challenges.

My advice would be to just map the bare essentials on your HOTAS sets and sticks, wait to see how each control is modeled in the sim and then decide on how to bind the rest. Otherwise you might be forced to retrace a lot of your steps, or find yourself with an unresponsive aircraft due to a macro and wonder what's happening. But then again, tinkering with it all and learning from mistakes is part of the fun ;)

Flying Pencil
03-23-2011, 01:50 AM
Agreed!!

PDF version of the manual in box, plz!

SsSsSsSsSnake
03-23-2011, 05:48 AM
wow Blackdog,that was an impressive and inmformed post,you must have great patience to post all that,i am tired of posting this already.

thankyou for your efforts,please continue with more of the same for this lazy person :)

MadBlaster
03-23-2011, 06:03 AM
A few things I noticed on those screens that I'm curious about:

1)Autorudder? I wonder if that will be allowed on full switch setting. Kinda hope not. Also, what is high and low setting?

2) I don't see auto prop pitch toggle. Figured that would be there for the 109, but maybe I just don't see it in the screenshots. I hope I can still fly the 109 with manual control over prop pitch.

3) The front slats on the 109. The way I understood it, those drop automatically based on change in air pressure and they are independent. But I see there is an axis for them. Maybe a manual override?

602Sqn.McLean
03-23-2011, 06:26 AM
Sorry Blackdog, I'm as lazy as SsSsSsSsSnake. I read the first line and the last line. It made sense though. Can't wait to pick up my copy tomorrow. :)

Matt255
03-23-2011, 06:36 AM
2) I don't see auto prop pitch toggle. Figured that would be there for the 109, but maybe I just don't see it in the screenshots.
Didn't see a screenshot of the controls including the auto prop pitch either. However, the switch is visible in the cockpit, so it's definately in.

But I see there is an axis for them. Maybe a manual override?
I was (and still am) a little worried about that myself. Maybe it's for arcade flightmodel or so.

Not sure about the flaps axis either. I hope it doesn't work for the Spit (and all the other planes that only had fixed settings).