Realism/Simulation Elements in SOW-BOB

[jasonbirder]

I've created a thread because discussion of simulation elements people would like to see in SOW-BOB have got bogged down into discussing the merits and de-merits of a clickable cockpit...
So i'd like to ask here instead...what type of Flight Simulator would people like to see SOW-BOB as?
Do people want it to continue very much in the same vein as IL2 1946...very much a lite sim with forgiving FMs and little or no elements of Flight Systems/Engine/Fuel Management etc...Or as a completely realistic simulation with everything modelled including failures gun jams etc...or something in between?
What level of realism do people consider appropriate ina World War II Flight Simulator...do people want to have to spend hours learning their plane or would people rather hop in and zoom off to the nearest dogfight?
I confess I am a big fan of Sims like Falcon 4.0 so I would like to see it warts and all and to me that means from a Flight point of view...all Engine Management and Fuel Management modelled...with appropriate performance penalties and failures if you screw up...I want my engine to burn out if I manhandle it or don't manage the transition from cruise to combat flight correctly...I'd like my Fuel System managed correctly so my engine cuts out if I don't transfer fuel from the appropriate tanks and my plane to become unstable if I don't manage its centre of gravity...
I want a heavy work load so sometimes i'm heads down in the cockpit and get suprised by the enemy
I'd like failures modelled so that my guns Jam if i fire repeated short bursts or try to fire them while i'm pulling heavy G's.
I'd like realistic ground handelling so I can't reun 2000HP of engine up to 100% let off the breaks and then sail down the runway.
I'd like realistic landing parameters so I can't plant the notoriously glass legged Bf109 down onto a rutted grass strip at a high sink rate and then motor off to the taxi way undamaged...
I'd like realistic flight times and distances so Fuel conservation becomes important
I'd like it to actaully be difficult to find the enemy so many sorties pass without contact
I'd like a realistic communications environment
No more Vector to Home Plate or GPS style Direction finding...

What do people think about that level of realism or would people rather we stuck with the current survey sim style and simplified/generic models to allow a focus on dogfighting?

[Feathered_IV]

I'd very much like there to be some substance to the way things are handled between missions. In the Silent Hunter series you can manage your personel, request and recieve a transfer. Organise yourself and your ship....
The Il-2 series has no particular soul when it comes to creating an immersive environment outside of the next spaw-on-runway scenario. Belonging to a unit should mean more than just the squadron number in the drop down menu. Commanding at unit should involve more than just getting to fly up front.

I had a similar thread going a while ago.
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=2813&highlight=superficial
I hope you have more luck with yours!

It'll probably come to nothing though. Online players will sabotage any efforts to develop a sim beyond their two petty mission objectives.

[Codex]

I wouldn't go that far Feather. I'm an online flyer but also enjoy a beefy campaign as much as the next guy. I do like what you have suggested about managing a sqaud. I think actual pilot stats similar to BoB2: Wings of Victory should play a part as well.

[Chiz]

Good call starting a new thread, in hindsight discussing mouse interaction with the cockpit and more detailed aircraft in one thread was a bit of a mess :(

I'd like to see a realistic, high fidelity sim in SoW, with scalable difficulty. This gives everyone the option to fly the way they want and set up their multiplayer servers the way they want. I'd certainly fly it in the most "realistic" mode it offered and would find SoW far more appealing if it offered a high level of detail. For those who want a simpler game they could scale the difficulty so it's like IL2. More demanding simmers get the game they want, the air quake crowd get the game they want, off line players get better AI and campaigns...and Maddox Games shifts more copied of SoW. Everybody wins! :grin:

[Forgottenfighter]

I would like it to be ultra realistic. It would be nice to have a simulator that required real skill to fly in. Obviously you could change the settings if you didn't like it being extremely difficult. I don't know about clickable cockpits but it would be great to, at least, have fuel cutoff for emergency landings and some more engine management controls. Planes should be damaged by flying particles, e.g. when you fly through a column of debris after a bomb drop or when bits fall off an enemy plane and hit you. I also think that when your plane has been damaged, like a hole in the wing, it should be susceptable to buckling under high G's.

[tagTaken2]

I'd rather have a game that's fun.
This doesn't mean I'd rather play a game as unrealistic as Strike Fighters, I find a lot of stuff about that frustrating, and I prefer Falcon 4.0 to SF et al.
MiG Alley was a good example of what I'd like to see SoW become. Great FM, great immersion, great campaign, great AI (but crap stability). We'd expect more in terms of graphics, damage and engine modelling, obviously, but gameplay was the best thing about MG and that's what sticks in my head, not the cockpit animations.
If complex engine management and full startup procedures could be implemented in SoW, that'll be fantastic, and I'll use them. But if it's going to keep slowing down development time, it's just not worth it. The game designer has said repeatedly it's not a priority, and I wish the FS crowd would 'click' that this game is not being built with them in mind.
Let's also bear in mind that most of the people on a game forum before the game comes out are going to be the obsessive ones, which tend to a skewed viewpoint.

[KG26_Alpha]

Hmm

its a niche enough market already

clicking it down further to how many pilots ??

not many and not enough to warrant the time.

There will be im sure the development line as was with IL2 series over the last 9-10 years to eventually apease the clickers and twiddlers.

:)

[Blackdog_kt]

It's drifting to the click-pit debate already, jesus.

Why isn't anybody bothered by Black Shark's clickpit? I'm sure it's a combat sim and not a civilian FSX clone, so why do 99.9% of the people who tried Black Shark love it still?

There's a very simple answer to that it's got all the functions of the original and you can manipulate them whichever way you want. That's what we should aim for in BoB as well.

Can you remember that ctrl+alt+shift+m switches between your magneto settings? Good for you, then do it this way.
You can't remember? No worries, reassign the keys for that or just click the damn knob.
You don't want to manually start up the engine? No worries either, press ctrl+e or something to that effect and watch the AI do it for you, just like it's done in FSX and Black Shark. You just have to wait until the AI pushes the buttons themselves, no instant engine on/off switch anymore, one more thing to think about when taking off with enemies nearby. A spitfire Mk.IX sequence barely took me 60 seconds maximum in a certain FSX addon when i first did it and that was because i didn't know where the buttons were, it takes half a minute to get it running normally and the automatic start follows the same procedure but is a bit faster as well.

So, what we should have is a sim that models as much of the airframe as possible, not just DM, turn rate/radius and engine HP. How the players interacts with these systems should be up to them, either via remapping keys or having a TrackIR set and clicking switches with the mouse, just give us both options and we can choose.

Did you know that maximum sustained boost in a late war Spit was a mere 7lbs and anything above that induced overheat and engine failure eventually? Or that a P47 had a very demanding engine management due to the existence of a turbo-supercharger (danger of over-revving)? A lot of the flying we do in IL2 is unrealistic and a lot of the match-ups and relative strengths and weaknesses between certain types of aircraft are wrong because of that one simple thing...we only model FM, DM and armament. We don't model the actual workload behind making these things work and that's what we should aim for.

Suddenly, aircraft that were inferior in performance in IL2 might become favorites because they are easier to manage. Planes like the Spit IX , the 109 or the 190 which had automated engine controls might suddenly become much more appealing than the P51 and P47 hotrods with their need for extra attention to the engine controls.

What's more, if the game engine can provide us a solid basis for modelling A/C subsystems, we might see a lot more interesting stuff in the future like radio navigation aids, blind bombing, airborne radar and so on. It would be a shame to miss out on so many things during the lifespan of the new series because our keyboards don't have enough keys to map functions to...i say copy everything from the real birds into the sim and simply let the users decide if and how they want to use it.

[robtek]

@Blackdog_kt

couldn´t have said it better!!!

In the end it will be the server settings that decide who has to use what and when.
So every single user can choose the server which offers his level of realism. Unpopulated servers change or quit, don´t they.

[csThor]

Apples and Oranges, Blackdog. In BS you had one (= 1) type of helicopter modeled and as it looks each following release will include just one more type. SoW on the other hand will have to incorporate more flyable objects right from the start and with each theater there will be more "must have"s on the list. It's simply a pointless discussion because you can't compare the two venues because of their drastically different focus.

[KG26_Alpha]

Apples and Oranges, Blackdog. In BS you had one (= 1) type of helicopter modeled and as it looks each following release will include just one more type. SoW on the other hand will have to incorporate more flyable objects right from the start and with each theater there will be more "must have"s on the list. It's simply a pointless discussion because you can't compare the two venues because of their drastically different focus.

+1

[TUSA/TX-Gunslinger]

Somewhere between the extremes of this debate, is the truth.

I love clickables - I have Black Shark, and it's convinced me of the utility and immersion of clickable cockpits. So much more efficient. Imagine simply "touching" the control on a gyro gunsight to increase/decrease the wingspan.

On the other hand, I can clearly see the level of complexity, in adding 10, 20 or 30 more variables to each cockpit.

Some folks seem to always want to drive discussion to extremes. It's obvious to the most casual observer that the objectives of Black Shark and Il2/SOW are very different.

With that said, clickables have been around for a long enough period that they would seem to be a "standard" feature.

Question is, did Oleg include clickables or not? If not, so be it, I'll live and fly SOW. If so, then he's figured out how to increase detail and features, while not compromising production too much. Great for him.

We in Il2, have been flying the same software package for about 8 years. We tend to be a bit more conservative about developments. At least, that's how I am.

Take LOMAC for instance - same developer, no clickables. If you've tried LOMAC after coming from Il2 - the first brick-wall you may have hit was the dramatic increase in assignable commands. No HOTAS has enough buttons to cover everything (no matter how many layers you assign), so you end up with more controllers or revert to a hoard of keyboard commands. That's really immersive, huh?

When I first setup BS before I became used to clickables, I actually mapped the Master Arm (switch is right in front of your face in the cockpit) to my Cougar. On my first flight, I noticed how dense I'd been and removed all of the commands from my Cougar from switches that were immediately within my normal cockpit view.

Cougar is much simpler now.

S~

Gunny

[jasonbirder]

Clickety...click...
Some people like clickpits...some don't; either way its just one method of interacting with your controls and if you don't like it they can be mapped to the keyboard or assigned to your HOTAS as you see fit...
But I started this thread specifically because I wanted to move away from the discussion of the interface...and talk about a desire to see SOW-BOB as a Combat Flight Simulator rather than a combat game with a flight element...
Mention Clickpits and you give every L33T arcade hyperlobby dogfighter ace an easy route to dismiss the discussion with the figleaf..."I don't like using a mouse to interact with the controls"
There is another thread to discuss clickpits
What I wanted to discuss was whether people felt that additions like realistic ground handling...realistic levels of torque...a high workload cockpit environment...realistic landing parameters...proper non-generic complex engine management...fuel management...radios...navigation...gun jams...engine failures etc etc...are things they would like to see in BOB-SOW or whether the preference was more of the same...a "lite" survey sim with lots of flyables and the emphasis firmly on the "fun" side...

[SlipBall]

What I wanted to discuss was whether people felt that additions like realistic ground handling...realistic levels of torque...a high workload cockpit environment...realistic landing parameters...proper non-generic complex engine management...fuel management...radios...navigation...gun jams...engine failures etc etc...are things they would like to see in BOB-SOW or whether the preference was more of the same...a "lite" survey sim with lots of flyables and the emphasis firmly on the "fun" side...



Yes I would love to have all of these included, I enjoy (love) IL-2 but it is lacking in so many areas. I would like to see SOW advance in this direction, more complexity, more like what it was during the war. It would really set it apart from what we have now, and would give to us many new challenges to under take. I can understand why most would not want such a demanding sim, so there lies the main problem for the rest of us. I think that it very possible to have a scaled game with these features in the "expert" selection. I think that would be the only way to have our cake, and keep everyone happy.

[steppie]

why not have a more complex setting, the answer is simple and it how game like dark shark handle it that they have a key setting that does it for you but what it also let you do is if you like to do it. the present game let you fly at max minimum power for as long as you keep it cool,why not be able to fine turn the engine setting.most early spit and hurrie were ownly able to handle maximum throttle for about 2 minutes and they had a wire on the throttle that they had to brake to get maximum boost.

[IceFire]

I'm not strictly opposed to some of the more advanced and specific features except for one thing. WWII sims still thrive by having a decent stable of aircraft available and if Oleg's team were to model say the complexities of manual start up...thats another layer of research that you then must do to make something flyable.

And you can say...sure but lets just do it generally for all of the aircraft and not worry too too much about the nuts and bolts. And I'd be alright with that. But can you see Oleg being alright with that? Maybe not.

I think a good mix of the complex aspects in there is good...it makes the experience that much more enjoyable. But the key things are still flying and shooting (or bombing) and I think most of that is a behind the scenes sort of thing that we want right and we want to be able to do that in as many types as realistically possible.

Its a matter of weighing the scales and determining what is most valuable

Black Shark is a fine example of a study sim and the detail and attention to it are stunning and shocking. But even I am a bit scared of all that :)

[tagTaken2]

I love clickables -

S~

Gunny

Who cares?

What's with all the clicky spamming by TX- 'blank' crowd?

Is this something that mods should be stamping on?

[Blackdog_kt]

Yes I would love to have all of these included, I enjoy (love) IL-2 but it is lacking in so many areas. I would like to see SOW advance in this direction, more complexity, more like what it was during the war. It would really set it apart from what we have now, and would give to us many new challenges to under take. I can understand why most would not want such a demanding sim, so there lies the main problem for the rest of us. I think that it very possible to have a scaled game with these features in the "expert" selection. I think that would be the only way to have our cake, and keep everyone happy.

That's exactly what i want as well. The interface is a secondary question, but it is important to move along with the times and have the option to use an extra peripheral or two.




With that said, clickables have been around for a long enough period that they would seem to be a "standard" feature. [.....]

Take LOMAC for instance - same developer, no clickables. If you've tried LOMAC after coming from Il2 - the first brick-wall you may have hit was the dramatic increase in assignable commands. No HOTAS has enough buttons to cover everything (no matter how many layers you assign), so you end up with more controllers or revert to a hoard of keyboard commands. That's really immersive, huh?



Exactly! I've read the Black Shark manual, do you know what was my first thought? "Woah, good luck remembering all those shortcuts".

If you feel that ctrl+shift+right alt+; is something easily remembered for when you need to eliminate the drift on your gyro compass, then you have a very good photographic memory and should probably better spend your time making a fortune by playing Blackjack in some casino ;) I find it much simpler to point the mouse over the little knob and click, or roll the mousewheel a la FSX.

And we come to the basis of the whole debate of why we can't have realistic systems modelling in a survey sim.

Apples and Oranges, Blackdog. In BS you had one (= 1) type of helicopter modeled and as it looks each following release will include just one more type. SoW on the other hand will have to incorporate more flyable objects right from the start and with each theater there will be more "must have"s on the list. It's simply a pointless discussion because you can't compare the two venues because of their drastically different focus.

I don't deny this but take into account that average WWII fighters of the same time period will have very similar controls. You need a knob to set the altitude meter correctly, a knob to set your compass and so on, it's not like they each had their own radar set with different modes.

I know this seems to contradict the quoted part about Lock on, but bear with me while i explain. Yes, someone might argue that "since the systems of the time were not so complicated we might be able to do with a keyboard only interface. Furthermore, modelling all those systems will delay production time for each new flyable, so why bother?"

My answer to this would be that first of all, most of the well known warbirds have manuals of them floating around the internet, it's not contemporary top secret electronic equipment, it's an aircraft of half a century ago. In fact, research on proper DM and FM will take much more time and effort than those needed to find the startup checklist of a P-38. I think i even have it lying somewhere in my hard drive and i'm not even one of the guys who collect aircraft manuals, like a lot do.

Now for the other part of the contradicting hypothetical argument, the interface. For me, evolution in the fidelity of systems modelling in the sim's aircraft goes hand in hand with the evolution of control methods. The reason? Well, we can pretty much use the keyboard for the basic controls that all aircraft of the era have. E.g ,these buttons are used to calibrate my altimeter, these buttons are used to calibrate my compass and they work in every fighter that has adjustable altimeters/compass, etc. However, take a look in IL2 and see how much of your keyboard is taken up already, with the limited amount of aircraft systems modelled. Imagine if we suddenly have fuel tank selector valves and other things like that. Now think about plane specific controls, that due to their less-frequently used nature will be relegated to obscure 4-5 keystroke combinations that nobody will remember.

And finally, think about the cost of a good Hotas set to map funtcions to. We are reaching a point where people need an increasing amount of peripherals to remain competitive in online play if we decide to increase the amount of things we simulate. Not everyone can afford a Cougar and a Track IR, but if you've got a gaming PC capable of running SoW chances are you'll have one of the two, or some sort of other equipment.

So what do we do? Do we make sims only for the elite few big spenders? Isn't this driving the sim down into a smaller niche market?

Or do we stay stale and rehash old recipes with slight improvements in graphics, sound and FM/DM?

Well, i'd like it if we could find a middle ground between these two. A WWII sim has an advantage that modern ones don't. The simple nature of the aircraft compared to a modern jet means that you can simulate every last switch in the cockpit for 4-5 WWII fighters in the time you'd need to get just one modern cockpit correct. Now if we can also have customizable controls for the whole lot we're getting somewhere.

I think it's silly to say "nobody will use such features" because there's clearly a debate going on and people want more realism. Your aircraft is more than the sum of your guns, ammo, engine and armor.And in order to make this work without a second keyboard or fancy and expensive gaming pads, we'll have to include a point and click function as well. It's not about realism or even immersion, it's about the mouse being suboptimal in many cases but also the most versatile and cost effective controller on your PC. Given the necessary software a mouse can do everything, from rotating your virtual head ingame , to clicking cockpit buttons, to typing your credit card number in a secure onscreen virtual keyboard and so on. It's a jack of all trades and master of none but it will have to do until you buy that customized gaming keyboard and install TripleHead2Go with TrackIR4.

I'm not much of an online ace, but i've been into flight sims for the past 16 years and to tell you the truth, pressing ctrl+D to drop my external tanks doesn't do it for me anymore. I'd prefer to have it the real away, moving the fuel selector to another fuel tank or risk the engine cutting out during combat if i forget to, and even then risking the tank not separating. This is the stuff we read about in aviation books and the stories of brave pilots who made mistakes, corrected them under enemy fire and managed to return home with a plane riddled full of bullets, but alive and with a story to tell.

Adding a realistic pilot workload will in turn multiply the chances of error and produce much more realistic combat scenarios. If you need to keep your head in the cockpit and monitor some of your vital systems it's that much more possible to suffer a surprise attack. Workload creates the possibility of error, error creates the possibility of imbalance, imbalance means an advantage for someone and that means someone is about to get a kill, and a realistic one at that.

People who don't like this sort of gameplay can scale it down offline, or use another server online. But having the possibility to properly model aircraft subsystems will add a new definition to the term "flying full-real".

I think we would be nuts to miss out on all the extra things that could be included and the awesome gameplay that could be generated as a result, because we act like we don't have adequate controllers to map a few cockpit switches to. That's all.

[ivagiglie]

Blackdog thank you, I've registered to this forum (which I'm reading regularly since last summer) only to say: "I completely agree with your proposals!".
There are a lot of people that would want much more realism than we're offered now.
And, as you said, every time I read a book where some bad/strange (usually recovered) events happened in a mission I wish I could - virtually - face the same one day.

[usagold2004]

In the big scheme, this topic is really kind of pointless. SoW will probably be out this year, so there is no time for a major rework. I never felt cheated with IL2. It is the best WW2 sim you can buy right now. That being said, I think SoW will be the same leap ahead that IL2 was.

Oleg has said already that the detail modeling will be there. Will it be in clickpit/engine start sequence? who knows! its just a matter of time now.

I'm all for having as much detail as possible, but really i'm ready for a new WW2 sim! so pack all of the details you can as long as we dont have to wait another year...

[Tree_UK]

In the big scheme, this topic is really kind of pointless. SoW will probably be out this year, so there is no time for a major rework. I never felt cheated with IL2. It is the best WW2 sim you can buy right now. That being said, I think SoW will be the same leap ahead that IL2 was.

Oleg has said already that the detail modeling will be there. Will it be in clickpit/engine start sequence? who knows! its just a matter of time now.

I'm all for having as much detail as possible, but really i'm ready for a new WW2 sim! so pack all of the details you can as long as we dont have to wait another year...

I think we will be very lucky to see it this year, with the lack of updates, no official website & the game allegedly still not being at alpha stage suggest this is still going to be a long long time coming.

[SlipBall]

Waiting for SOW for sure, but after reading this review of Black Shark,
I just gotta get it this weekend. Check this out

http://www.simhq.com/_air12/air_390a.html

http://pc.ign.com/articles/945/945520p1.html


I can have some complexity and challenge while waiting...would perfer a high hp ww2 prop aircraft though


edit:
No hard copy = no buy from me!!!!!!!!

[Blackdog_kt]

Black Shark will be released in a boxed set too sometime during spring. However, i think that it's still going to have a similar activation scheme.

I think that the boxed set is giving you more activation/deactivation attempts than the downloaded one though.

[SlipBall]

Black Shark will be released in a boxed set too sometime during spring. However, i think that it's still going to have a similar activation scheme.

I think that the boxed set is giving you more activation/deactivation attempts than the downloaded one though.


Well I will look forward then to this news that you bring