You give someone a poly/texture size limit and some general outlines and requirements and you can have a hundred buildings submitted in a week. I'm not saying that there isn't going to be need for quality control and maybe some tweaking, but how do you mess up 4 walls and a roof? The same with static vehicles. Not all them have to be movable. If they are doing a battle of moscow there should be maps with dozens or hundreds of knocked out vehicles on the side of the roads. Why insert a dev made truck, then set the damage to "dead" when there is nothing more you can do it it? It's already busted, why not use a static vehicle made by a fan? That way you also have some variety so not every single destroyed vehicle on the side of the road is "lend-lease jeep" or "5 ton truck".

As for vessels, fishing boats, tugs, barges, etc only need one damage setting, "destroyed". That doesn't require a bunch of crazy compartments or intricate internal detail. As for larger naval vessels, if the tools are available, the requirements and constraints are clearly established, then it shouldn't be a problem for the devs to get dozens of usable (maybe with slight tweaking) larger vessels.

Battlefield 1942: Forgotten Hope mod added hundreds of vehicles, all of them high quality, meshing with the game perfectly, and with realistic damage values (or the closest approximation you could get with that engine).

Silent Hunter III: Lots of additional content, just as good or better than the stuff included in the game.

I could go on, but I figured those were the two most would remember. I'm not saying fans can make the planes and cockpits, but static objects and the vehicles that the player will never pilot. If MG released the tools and a few of their existing building, vehicle, gun, and ship models then the model makers out there could examine them, see what they need to do and replicate them for their new content.

This has been done before in hundreds of mods. I'm not saying that MG should just let anyone email them their models, but maybe create a subforum where good models, that meet the quality and requirements of the game could be examined and then moved to a developer viewed thread by the mods where only the best of the best make it.

Couldn't hurt. Or are MG intent on keeping all of their tools a closely guarded secret until after they go out of business because nobody wants to buy a game with 4 flyable planes, no decent missions, and 2 different tanks you can attack?

I am no modeller but I have watched enough TD discussions on the matter to know that there is more to a modelling specification than just texture size and poly count. There are also such things as model breakup (in specifically named parts), materials to be used, specific regulations for animations and and and ...

But, quite honestly, before MG diverts any manpower into the SDK I'd rather see them use it to fix the goddarn engine bugs ... and the AI. ;)

I am a modeller and all that is true, release an SDK with a good white paper detailing the required specifications and modellers will be able to work something out.

But youre right.....fix the game first.

Agreed, for a user to make a new A/C or even a cockpit for an existing A/C and to the incredible standard they have set will take a few months unless you can work on it full time and it would still take a long time.

Much longer than six months I would say. Oleg mentioned several times that it took his team that long to produce a simple aircraft for the old Il-2.

Given Maddox Games' efficiency (only took them 6 years to make a broken game) I would say most real studios would laugh at that statement.

Also, as I said a few times already, the modelers wouldn't be doing aircraft, instead they'd be leaving it to the devs. The modelers who prove themselves on the static objects, could possibly move on to ground vehicles, etc. Maybe if someone in the community proved to be incredibly skilled and progressed through the steps of more and more complex models, they could move on to AC, but the intent of my post was that you could have the modelers work on the tough stuff while the community gives you the "atmospheric content". The models that just sit there and look pretty, that only have two damage settings, the ones that are not going to make or break the game.

?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????

Of course the modellers would be doing A/C!!!

And while were at it "most real" studios don't go into this level of detail and have a much larger team!

Do you have any experience modelling, judging from what you posted I would say, No?

They must have been furious that the Zero wins the fight on the box too LOL.

I think it's the only sim out there where the Axis aeroplane wins the fight on the box. I'm such a 1c fan. :) I dare them to let a Messerschmitt win a fight. There's just no way.

Is there a reading comprehension issue here?

I'm saying the "COMMUNITY MODELERS" would not do the aircraft due to the complexity and the requirements. The Community Modelers could do all the simple stuff that makes a map look real (buildings, static objects, simple vehicles, etc.) so that the developers (Maddox Game employees) could focus on those. The less time they have to spend working on simple things like static objects, the more time they have to work on Aircraft. If this worked, the sim could have extra planes because the devs could devote more time to it instead of working on a hundred different peasant buildings, haystacks, and Moscow apartment blocks.

Maybe if some modeler showed that he could do buildings well he could then be asked to do some static vehicles, if those worked out well some actual vehicles, and if those worked out well maybe move on to aircraft. The percentage of people who could do AC that would be suitable for the game would be quite low, but getting all the simple stuff out of the way would probably help the devs a lot.

So I made a quick little mod to see what the deserts of north africa would look like in cod.
http://www.abload.de/img/shot_20120121_205348lv159.png
http://www.abload.de/img/shot_20120121_205116up1hl.png