Okay, so the controls are not the problem.

What kind of scenario do you want to offer the visitors?

Let's assume a dogfight over Midway Islands. If you use a simple dogfight server with only two types of aircraft: zero and the Wildcat, the users would only have to do this:

1. In the Briefing screen, pick an airfield. There wil be two airfields (actually spawn points in the air) very close together, right over the Midway islands. One PC must always be blue, the other red (this has to be explained in an instruction, or mark the stations clearly as blue and red).
2. Pick an aircraft, either the Zero or the Wildcat, form that airbase
3. Hit "fly" to start in the air. Both players will start in the air, some distance away from each other...have fun!
4. Hit escape and then "refly" after you have been destroyed (or have landed) or if there is a dedicated server: wait until the game reloads automatically...

This can be done easily in Pacific Fighters as well. With the full mission builder, the mission would be made, and you could have a incoming aircraft perfectly lined up with the flight deck, (you could have the USS Lexington CV2) distance out, altitude, speed all configured. I think that landing a nice old prop aircraft would give your visitor's a real treat...and she has guns!:grin:




(quote)
Our biggest challenge is getting the player to a scenario without going through all the set up, choosing a mission and base, choosing planes, etc


The player would start the game in the air, in the cockpit, and at the controls as you have done with MS...could also be done for your station's 1&2 as well. Where the 2 player's are only seconds away from eye contact, after they first begin to play.

These are all really useful ideas. I'm going to have my electrician/computer guy start trying some of them out.

Thanks!

Here is a simple sample mission for that dogfight example. There are a few tricks involved (using air starts), so you might want to try it out. Just unzip this in the \missions\net\dogfight\Pacific Fighters folder.

The only "problem" is that if the user hits "exit" instead of "refly" after pressing esc, then the multiplay game will have to be loaded again. Just play around with it to see if it works out...


Good luck!

Hi guys,
Thanks for all your help with this. The 2 player mission you posted for us works great!
However, I still haven't had any luck getting the game to automatically begin a mission upon startup. I have even tried to use several mouse/keyboard macro recorders to automatically mimic the manual selections. But, the game seems to have something in it that prevents the use of these types of programs. Does any one know of a way around this? Or, does anyone know how to create a hotkey in the game that I can assign a series of actions too?
If anyone has any other ideas, I am interested in trying anything at this point.

Thanks.

I'm thinking of Hyperlobby, which is an external utility. From the lobby you can choose a multiplay game and this utility will then automatically start your IL2 game and connect to the proper server. So my guess is that it is possible to start IL2 in some kind of automated way, but I don't know how it's done..

Anybody out there that knows this?

Could someone get someone from 1C to talk with this guy? Surely they would do a little mod for this; I can't see it being too hard. Oleg is v interested (I think) in these sort of applications. It can only help, surely? Might get a bunch of sales.

I agree, this is a really big deal, having Pacific Fighters running on the Lexington! Someone needs to alert Oleg ASAP and see if he can have someone take a little time to work with these guys!

Somewhere down here we have AFAIK, 2 fully functional CPits - One me109 and and a Hurricane. I'm hoping to reestablish contact so that I can link the two when BoB comes out.
It'll be something like a travelling museum at airshows
:)

Does your kiosk have room for another box? If so, set up a dedicated server with IL2SC or FBDaemon doing mission rotation. Then there is no issue for picking missions or selecting difficulty settings, only picking aircraft and flying.

A dedicated server machine doesn't have to be nearly as capable as a client machine. For a start, it doesn't need a 3D graphics card...