That's a good way to ruin it for those that go trough the pain of learning to do things right.
My interest for IL-2 died when everyone and his little brother started using their own home brew online. It killed it quick for me. The feeling that we were all on the same playing field was gone.

Would you really feel that everything was ruined for you if, for example, you used manual fuel system priming pump levers and fuel cock levers when someone else had set an aid on to automate that part? If yes, why is that? If no, why not?

Although not entirely related: why do you feel as if the playing field was no longer level with user custmisation?

Flying ww2 aircraft was long hours of a lot of hard work mixed with brief moments of sheer terror. The better trained pilots had more time with the head outside the cockpit. Aids and automatic game features eliminates the need for traning. In most cases, traning is what made the difference between hunters and pray. The guy that has the game do the hard pilot work, like watching gauges, follow correct procedures, keeping the engine at the correct settings, has more time to look around and do the fun part of flying. That creates a very solid advantage online.


Because it wasn't. Some people flew with heavy fluffy clouds, othes without, some people used home brewed weapons, some tweaked their engines to their own wishes. The game died right there for me.
Even the large mod packs have their own people pushing certain flavours of reality. Theres no level playing field for a long time in IL2.

Just stick with 4.09m then!

I stoped playing Il-2 for some time now.

I'd love if they'd model all plane's systems as they were and as they worked. It may be impossible to operate in a multiengine aircraft but for single engine fighters is not that bad: :-P


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfbU5DtUPb4:-P

This is what I'd like to see too. I want to learn how to do these things properly. I think though, for me it would require either clickable cockpits or separate in-game keyboard profiles for each different plane type.

About the stuff mentioned in the original post, it reminded me of a racing sim called rFactor and the server-side settings it allows players when racing online. I wonder if this (see screenshot) is the sort of thing you're talking about?

http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/5...orsettings.jpg

The assists selected in the screenshot are pretty much the default standard for open servers (combined with less than 100% realistic damage).

Now, you don't have to use them, but most people by far do, just to remain competitive. So, realistically, there is an issue there with providing assistance measures for people. Which can be basically summed up as - if the assistance measures actually work, then those who use them will have an advantage over those who don't.

Which is not to say those people using the assists can't still be out-driven or out-flown by those who don't use the assists. But the fact remains, for assists to be useful, they must be providing an advantage of some sort. Otherwise they'd be of no use and people wouldn't use them. And they won't use them at all if they actually disadvantage you competitively (like some of the 'assists' left unchecked in the example above).

If indeed these settings are the sort of thing you're suggesting, and they were implemented in SOW, then like in rFactor and other sims, the SOW servers would soon enough settle on their own selection of assists that would be considered standard settings.

For me, on 'full-real' servers, I wouldn't want to see any assists available at all. But for the majority of online servers a degree of selected assists would be alright (and although I'd rather not be disadvantaged or cheated out of a victory because of it, I think it would be inevitable eventually). And for the old furballing, unlimited plane-set, opposing bases 5 kilometres apart style servers, you'd probably have everything short of invulnerability available.

So, yeah, the only differences I can see between what you're suggesting and what we've got now in IL-2 is that you're suggesting the assists become more sort of pro-active. That is, instead of not switching something on to make things easier (ie. one of the realism features), you're suggesting something is switched on to make things easier (ie. aids or assists).

Or maybe I've misunderstood you altogether. Because, as I understand it, people can still choose to fly full-real on an 'arcade settings' server, right? I honestly can't remember. If not, they should be able to, and simply changing that in SOW could address the whole issue of merging different realism preferences online, even without intoducing new assists or aids.

Is a good thread by the way, now I know how to start up a P-47 and a FW-190 :-)

Les.

That's the kind of experience I'm after too, thanks for posting Jaws. Now, how many of those switches would need to be accessed in a combat environment? Hardly any I reckon. I agree that mouse clicking during combat would be impossible but most of the time you'd be operating switches before/after takeoff or during cruise....no problem.

Just hope the third parties can deliver for us.

That was an excellent video and shows that most of the controls used in a start-up have absolutely no bearing during combat, they are set-and-forget until it's time to land.

In fact, if you pay attention you'll see that there's a cover over the switches so that the pilot will not push them accidentally, you wouldn't want to turn off your artificial horizon by mistake for example.

This is obviously an instructional video so he goes through the motions slowly. I think that if he wanted, he could have it up and running within less than a minute by simply pushing everything in succession.
As for the warm-up, we can see that most high performance WWII engines reach operating temperatures very fast. The captions said "Wait for 45 degrees Celsius oil temperature before taxi" and in the time required for him to look around the cockpit and confirm that he didn't forget anything, it was already at that temperature.

The rest is stuff that you do while taxiing to the runway, i mean since you're obviously going to s-turn in a taildragger might as well check if your turn indicators work.

I'm off to watch the rest of his videos on the 190 :cool:

The video with the fuel tank selection is nice too.:-P