PDA

View Full Version : Possible new eastern front maps - some food for thought


Lagarto
10-12-2011, 07:11 PM
Once, being curious, how much terrain is missing from the game, I made these two maps (I had posted them some time ago at SimHQ forum). Now, with new hopes about updating DGen, I thought I'd revive the subject. The areas currently integrated into the DGen are outlined in red.

northern bit (Kurland is more to the left):

http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/3329/northernvoid.jpg

And southern bit (with Stalingrad more to the right):

http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/5175/voidy.jpg


As you can see, two large maps covering the northern 'void' (south of Leningrad) and southern 'void' (most of the central and eastern Ukraine) would vastly enhance continuity of DGen campaigns. I'm curious of your opinion.

28_Condor
10-13-2011, 08:28 PM
I think the map of Moscow also is missing much of the area of the Kalinin and Moscow itself!

IceFire
10-14-2011, 04:34 AM
If I remember correctly...Kharkov and surrounding area is somewhere that I'd like to see on the Eastern Front. We do have pretty good coverage of some of the major areas where battles were fought... but there are gaps of course. It is the longest front of the war.

Lagarto
10-15-2011, 04:43 PM
The area between Kharkov and Sea of Azov is where JG 52 and JG 77, among others, where heavily engaged.

zakkandrachoff
10-20-2011, 03:20 AM
dont forget the TREES!

and will be nice put the date of the battle in each selection

Treetop64
10-22-2011, 12:02 AM
I think it's a great idea.

One of the rare things that I really hate about IL-2 is the very limited size of the maps. The Leningrad, Kurland, Slovakia, and Romania maps are currently the only Eastern maps worth flying over any more. The rest make you feel as though you're flying over a game board on the coffee table.

For contemporary equipment ten years ago, rendering small maps was necessary and acceptable. There's just no excuse for it today, though.

At a minimum, make three separate maps; one each for the territories covered by the three German army groups, with some overlap between the groups. A separate map for Scandinavia would be nice. Heck, include an option - if practical - to load the entire Eastern front. It may take up a bit of HD space and extra RAM, and take a few more seconds to load, but believe me, that would be something I would be more than happy to live with.

Man, just think of the dream DCG scenarios one could come up with if proper maps were available, as well as for DGen!

IceFire
10-22-2011, 02:18 PM
I think it's a great idea.

One of the rare things that I really hate about IL-2 is the very limited size of the maps. The Leningrad, Kurland, Slovakia, and Romania maps are currently the only Eastern maps worth flying over any more. The rest make you feel as though you're flying over a game board on the coffee table.

For contemporary equipment ten years ago, rendering small maps was necessary and acceptable. There's just no excuse for it today, though.

At a minimum, make three separate maps; one each for the territories covered by the three German army groups, with some overlap between the groups. A separate map for Scandinavia would be nice. Heck, include an option - if practical - to load the entire Eastern front. It may take up a bit of HD space and extra RAM, and take a few more seconds to load, but believe me, that would be something I would be more than happy to live with.

Man, just think of the dream DCG scenarios one could come up with if proper maps were available, as well as for DGen!
You are right... There are several maps on the eastern front that we could have much larger than they are right now. Kuban and Crimea could be one big map. Stalingrad could cover the entire battle space instead of just centering around the city. The Kursk map could extend north and south to cover that entire battlespace. We're talking a boatload of work here for map makers so I'm going for cloud 9 here.

But I don't believe there is any way we could load the entire eastern front in the IL-2 engine. When IL-2 loads up a map it has to load up every piece of geometry and every object on it. Yes our computers are that much better but the engine itself that drives everything isn't... a modern engine (I believe IL-2 Cliffs of Dover uses this technique) would load segments of the map and stream in segments as necessary loading and unloading dynamically from memory. This is how you can get loads of detail without the performance hit from having to track a billion objects. Not to mention the eastern front is the single longest battlefront in the history of warfare.

Lagarto
10-22-2011, 05:15 PM
Apparently the old IL-2 engine can handle a lot. The latest Solomons map is huge by IL-2 Standards, spanning nearly 1,000 km - much larger than the Leningrad map (the distance from Tallinn to Leningrad is just over 300 km). Of course, most of it is water :)
Anyway, an MTO map of that size would cover entire Sicily, Malta and a big chunk of Tunisia (it's roughly 270 km from La Valletta to Palermo and 400 km to Tunis) - AND with most of it being water.

The red, diagonal line is 900 km long:

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/7139/mtoc.jpg

IceFire
10-22-2011, 05:24 PM
Apparently the old IL-2 engine can handle a lot. The latest Solomons map is huge by IL-2 Standards, spanning nearly 1,000 km - much larger than the Leningrad map (the distance from Tallinn to Leningrad is just over 300 km). Of course, most of it is water :)
Anyway, an MTO map of that size would cover entire Sicily, Malta and a big chunk of Tunisia (it's roughly 270 km from La Valletta to Palermo and 400 km to Tunis) - AND with most of it being water.

The game engine is impressive given what it was originally designed for. No doubt about it! But a 1000km map isn't a problem when the majority of it is water and uninhabited islands. That's exactly why you can get away with doing that map in such a grand scale.

Looking forward to a map that has Rabaul on it some time too!

JtD
10-24-2011, 06:53 AM
If I have to chose between a huge map and a detailed map, I'd rather have the detailed map.

Pursuivant
10-24-2011, 08:04 AM
There are a vast number of modded maps which range from acceptable to very good, as well as a number of retextured maps which make no-so-good stock maps (i.e., Singapore, Pearl Harbor, Sands of Time) look wonderful. Modded textures for spring, autumn and winter/summer also vastly expand the number of maps available.

For new maps, I believe that a Kharkov map is in the works by a Russian mod team.

What I'd prefer over new maps, though, is getting the details right on the existing maps. A simple change, which might actually reduce the number of objects, would be to create simple block-sized building objects then rework the map plates so that there are more city blocks and fewer individual houses.

I'd also like to see the some of the older maps get a facelift. Sevastopol and Stalingrad had buildings or building complexes which were important to the campaigns fought there, which should be modeled in the game. Right now, there's nothing that makes those cities distinct.

Especially for Stalingrad, I'd like to see the city center reworked so that it looks a lot more urban, and has some of the more important buildings associated with the battle, such as the Grain Elevator, the GUM Department Store, Pavlov's House and the big factory complexes like the Dzerzhinsky tractor works or the Red October steel plant. The German airfields surrounding the city could also be better modeled.

As for size, I think that the maps are the right size.

While it might be possible to make Eastern Front maps bigger due to relatively low population density, most missions there were flown at low level, so you need more eye candy. And, realistically, the forces involved on the Eastern Front were enormous, so a realistic mission might have hundreds of objects in it, which slows things down even more.

By contrast, a Pacific Islands maps can be enormous. They're mostly water and a few barely populated islands, and most of the air combat fought over the Pacific took place at middling to high altitudes.

Lagarto
10-24-2011, 08:27 AM
Personally, I am for bigger maps. You can always add more eyecandy yourself, through FMB - especially now, when there is possibility to copy/paste hundreds of objects with one click, and computers are much more powerful than they were a few years ago.
To me, one of the biggest immersion killers is to climb up to 5000 meters and be able to see all four corners of the map, as if you were flying "over a game board on the coffee table", as Treetop64 put it very accurately :)

And Rabaul map... that would be something, a one like this perhaps:

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/9378/rabaulv.jpg

Fenice_1965
10-24-2011, 06:43 PM
I think one of the greatest miss is a Sicily, mediterranean map, with the Malta Area. It's not so large and could be easily put in in one of the next patches.

Lagarto
10-30-2011, 10:04 AM
Could we have a word from DT on the subject? What's up the pipeline? :)

Aracno
10-30-2011, 10:40 AM
I think one of the greatest miss is a Sicily, mediterranean map, with the Malta Area. It's not so large and could be easily put in in one of the next patches.

Some mates of various italian squadrons are working on this:

http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/8616/mago20maraz.jpg

They started from the med-map done by Maraz, already available.
You can found their WIP post here: http://www.maw-superaereo.it/forum/il-2-sturmovick-1946/1164-progetto-mappe.html

Not sure when will be finished and it will be too large for a TD standard, but now you know that someone is working on it :)