My two cents of latest developments
 

Dear fellow gamers

After following the latest news and discussion of the CoD release, I think the best course of action for Sturmovik series would be to quickly change the western publisher. Your involvement with ubisoft can only hurt the future of this great series as ubisoft has over and over again proved to be a very difficult partner and treated sims particularly badly (Silent Hunter V, CoD). They over and over again underestimate your customers and this latest upset is mindbogglingly stupid. How many potential customers will be lost because of this utterly stupid move?
It is extremely sad to see something that many people have worked for years to make and perfect, only to be kicked in the groin by the people who should be supporting them.
Developers, being very professional take the blame and try to downplay the publisher meddling in the development. But in my opinion this great game deserves better than this.
Hopefully CoD survives this and is the success it ought to be.

"Our game did cause Wide-Scale Epilepsy Failures when tested"

Yes thats UBI's fault....not.

You'd better spend your 2 cents for a quick search on facts.

Ubisoft is to blame to enforce their epilepsy program that is not required by law anywhere in the world to solve a problem that really does not exist in any meaningful numbers.
Epilepsy is naturally a terrible disease but only about 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy and most of these are very aware of their state and realize the dangers of playing games. So to use these measures to protect this tiny minority who choose to disregard all warnings can only be described as a publicity stunt.

"Our game did cause Wide-Scale Epilepsy Failures when tested"
And this has not been a problem for many years until ubisoft suddenly decided to made it such.

and who knows what is the real truth? (*wink!*)

I think you'll find it has been a problem for many years, but the developers finally can test for the problem and decided they could do something about it. It's called being socially responsible.

Does this make the impact on the game in regards to frame rate drop not suck? No but it makes the reason for it and the measures that they have taken understandable.

I expect this sort of issue will become quite common in the near future as software companies realise their liability.

Just think, once the hardware companies like ATI and NVidia realise they too are partially responsible (for suppling the hardware that can trigger seizures) they may need to do this pixel by pixel comparison in hardware? At least it will be a global solution and possibly quicker. But think of the visual effects on games!

Cheers!

ill considered is the fact it is the timing of the flashes which cause the siezures.

This +1

We all know it sucks, but it is necessary.

So should all penut products be banned for the greater good?

The reason Luthier gave for implementing the filter was not to prevent people from having seizures, but to stop people suing them.
So how do you best do that? That is the question to address, as it is the one posed by the creators.

I say :-
1) Post a great big warning on the opening screen.
2) Have the filter in place and active regardelss of the warning.
3) Put a disable option in the config file.

I'm not sure where some of you guys coming off saying that the IL-2 guys should just up and change publishers, as if that's possible.

Clearly, Ubisoft owns the rights to publish the IL-2 series, and there's nothing the developers can do about that. It's either they stick with Ubisoft or split off and create a new product that doesn't bear the IL-2 name, which would be a shame given how much work they put into cultivating that name in the gaming community as a high quality sim product.

I'm sure if they had the magical ability to just "stop using Ubisoft" they would, given that they could find another publisher. The truth is, this isn't how it works in the world of business and contract law.

WHAT! Do you dare make sense around here!? BURN THE HERETIC!!!!!


sorry, I had to....read below.

No its NOT necessary. Games have been around for years and people have been dealing with them fine. If someone has a problem with epileptic seazures then dont play video games DUH is that so hard to figure out. How many IL2 players are epileptic?? I have never heard of one problem.

"Our game did cause Wide-Scale Epilepsy Failures when tested"

Does this mean that many of the beta testers were Epileptic? Or does it mean the game caused epileptic type symptoms in otherwise normal people?

Very sensible approach.

In the real world we cannot, and probably should not, remove all risks from life.
All that can reasonably be expected is that risks are identified and either removed, reduced or managed.
It is not practical to remove or reduce all risks.

If the implication of removing the epilepsy risk completely is that game performance is greatly reduced for all then it is surely more sensible to manage the risk in the way suggested.

From my reading of luthiers post I took it to mean they had some software that tested for certain events or conditions (like repetitive flashes) and it found that COD failed the test. I'm sure if they ran the test with any of the early IL2 sims they would also fail the test (as would many existing combat flight sims)!

cheers!