Best post ever!!

I think that a static campaign will work well since the game is centered around the battle of britain..

On the other hand, if they make a sequel of a more "generic" conflict, like the MTO or PTO, you're not bound to simulate exact historical happenings and such...

When you announce that the game is to be centered around the BoB, people expect the Adlertag to happen at the exact date.. With a dynamic campaign, some of the historic events might've not happened at all (if the campaign is fully dynamic) ..

My 0.02 cents

Well there have been dynamic campaigns released for BoB flight sims, most noteworthy probably the one in Rowan's BoB / Wings of Victory. Not the biggest fan of it myself but it does manage to be dynamic without being ridiculously unrealistic. So yes it's possible, although I understand the reasons why there's no such campaign in CoD.

"spend several hours arguing with Trafford Leigh-Mallory"

Was Trafford Leigh-Mallory the original Spitfire whiner?

"5)Your skill at jerking a joystick gets you posted to an elite squadron of supercharged Spits Your next mission takes you into a railway tunnel where you must skip a 500lb bomb into the path of Goering's train and escape vertically up a ventilation shaft. In the course of doing this you create the first clipped-wing Spit and gain 500 Inventor points....... on your return you get totally pissed on warm beer and find yourself unable to deliver when Spitfire girl offers her all...."

lol, very humorous :) This forum could use a bit more lightheartedness atm

I think that as long as the engine has the rights "hooks" built into it from the get go, you can go as far as you like thanks to the built-in modding support.

Oleg Maddox said that it's already possible to create some sort of dynamic campaign with the stock game, but according to Luthier they wanted to do more complicated stuff. I guess we'll have some the appropriate data output and log files, so that for example a programmer can script some kind of plug-in (let's not forget we'll be getting an SDK some time after release) that tracks mission results from one sortie to the next and acts accordingly within certain parameters.

As far as what the future holds, brace yourself because i'm going to go wild and get too much ahead of things.

I guess it could be a "be an ordinary pilot following orders" deal, all the way to "manage every single sortie" if the rights community mods are available.

However, imagine now having some of this functionality online, with people being able to plan a mission within the server lobby, invite people into it and suddenly the game automatically assigns you a common radio frequency, call signs to use with the ground controllers and gives everyone in your flight the waypoints and flightplan on the in-game map: it's like a fusion/combination of DF server, coop and single player.

Add the ability to schedule AI flights that you can then hop into and take control of and you got the means to recreate real raids on real size maps, with whatever tactical considerations that means affecting the mission towards a more realistic, once again, outcome.
If i can schedule a group of AI B-17s to take off and start heading for a target in the Ruhr or do the same for a bunch of Ju-88Cs patrolling over the bay of Biscay and then take control of them 3-4 hours later, i will be able to fly the interesting parts of the mission while facing as much of the real considerations these guys faced.
And the main thing here is fuel loads and the fear of not making it back to base in case of damage, because what we currently have in IL2 is aircraft with a few thousand miles of range flying sorties of maybe 200-300km round trips at most and usually within gliding distance of a friendly base, all the while loaded with merely 30% fuel with whatever non-historical advantages that brings in combat ;)

I also think dynamic campaigns work very well if they include scripted missions of selected historical events. This was done with GWX (grey wolves expansion) which is a mod for the silent hunter 3 U-boat sim.
Ship traffic was very much dynamic, but selected operations that were well known actions had been scripted to occur in the campaign regardless of other factors: if you were around Narvik during the invasion of Norway you could see the German battleships and the royal navy duking it out along with the transports moving troops, if you were silly enough to brave crossing the channel during June '44 you could easily stumble upon the D-Day invasion fleet (in fact a guy posted screenshots of just that a few years ago on subsim.com from his hydrophone station and there were contacts everywhere), things like that.

Personally, i would fly as just a pilot and wouldn't probably manage the strategic aspect if such an option was ever available, however i'm not against it because it has a certain functionality and set of needed tools that could carry over very well to the new multiplayer mini-campaign mode.

Maybe 2-3 years down the line i'll be able to join a server, click on the map and see a breakdown of the campaign objectives or even data at the strategic level (amount of aircraft per type, ammunition , pilots/team "lives", fuel and their respective rate of replenishment for example) to decide what to do. Then i could click on an enemy installation and select "last known intel", it would display the date of last known data along with "installation capacity %" and "estimated production output" for factories, or "estimated aircraft stationed" for airbases, things like that.

Then i'd select a mosquito, click on the "flight planner" tool and draw up a flightplan for my next mission. My AI navigator would provide course data to help my fly it, i'd go over the target and snap some pictures. If i made it back to base i'd be treated to some black and white screenshots and an update to the campaign map's intel on the specific target. Other people could then use this to do similar stuff and plan air raids against the target, escort for the bombers and so on.

Such a thing would be awesome for a very simple reason: it would give people of varying tastes an incentive and a way to all fly together in the same environment. The wacky folks like me would be flying anti-submarine/anti-shipping patrols and recon flights, the fighter guys would always have something going to intercept, friendly bombers to escort and targets across the channel to raid and flying as a bomber guy would give some very tangible rewards.

And the best part of it is that as long as the engine is moddable by design, it's not the developers who will have to do it all by themselves but hobbyists from the community will be able to help.

Most probably i'd let the folks who enjoy the strategic aspect do most of that, what i would do however is browse a list of sticky messages they had posted on the team lobby with the kind of missions they want: "recon needed at target X", "top cover escort requested for bombers, contact me for details" and so on, then i'd plan my mission, invite my buddies to my flight and go out to do it.

I think it would be great because it would allow everyone to become as much involved as they wanted with the deeper aspects of air warfare planning, or not at all involved and keep flying missions that other people provide (like it is today on mission based DF servers) or even ad-hoc sorties of their own if they just wanted to have some quick fun.

Is it going to happen tomorrow? Definitely not. But i can see it making its first steps within the next 2-3 years ;)

That's very Wellum, though he was quite sure he saw the undercarriage drop when he fired upon it.

BTW, terrific post.

Well, if you've never seen such a thing in operation, I recommend you try OFF.

But simply put, you set up the historical OOBs, including reinforcements and withdrawals happening more or less when they really did. Then you have each squadron do things similar to what each did in real life. Not exactly the same, or you're into canned missions again with no replay value, but definitely giving the flavor of actual events. Every squadron all over the game map is doing this, and whenever opposing units meet each other, there's combat. If the player is in the neighborhood, he can be part of the fights there but otherwise the results are computed, not rendered. The player can join any squadron on the map at any point in time covered by the game. His squadron gets its assigned missions like all the others but he plays out his own. If he wanders off his assigned track, he'll run into whatever else is going on in other areas. The game keeps track of the player's own career and those of his squadronmates. This goes on until either the player dies or the game reaches its end date.

That's just the simple version. You can add all sorts of things to this, but this is the essential core. It's been done many times over the past several decades so there's no great secret, no need to reinvent the wheel. It's just tedious to set up and test.

It might not sound like much, but this sort of thing is a proven immersion-provider and is actually the most popular type of flightsim gameplay in history. Besides giving the player the feeling of being an actual participant in the battle, not knowing what tomorrow will bring, he can get this experience even if he only has time for 1 sortie per day, at a time when none of his online friends are available, due to real life constraints. And because all squadrons are doing semi-random things, the player can pick a favorite squadron and play the same time period over and over, and never see the same thing twice.

I've always wondered how in virtually the same breath, someone can talk about the historical accuracy of a sim, and then lament that there is no dynamic campaign.

They are mutually exclusive as far as I can see.

That said I have no real horse in this race. I am almost 100% an online pilot.

Very few, and I mean one or two, offline "campaigns" have ever held my interest. Their downfall is always the AI. The computer controlled elements, either enemy or friend, are just so uber at fighting, and yet totally stupid at taking orders that the campaigns quickly melt down to tedious "goat herding" of your element, who won't obey anyway, or being sniped from low earth orbit by a tail gunner with a pop gun.

Boring.

I'll take human opposition any day.

Unfortunately its been confirmed we cannot actually fly through the railway tunnels with this release so the Goering mission will have to wait till a later patch.

Then there is always the issue of the possibility of Goering himself fitting in a railway tunnel...


:grin:

Wow. Looks like Blackdog has been putting some thought into this for a while. Great post.