Sorry

How can you expect Oleg or Luthier to answer some of the very interesting questions asked with all the c... you are throwing at each other polluting this thread?

Hope it will not discourage Oleg of posting new updates as well.

I agree. But I think they have too much work to do to answer all our questions. If we look over recent updates, clearly the only questions that get answered are ones that are interesting to the team.
Either way, we should count ourselves lucky to get updates.

And I will apologise again for having my rant; it is intolerable. But clearly I spoke on behalf of a few members on the forum.

Anyway; this is all virtual so non-one was hurt ;)

And just to say that I edited all my posts before to apologise.

I still think this was an interesting question on page 15 in reaction on that tracersmoke

Well, back on topic somewhat...

Well, in many planes cockpits are cramped and in others some instruments are tucked away in some funny places, for example fuel gauges in P-51s. While i agree that seeing our own virtual body would add to immersion somewhat, there are practical problems as well. I also agree that having a pilot body that is totally still is worse than having none at all.

For example, bear in mind that due to the increased amount of realism there needs to be an increased amount of controls as well. Since most people have a HOTAS and keyboard at best and not custom-made simpits, the decision was made to allow the use of clickable cockpit switches in order to cut down on the amount of keyboard/button controls needed to operate the aircraft. A virtual pilot body in the cockpit would seriously hinder the use of that, forcing you to bind, memorize and use large numbers of keyboard shortcuts for things that are probably only used sparingly throughout the mission (so they don't have to be bound directly to keyboard/HOTAS), but still need to be operated.

Case in point, things like bomb selection/release panels and side consoles/electric controls panels. For example, in a P47 half of the electric controls switches would be obscured by the pilot's left leg if he was modelled in the cockpit. You need those switches to actually start the plane up but won't need them again until you land and shut everything down, so the obvious solution would be to not bind them to keyboard or stick buttons but operate them with the mouse once at the start and once before the end of the mission. If there was a pilot modelled in the cockpit, the view would be blocked and you'd have to bind them to keys/buttons.

I wouldn't mind seeing a pilot, but if he was interfering with controls there should be an on/off toggle switch or transparency option when hovering the cursor over him.

Just on a side note: Decision to make SoW open-ended has absolutely nothing to do with IL-2 mods, as it was adopted as early, as in mid-2003, when the very first concept of SoW evolved and by then there was no sign of any so called mods.

I think it's been said, and you can see from pics that it is 3D. I also seem to remember that it will not react to being flown through it as that would require a heck of a lot of resources and further work.

Really? OK, that could make sense. of course, there is no real evidence to prove either of us right, but I could go with that ;)

Ah, ok... thx Jockey, I must have missed it somehow.:cool:

Hmm, I raised the question of 3D smoke effects in the first place, because the fuel-leak effect looked a bit 2D in the pictures. It is so hard to get a feel of the sims movement though from the pictures.