Perfect 109E!! Congratulations for the quality work!

London and surrounding areas were bombed heavily, there was a great deal of damage. I realize BOB was an airwar, but ground objects and landscape were destroyed as well.

When it rained the airfileds were a quagmire of muck and mud. The aircraft looked equally mucked up. The grass was laid flat from rain, etc.

The BOB SOW is just the beginning of a new series like IL2, with addon maps, aircraft, etc. The expansion of war theatres is in the planning as well. What I'm saying is we won't be fighting the BOB for the next 10 years. It would be more immersive to play through the battles in the Ardennes in a muddy, snowy, hostile environment as it really was. The Mediterranean theatre and North Africa, Italy, etc. all had some differences in conidtions,etc.

It would really be a plus, if we had a way to apply muddy and beat up skins to aircraft with little effort. Possibly by just setting the weather conditions the airbases and aircraft skins would be muddy, dark, beat up,etc.

I think about landing and taking off aircraft in the mud and rain, sleet and snow. Sliding around in the muck and mire, and frozen ground in your aircraft would add so much to the feel of what it was like.

Most important is not to be flying in the pristine and beautiful battlegrounds we have in IL2. I'd really like for bad conditions and destruction to be a big part of the experience. :evil:

Oleg & Co,

thx for the ingame screenshots, its starting to come together and the nice tall grass really adds to the immersion instead of just flat tiles like we see in most games :) the screenshot of the tall grass amongst the trees brings back memories of northern france/england just by looking at it !! the trees with thick foliage look very good already even in the basic alpha colours used now.

some Q's:
- will some parts of the tree branches move in the wind in a similar way to the tall grass ?
- will some of the small light objects (chairs, cups etc.. seen in other earlier screenshots ) in the game also get blown away by strong wind weather, or even prop wash or air vortex's when an aircraft is very close ? and will doors/windows etc move in the same way by interacting air physics in the game ?
- will wood debris and other material from ships/aicraft float on the water after the object sinks ? (idea for luthier maybe with his immersion idea's thread, leaving an oil slick with some debris after sinking)
- the 109 looks brand spanking new as if it just rolled of the production line, will the "new" aircraft always look as crisp and perfect right from the start ? (they had to be shuttled in by air as replacements i suspect, and even freshly washed might just not quite look as perfectly clean and unused on their first day of use)
- is the big flat square looking vertical "screen-type" object in the background of one of the screenshots a practice target to set gun convergence, or can it even be used to try and practice strafe from the air in a training environment ? (and get a closeup of the result afterwards to see how accurate you were ?)

thanks for all the hard work, am eagerly awaiting the next installment :)


to the "anti tall grass" folks:
- i doubt the germans would have had gardeners assigned to their engineering crews that built these short term frontline airfields. the best you could hope for is tractor with a large schrub cutter on the back to run through the open area's a couple of times during the warmer months, and even then that cut crass would never be "short" (maybe about half the size it is now)
- oleg's previous screenshots already showed that where vehicles have traveled in fields and roads, they do leave tracks and flatten the grass !! so used area's at the airfield itself will/would/should quickly flatten, which will make the scenery look even more real, some flat and some tall grass in the same area depending on activity (and maybe fire/explosions could flatten + darken grass in local area's to ?)
- the tall grass looks very realistic for what you see in the warmer months in real life in england/france/belgium next to the roads, in fields, between trees in an orchard or forest etc, and it looks MUCH better in the game then neatly trimmed grass like you would only see in a manicured english garden

maybe eventually Oleg can make 2 grass models that can be used for different area's (or different seasons ?), tall like it is now, and medium (about half the size it is now). but if right now you need to choose between tall and medium, the taller one is probably the most realistic for general use in game during summer (and BoB was in the summer months)

My God, I can't wait to see some videos of all this in motion. Do you guys plan to make full use of all the new (or at least shinily rebranded) features of DX11 like all this compute shader and hardware tesselation business?
I have to agree with zapatista and co., I've lived in England for most of my life and spent a year and a half living in France as a child and I haven't seen a great many perfectly manicured fields. Lawns are a different business! All the same, obviously the length of grass at airfields isn't completely irrelevant, I recall reading a pilot's autobiography in which he mentioned that during the summer months waiting at dispersal, taking turns to use the lawnmower was a pleasant distraction from waiting for a call from the dispersal hut. I can't remember whose it was though, but I didn't read it very long ago.
Some of the things that people mention like tree branches that wave in the wind sound really good if they're only visible on the highest LOD model for an object. This game is already looking like a full-blown GPU axe-murderer in scale alone, without the final attractive fiddly details.
I have to agree with the person who said the nose of the 109 looks a bit plastic, as well, I think it's just that there's a couple of hard edges missing between the cooler intake and the rest of the cowling that give it a tiny hint of a vacuum-formed plastic look, but that's such an easy thing to fix, of course. Otherwise the aircraft looks absolutely perfect, if a bit clean and pristine even for a newly delivered one. Perhaps worth considering the length of test flights and the ferry flight to decide how dirty new aircraft look. :-P

I don't like hearing that Oleg is being sick again - I really hope it's not something serious?

Get well! /Mazex

if that was in 1939/1940 i suspect it was one of those little hand driven old style mechanized mowers, and not a motorized one, hence the good exercise they got from it as a bit of a workout. i doubt it was a petrol engined mower they could have done larger area's with

its winter in russia now, so hopefully its just a flu/cold

Let's hope the map at the screenshot isn't a hint for SoW's size of map... would be rather small.

http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/8574/bobmap.jpg

Oleg, Luthier, about this picture I am wondering if:

a) Will the gunner also turn his head back and look at the pilot?
b) Will we be able to put our own face in pilot's and gunner's faces, like now in IL-2?
c) In on line flying in a bomber like Stuka, for instance, will every pilot/gunner choose his own face and will it be seen by the other ?

You can guess where I am pointing out: image that you pilot a Stuka on line with a friend as gunner and being in comms with him, you can look at yourselves one each other behind !! :)

Of course it was, yeah. I'm sure they weren't the only people who were cutting the grass, though. Pretty sure that's not a pilot's job unless there was something strange going on in the RAF. :p