Hostile units position call
 

Hi

Currently if you fly offline campaign/missions full switch it can be possible not to encounter the enemy, this is realiistic can can be frustrating.

Would it be possible to get calls from the ground controller to vector you to possible enemy contacts ie via radar in the appropriate area & year or by forward observers & spotters. Also friendly air & ground units could request assistance & give you a vector to the area.

This way we could maintain our full switch emmersion without having to use the allseeing red & blue radar we can turn on in the difficulty settings.

You can already have kind of reporting by use of FoW (Fog of War) feature in FMB.
Defined objects can cause enemy planes appear on the map for the time, they are in their visiblity area.

Can this be switched on in DGEN campaigns when you set the difficulty options for the campaign?

Yes, under the difficulty settings when you start the campaign, But only if you edit the dgen campaigns i think.

I would however love to see something like the 'distress call position' mod included in, where when the AI are under attack, they give you a grid location of there position, as otherwise its fairly pointless them saying anything, since you have no idea where the hell they are. They might as well be saying wibble wibble wibble.

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y29...17-46-05PM.jpg

We can do that in 5 minutes, code is written long ago but what about those who fly without HUD messages? For proper implementation we would need lot of new sound files for all of the nations in the game.

If it's simple to implement maybe it should be done. It's just a feature like the HUD itself. The ones that don't use HUD messages can do it for a number of reasons, being one of them that they are somehow "useless" in a lot of ways. Adding more info to the calls can actually make messages something worth using back again.

Just a thought, please don't get me wrong.

Any chance call signs for units could be implimented? At the moment, you have no idea if they are talking to you anyway. For example a rotte could be edelwiess 1 & 2 (must used on Russian front IIRC. similarly when asking ground control for vector to home base some idea of distance would good, I know this would be a lot of work probably.
Thanks for the great work you and the team have done on the new patch btw!

You can implement location info right now with no problems.

1) People who fly without HUD messages are already giving up a slight tactical advantage and know it.

2) Realistically, panicked pilots didn't always call out their location.

3) For people who think that it's an unfair advantage that you get location information from HUD messages, give them the option of turning it off in the GUI - at least for planes, if not for ground control.

As for new sound files, put out a call for voice actors among the fans. Not everyone can mod or make campaigns, but anyone with a cell phone or microphone attached to their computer can try to do voice-acting.

Note that, over the years, there have been a number of fan-produced voice packs, both for nations not included in the Official IL2 releases, and for dialects and voices not represented in official releases.

Adding position call-out just means adding 27 very short new voice messages per nation (34 for Russian/Cyrillic) - the letters from A-Z (or A-Я) and the message header "map coordinates". The numbers from 0-9 already exist.

Implementing them would mean adding the following lines to the end of all relevant messages:

. . . "Map Coordinates" + [Letter] + [Optional Letter] + [Number] + [Optional Number].

Speaking of which, how about adding some new nations to the next patch? I can think of no political reason to not add Spanish, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Czech and Serbo-Croatian voicepacks and associated nationalities. And, as long as you were to use PLAAF or fictional markings, no reason to not add Chinese. Fan-produced voice packs already exist for many of these nations.