OK, I've read this entire thread and I think that most folk would like to see more complex systems management but not necessarily through mouse clicking.

I think the arguments arise because there are 2 distinct camps of people:

1. Those that primarily enjoy the combat and the skills and strategy required to down the bad guys. For them complex systems may be seen as an unnecessary and unwelcome delay in getting at the enemy. I respect these guys and acknowledge that many have incredible flying skills and a great knowledge of air combat tactics. However, flying skills and tactics were only part of the real mission.....

2. Those that want to engage with the full reality of WWII flying, as they may have read in first hand accounts. Re-living those accounts and getting the real experience of the air war, yes, including the boring bits.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I fall into this second group. I believe that IL2 is very good at giving us the rush of air combat. However I don't believe it is so good at replicating the true work load of a WWII pilot. For many of us, immersion comes from learning an aircraft the way a WWII pilot would have been required to - this includes the flight characteristics AND knowing the procedures required to keep the engine from quitting on you when you're over water 300 miles from land.

To me, it should matter how you handle your fuel load, so when the fight comes you have an aircraft capable of responding. It should matter how you use your mixture controls, boost and prop pitch on a long mission to conserve fuel and get you to the target and home again. Can you imagine the tension these guys felt in the pacific when flying distances over water and the urgency of watching fuel consumption and the health of the engine? As of now you really don't feel any of that urgency and respect for the engine that is keeping you from potentially a watery grave. That is the element that is missing for me - I know we'll never feel the true terror of life and death combat but with a good simulator you certainly can experience the mission tension and some of the thought processes and feelings that the real pilots recount in the many books available.

I really am impressed with what Oleg has given us already with regards to CEM, incredible really. All I'm asking is that proper consideration be given to the things that worried real pilots in the war - essentially fuel state, the health of the engine and life support systems and navigation. I'm not necessarily after every last switch (although I wouldn't complain), I just want to feel more like I've been there and done that when I'm reading these first hand accounts. Giving us things like fuel master switch, primer, battery switch and proper mixture and turbo controls (on US planes anyway) would go a long way to allowing us to follow procedures fairly closely.

Hitting the I key and going to full throttle was not the way it was done in the war and since this is a simulator, shouldn't we have an option that requires a good knowledge of the procedures required to fly a real mission?

I hope this doesn't come across as over demanding or a rant. I just want to express what I think the second camp of simmers might be looking for in SOW, including all the guys coming over from FSX etc.

No thanks for me.

Click
 

I hate to use the mouse to click on some switches in the cockpit.

A good joystick, pedals and TrackIR. no more.

I don't want clickable cockpits, instead of that use a real joystick to select and switch the options of the cockpit.

I have a Saitek X52Pro you can setup it with 202 buttons and 7 axis, I think is enough. When you use the TrackIR (my case) is not easy to focus on some areas to use the mouse to click.

NO, I DON'T WANT A CLICKABLE COCKPIT

But I DO WANT a complex engine management, more real, all the necesary steps to start the engine, to take care and not exceed in maniful pressure and all that.

This thread was started a year ago and every time you look at the forums someone has resurrected it again.

No clickable, if you want clickable and full sequence controls go to MSFT Flight Simulator or Falcon. You can get all that time wasting stuff to give you the whole banana.

Most Falcon users create a one button programmable switch for start sequence.

Take real flight training flight lessons they are not that expensive. You can get all the feel and click you want, and it will actually mean something.

Lookup the CHPRODUCTS MFP and other control devices. You just program them. They beat heck out of trying to shake the hun on your bum, while trying to locate the flaps on the screen to click it. LOL

:rolleyes: :rolleyes:

While better mix management is a good idea, doing it for increased range makes no sense. Even the largest mod maps out there do not require that kind of micro management of fuel. And as an aside, no aircraft in this sim have the range of their real counterparts anyway. And even though I've flown 1+ hour one way missions on the "Slot" map, there is no way anyone is going to fly a 6 odd hour mission to Berlin and back, or one in the Pacific.

A. No maps that large.

B. Why?

I've flown IL2 since December of 2001. One thing I've noticed is that as servers become more strident in their quest for "hyper-reality" in re-creating WW2, the fun factor goes way down.

I can't believe this is ressurected, but it's somewhat of a weird coincidence because i've spent quite some time with clickpits lately.

The last couple of months i've been flying FSX on a friend's PC when i visit him. I never got into FSX before, i don't own FSX and i don't believe the flight models are necessarily better than the combat sims we usually fly. I just got interested one day when i went over his place to visit and i saw the shiny graphics (he's got an environment add-on that is the best thing i've seen up to the latest spitfire video we've seen a couple of weeks back) and sat down to see what he was doing out of sheer curiosity.

I also don't fly trans-atlantic flights in an Airbus or do airline stuff. You see, that buddy of mine has spent quite an amount of money over the years and has amassed a collection of add-on aircraft for FSX that blow the stock ones out of the water.

So, what we do take turns flying when we are having a flight-sim evening is mainly small, bush-flying aircraft with STOL capabilities, amphibians or vintage birds and that includes warbirds as well. I also have spent minimal time on IL2 since i started getting into this habit, because the aircraft suddently started feeling too "easy" for lack of a better word. Not that i wouldn't get my behind handed to me online if i didn't have network problems, what i'm talking about is not easy in the sense that the FMs are not good (to the contrary, most of the FSX FMs are worse than IL2's), but i feel like the planes in IL2 are suddenly "empty" and too predictable and they don't give me the feeling that there's a bazillion nuts and bolts and turning bits that might fail. To put it accurately, the aircraft in IL2 don't scare me anymore and they don't strike awe and fear anymore into my flight-simming soul as they used to do in the past.

Let me tell you that clickpit or no clickpit, just flying around in the A2A P-47 and watching all the gauges move, with display errors as well due to engine vibration, is one of the best simming experiences i've had in my life. If you think you know the way to execute a boom and zoom attack in a Jug because you fly IL2, think again because you know NOTHING. I didn't know either and we could say that i still don't since i haven't actually done it, but i can at least finally feel and appreciate a tiny bit of the workload involved without the anxiety of possible fiery death that comes with real air combat.

In IL-2 you just select your thottle setting to avoid overspeed and dive on the bandit. To add insult to injury, regardless of aircraft type most of us follow a completely unrealistic procedure that can cause extreme malfunction in real life, we dive with rads open and throttle at idle to cool the engine fast, so that we can push it to overheat later. Well, if the in-game standard procedure being the exact opposite of what applies to the real world is not enough of an indication that something needs fixing in the next sim, i don't know what is. A real engine might suffer anything from rough running, to cracks that lead to reduced performance and higher fuel burn, to outright seizure with no possibility of restart if the cylinders are cooled from 250 degrees Celsius down to 100 C in the span of less than 20 seconds.

In the A2A Jug before you even think of diving you have to
1) Pull back the turbocharger lever. Yes sirs, the Jug is like having two throttles instead of one, you use the throttle up to about 7-10k ft and from then on you use the turbo lever and you have to develop a feel for it, because the turbocharger fan is slower to react to inputs due to inertia. It certainly isn't a point and shoot aircraft.
2) Pull back the throttle
3) Select a good RPM range to keep from overspeeding
4) Close your cowl flaps to prevent shock cooling of the cylinders
5) Adjust intercooler flaps (for the carburator temperatures) in expectance of cooling due to the high speed dive
6) Now you can dive on the bandit.

Does it sound hard? Yes. Is it really that hard? Not by a long-shot. Is it closer to what they really had to do when flying a Jug? Definitely.

With a fidgety TrackIR set (my track-clip Pro is broken and i have it held together with duct-tape) and no real HOTAS or pedals (just an old sidewinder precision 2 stick), it takes me about 5-7 seconds to put the plane in diving configuration for a boom and zoom attack. If i map the necessary inputs to the keyboard i can probably start the dive immediately and look through the gunsight while i simultaneously press the necessary keys, it's not like we'll exceed safe engine parameters in the first 5 seconds of the dive anyway.

Other aircarft i've flown with my buddy in FSX are Fw190A and Spitfire variants and Catalinas (both vintage and restored versions) and they are a blast just to fly around in. We did a 500km nap of the earh run in a 190 one day at maximum continuous power skimming over the trees at 470km/h, a 10 hour flight in a catalina from the Bahamas to St.Maartin at 7000ft while taking turns at the wheel and doing a measly 100knots the following two evenings.

If the aircraft feels like real machinery and can create the illusion that it's operating like the real one, it's a joy just to operate it and fly around. And that's coming from someone who was never a big fan of FSX or airliner jets, was never a fan of jets in general (except Mig Alley), was never a fan of anything too complicated in regards to air combat simulations and is still not a big fan of the stock FSX aircraft.
But if you see some of the add-on 3rd party vintage birds for FSX and don't think "i wish we get something that feels this real in SoW someday", well, sell your joysticks and your simming gear because you're in the wrong hobby.

So, instead of focusing on wether we want clickpits or not (which is merely an interface question), let's focus on wether we want realistic systems modelling on our aircraft (which is what really has some bearing on the gameplay, since our gameplay is about realism), because the real warbirds of WWII were far more complicated than what we have in IL2.


IL2 is still a great combat sim and it was king in its day, but it's getting old.
In comparison with other simulated aircraft i've recently flown, the aircraft of IL2 feel like a collection of arithmetic properties and not a breathing, living piece of dangerous machinery that's oozing character around you as you sit in the cockpit.
The engines always run the same, always overheat the same, even fail the same if you do manage to push them over the limit, you got 2000 horsepower, a few thousand pounds of weight, a dozen aerodynamic parameters and a bunch of guns, now run wild and play along with them. Sorry, but that is not good enough for a modern sim. It was perfect for the time IL2 hit the market and the following years, because there was nothing with a higher level of detail to compare to. Well, now there is.

That's what mostly missing from IL2, character in the machinery, and is precisely what i hope to see in the next title. We know the graphics are outstanding, we know the FMs and DMs will be top notch, we know the sound will be good and we have received word that the AI and the campaign will be improved. That's the only thing left to truly make SoW shine, make the plane around you feel as real as possible, so that even when flying around the countryside with not a bandit in sight you'll have something to occupy yourself with and feel good doing it, because suddenly you realize...

"Man, it's almost as if i have my personal little time machine here. I'm dodging flocks of seagulls over Dover in my Hurri and while it's not exactly frantic, i still have to flick that switch here and push that lever there and keep an eye on my temps because it's a hot summer day, regardless of the interface i use to do it, and it feels warm, alive and REAL!"

Most of all however, such a thing will add a whole new dimension to combat as well. If you have to keep your systems within acceptable parameters, you'll also have to plan things way ahead. This introduces something that's missing big time from combat sims. We do have the surprise factor, the instinct and talent factor, the tacticians, the marksmen and the oustanding furballers, but we lack a very important aspect that characterized much of the aerial warfare of the time: casualties because of mounting workload. This intertwines with all the rest and will make engagements all the more realistic. People might not press on like there's no tomorrow, more people breaking from fights, conservative survivalist tactics, and yet, even if you do break away that battle damage might mean that you get a cascading failure of aircarft systems that you can't cope with, a mountain that's slowly crumpling all around you and is about to swallow you. This is what makes for exciting flying, having something to scare you even after the combat is over and you're well inside friendly territory.

Don't think that in the heat of combat these guys used to fly with checklists like in FSX, it's just that after a few flights you develop a feel for the aircarft and start understanding what's right and what's wrong without having to look up the manuals all the time, plus most of the instruments are marked and you know not to put the needle in the red zone for more than a couple of minutes.
So, while it's a bit of extra knowledge to learn, it adds tons of immersion and if we have good interfacing options it will not inconvenience anybody. Heck, let's have customized views for each aircraft (like it is in RoF) so we can pan the view and click if we want, and let's also have the possibility of mapping them to keyboard and HOTAS so we don't click anything if we don't want to. In the end, all the important stuff will go on keyboard and HOTAS and the customized,"frozen" snap views will be used for things like startup, shutdown, zoomed in gunsights and switching tanks.

I think all of this should be falling under systems management and not stictly clickpits, as that is somewhat misleading. It's not a question of useless interfacing, it's a question of highly necessary and overdue realism settings that need to be added. And if someone doesn't like it and wants the old IL2 style model, just click "simplified engine management" in the difficulty settings and you're good to go ;)

Great post Blackdog, I think that sums it up very well. It's a shame about the clickable bit in the title of this thread because that isn't the main issue at all and it's throwing people.

The reason the thread gets resurrected is because the issues it discusses are important to people...sure, maybe not everyone, but there are plenty of us who want a proper simulation of WWII combat, not just a pretty point and shoot.

As for the argument, if you want systems, go play F4 or something, I play IL2 because I'm a WWII fan and nothing else captures the combat side of things better. Why should I want to fly a modern jet? And no, I have no desire to go for my pilots licence and I certainly wouldn't get to fly any warbirds if I did.

This is a simulator, is it not? As such it should simulate the demands of real air combat, including the need to remember the procedures to stop your engine from over speeding or your cowl flaps from being torn off in a dive. I just don't see that as boring and nerdy at all. You really are kidding yourself if you think real pilots had the luxury of floating about watching the pretty scenery until the combat started.

We all love WWII planes don't we? Surely anyone with a love of a certain aircraft would like to think they could sit in the real thing and feel at home, knowing what does what and how to crank it up? Otherwise, what is the point of all the beautifully crafted cockpits we're getting - just glorified eye candy.

I know Oleg will do what he wants at the end of the day. All I ask is that if he really doesn't want to model systems to the degree we desire then please give the third party developers the interfaces to do it for us. It really would increase the fan base considerably and bring over all the FSX crowd too.

Nearmiss,

You've got me confused. You seem to be telling me to clear off and play F4 because I enjoy learning the ins and outs of a particular aircraft and its systems and yet from your recent post from AAA (quoted below) you like just the same thing.

"So, yeah you might call me an enthusiat with a different approach to the IL2. I enjoy flying the aircraft, but unlike many others I fly one aircraft for months and study all the manuals,etc. Yes, it matters to me to get the most out of an aircraft and better still improve performance where it all makes sense. I mean if you fly the P51D in the HUD, you never learn anything about the aircraft and really all you do is take a virtual aircraft device and shoot at something. IMO, flying the HUD, the little bit learned is missing the whole point of a great air combat simulator like IL2. "

I don't want to start a slagging match here, I just want folk to realise that there are several types of simmers out there - those that want just air action, those that want to feel immersed in a machine of the time with all the problems it posed for the pilot, and those that want a bit of both.

Can't we just accept that and provide options so that everyone is happy?:grin:

ElAurens,

I accept your point regarding current map size but in my opinion that's not a good enough reason to skip the need for fuel management in a next gen sim like SOW.

I kind of hope that one day Oleg will give us a mid-mission save capability so that longer missions could be flown. And no, that wouldn't necessarily be boring if we had a good systems simulation where things NEED to be watched and managed to ensure mission success. That coupled with navigating or keeping in formation would keep me very well occupied me thinks. The challenge of getting there and back is just as rewarding as the combat part in my opinion.

I play exclusively offline but if enough people truly want quick fix air combat then I'm sure there will always be a server out there for you with the correct options set. There must be a reason these servers are going for more realism and that usually comes from demand. Perhaps you need to start your own dogfight FUN server to satisfy all this pent up demand?

S!

Cockpits could be clickable to an extent, like those buttons you DO NOT NEED while flying, or very rarely then. Like magnetos, fuel pumps, batter on/off etc. Trims, mixture, prop pitch etc. everyone already has on their sticks and throttles. It is just what you put as clickable and what toa keystroke/joystick button..or both. Really matter of configuring. A button/switch/whatever could be clickable but at the same time used by a key stroke or button press. A win win to me :)

If implemented correctly the clicky cockpit would add to immersion in my opinion. As of engine management..in IL2 it is very easy and hopefully SoW will be closer to real. Maybe many "desktop aces" would see how much work it really was to fly a warbird ;) Not like now, slam throttle and forget about it..Not really convincing to scream for realism if you can't handle realistic engine management. It is part of flying the plane and fighting in it. My 2 cents..