That's a lot of effort for a bloke who doesn't give a 'hoot'.

But hey, and hey again, thanks for the enlightenment. but shouldn't you be arguing with 'raaaid'?

Thanks for the responses, Luthier.

I still see many people are upset over this. I've gotten my enjoyment out of this for the price I paid for the sim easily 100x over. This sim has completely ruined me for even loading up 46.

I'm glad you addressed the sandbox analogy. That's one of the greatest things the IL2 series does over everyone else in the sim business. You guys really do say "here you go. Now make what you want." Please DON'T EVER CHANGE THAT!! That is why the 46 is still going strong after all these years.

I am more than happy to wait, because I know, given enough time, you guys will get it all sorted out. I'll be one of the 1st in line to buy the sequel. More content and features = I can't wait! I'm guess it will be a good 4-5 years before the ball really rolling and the community really takes off. But the main thought I got about your responses, which should be the main thing on every flight sim enthusiasts mind, is the reassurance that work continues. I know we'll get the BoB included with the Russian front. It seems like the addon's are going to be the same way the old game did (as far as that regards). That is very good.

In the end, all good things come to those that wait. I'm looking forward to it. I'm wish I could see just how many theaters, planes, maps, features, etc.,etc., we'll have in the next 10 years. I'm still confident there's many a good times ahead. And this is about the cheapest entertainment I've ever had, even with all the bugs. Here's hoping the sequel comes out sooner than later.

This whole thing/thread reminds of "drunk dialing".
Maybe it's just the bad raspberries?

Certainly, not the time to answer the phone...just pass the berries, back.

That's how I see it.

S~ SternJ This whole process has been like watching a poodle pass a peach seed. Painful, but necessary. :-|

Part II

First of all, I see that my brand of humor offended some people. I forget sometimes that some fans are so passionate about this game they can’t take anything but straight out plain answers, so I’ll answer some of the earlier questions again.

The entire point of an alpha-beta patch is to TEST things. If an alpha-beta patch had no problems, it wouldn’t be called an alpha-beta patch, it would be called a release patch.
We release these test patches fully aware that a portion of the community will get upset over every issue and blame us for it, but we’re still doing it because it allows us to test our software on a wide range of hardware by a huge number of people, and locate and fix problems much faster than if we test in-house.
Programmers themselves usually do a limited amount of testing, and that’s precisely why it’s always a good idea to have their work tested by other people when they think they’re done. Our other employees are usually far too busy to thoroughly test patches, and external teams of professional testers we have access to are not, you know, simmers and if we test with them we’ll get nowhere near the feedback we get over here.
So, we will continue to use this approach in the future as well.
I just want to add however that if you are one of the people who gets really, really upset when alpha or beta software does not work perfectly then please, please don’t participate in beta tests. I’m not being sarcastic or snarky, I sincerely mean it. Beta tests will always be buggy by definition.

You’ve seen how hard it was for us to redo graphics. AI and radio comms are even worse. Flight models? Nightmare.
The only time redoing a feature turned out well was when we redid the sound engine. Pleasant surprise for everyone.

Yes, the current particle system still needs a lot of work.

I’m not in charge of setting prices in any way. I seriously doubt that any of the people who are responsible for setting prices and distributing the product would ever consider anything like that. If I were to suggest something like this to me they’d look at me with big crazy eyes, quietly walk away, and never speak to me again.

----------------

Previously answered – can’t reveal yet.

Previously answered. Sorry, not my call.

Redoing and adding a lot for the sequel.

Sorry, sequel.

We hope it’s been fixed in the RC patch. I see some reports that it isn’t, so we’ll start investigating on Monday.

See the most recent patch notes.

Dedicated server shipped with the initial release?

This is something that we’ll make sure is in the final release patch.

We are looking into this, the current situation is unintended.

We won’t address ground object LODs in Cliffs of Dover.

Completely redoing the entire GUI for the sequel.

It’s nowhere ready at the moment, so you won’t see it before the sequel is released.

Unfortunately, it’s working is intended at the moment. See most other current gen games.
All our shadows are saved into something called a shadow map, a single shadow texture that is then placed on top of the landscape and other objects. The shadow map is of a standard resolution. The technology often leads to a case where a shadow map pixel is not the same size as a terrain or object pixel underneath it. As the camera moves, the shadow map is redrawn and reapplied, and the mismatched shadow map pixels appear to shift or shimmer. This is especially noticeable with a large amount of small objects.
The only solution is to increase the size of the shadow map, and that leads to a huge performance hit so it's not an option at this time.

Don’t have an answer.

Few features were outright removed. The only thing, if I remember correctly, that we had and you guys could not access was player-controllable ground vehicles. Other features may have been modified, shrunk, or not completed to desired specs, but I can’t even remember anything that was cut per se.

No.
They’re too expensive to make to release for free, and we can’t possibly hope to make any money selling them as DLC for Cliffs of Dover.

It’s working as intended. View settings cannot be changed in a track, otherwise people would just record a track online, quickly play it back on another machine, and see exactly where all the enemy planes are.

It appears that the track did not record the bomb bouncing off the roof. If you watch bombs dropped at a shallow angle in real time (i.e. while flying) you’ll see that they’ll bounce. This is what happened, but apparently the bounce didn’t play back in the track.

I’m not the only employee here. We have different people with different skill sets. The person who worked on player-controllable vehicles has absolutely nothing to do with aircraft or any flying part of the game.

Definitely very important considerations. In addition to myself, we now have several new game designers working very hard on improving gameplay elements and creating interesting, exciting, new online modes.
Now that the game engine is rather mature and we aren’t constantly distracted by FPS or crashes, we can finally take a deep breath and start, you know, making a game out of all this.

(wink)

(hurts his eye winking, ow)

Yes, we are aware of it. Sorry, we don’t have a solution yet, looking hard into it.

It is getting the attention it deserves. Unfortunately the code is so bloated and complex, changes to it take forever. See how long it took us to get the graphics working – the AI is even worse.

See earlier about the mods

Well I could always run for senate.

We’re hoping it’s been fixed in Friday’s RC,

No, I don’t believe so.

Thank you for your support and your kind words! I can’t make any comments on online platforms for the sequels at this time however, and I really wish I could.

As stated previously, it’s still my hope that we’ll release a map-making SDK allowing the community to change the existing map as they see fit.
Aircraft – as I wrote previously, they won’t be abandoned with the upcoming final patch. We are carrying everything over to the sequel, and they will get the same attention as new sequel aircraft and definitely benefit from our future efforts.

Absolutely.

I meant that it wouldn’t do anything for the bottom line, for sales. Whatever I do here today won’t sell any new copies, and it will have no effect on the sequel.
The only reason we ever did anything with the game, starting as far back as about last May, was for forum brownie points. It was clear enough even then that any additional fixes won’t pay the bills, that the only way for us to survive financially is to release a good sequel, fix any issues with Cliffs of Dover while making the sequel, and grandfather CoD content into it.
We made the decision then to try to release as many of the fixes as we can in the shape of free updates for Cliffs of Dover and hope that it restores some of the trust and placates the community. That unfortunately never materialized. The community is as hostile as ever, and for most of us the general atmosphere of “you fixed X, about time, let’s never mention it again, now why the hell aren’t you fixing Y” is extremely tiring. Again, don’t feel like being all PC today. Definitely not judging anyone for their attitude or saying they have no right to feel that way, but I personally can only take so much abuse, and that’s why I post here so rarely.
To me, the product speaks for itself, and my efforts on the forums are secondary. I feel that if the people aren’t happy with my product when they play it, I certainly can’t convince them to like it by posting about it on the forums.

Great list, thank you! Do everything we can for the final release.

Luthier,

I understand you saying the dedicated server was shipped with the game, but it's function doesn't really work like a dedicated server.

Let me explain: The dedicated server for IL2COD, brings up a DOS looking box/console that gives off the appearance of a dedicated server, and it very well may act like one too, but here's the major fault: The dedicated server connects like a client.

What I mean is, you load up a dedicated server for virtually every single other steam game out there, and steam is not required to run it. It is it's own standalone dedicated server that streams data through steam for showing on steam's master browser / for anti-cheat etc. I guess what I'm getting at is: If globally, steam goes down for maintenance, so does the server for IL2COD. This does not happen in CSS, TF2, COD4, CS 1.6, etc.,etc., etc.. The server always remains up. It may not appear up on steam's list, but steam doesn't effect it's ability to remain running, just it's ability to show up.

Now, if this was the only concern with connecting like a client to run a dedicated server, I could probably live with that. We've had to code various things to keep the server up and running when steam fails because of it - which is annoying, but it does work. But the main thing without having a real standalone server like the other steam games is made the ability to host multiple servers from the same machine, virtually impossible. I understand Repka has re-imaged their operating system (made virtual machines inside their normal machine) for each and every single instance of the server they want to run. Basically, this is ludicrous. I should be able, just like all other steam servers (such as the examples listed above) install as many and run as many dedicated servers that I please. Having the dedicated server act as a client is just flat out wrong.

Can you please tell me you are getting rid of that system and going to a system like other steam games, where you don't even need the steam service running to run a server. We have one hell of a dedicated machine, and it's sad we can't run more than 1 instance of the game (as a server on it) because of servers acting/connecting like clients.

Can you shed any light on this?

Thanks again i haven't seen a ghost formation since this patch anybody else?

Thanks Luthier for taking the time to write to us.

I may not like all answers but, it is a huge improvement compared to the "silence" we had very often during the past months (Black6 did a great job but we often felt how big the constraints were set upon him regarding disclosure of the current state of progress).

Looking forward to the sequel, good to read that there is a sequel planned and that work is being done (instead of dropping the whole project).

~S~

No, however just saw three floating ships, in the clouds. First time I've seen that. Very funny.

Luthier,
Thankyou for answering questions. I know the team is squashing bugs in the RC patch as best they can. You might have overlooked some important problems, especially numbers (3), (4) & (5).

GAME BUGS:
(1) Hurricane cockpit has blue flashing light/illumination coming from cockpit floor below rudder pedals. Could be rendering of engine flame inside cockpit?
(2) Hurricanes won't ground start until water temp > about 30 degrees.
(3) Spline roads & urban & rural buildings do not appear in online MP server games.
(4) Vehicles travel through bridges at ground height & not over them.
(5) Static objects don't retain their Z-offset parameter, all are returned to ground height in-game.
(6) Rendering issue when cockpit view turns red (pilot injured). See screen shot below.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile...s/?id=99735669
(7) In spitfire IIa, collided head-on with 109, entire plane exploded & disappeared. (a) I exploded, 109 flies on apparently undamaged. (b) my camera view left in mid-air, should be pilot-kill black screen of death after head-on collision.
(8 ) Spitfire engine cuts out when throttle pulled back below 30 percent percent.
(9) On custom-made air bases, taxiing Ai planes still jump into the air & crash to earth, or crash when they teleport as they taxi.
(10) FMB object rendering issues remain unchanged. eg. Piers at Dover only render at relatively close distance in-game.

FMB BUGS
(1) Spline roads don't show in FMB when a mission is loaded, they only show after you re-save the mission.

While some of the answers definitely will piss off some people, I find that they are honest answers all in all. Probably too honest for some people, but then again, honesty is always better than having sunshine and rainbows blown up one's kilt.

While I may not agree with all of the answers, they are what they are. When BoM comes out, I'll have a look at it and then decide if I'll buy it based on the merits and feedback about that product, and despite what CLoD was.