Oleg, I am a huge fan of your work and have been since the original IL2 Sturmovik. As a retired city of London marketing manager and head hunter I have also always admired the strategic intelligence of your long term marketing plan, saving the most easily saleable BoB program with the new physics engine until you have built up the market for it with your former air-combat sim product generations. Plus the emminently sensible target of creating a combat air sim sub industry around your apex product just as one arose around the FS series, now conveniently no longer in competition. Finally I admire the obsessive detail, accuracy and realism of your approach which has always made your product line unique and enabled you to defeat the mighty MS CFS series with your very first product.
I used to feel that you paid insufficient attention to the ground detail and realism but that has more than been addressed in BoB SoW from the screenshots I have seen and now you have a real time weather engine too. (Ground texture tiles still appear to produce herringbone patterns from altitude but perhaps that can be randomised?)
I have only one remaining caveat which may well also prove misplaced. In all the screen shots I have seen the incredibly detailed and realistic machines, aircraft, vehicles, buildings, countryside and roadways have remained empty and sans people. Hopefully in the final release the ground environment will be populated with AI soldiers and civilians, all artillery and AA guns will be manned and all aircraft in flight will have populated cockpits and gun positions? I also want to look down and see my own knees and hands on the stick in the cockpit (as in LOMAC). If so this sim is definitely going to be the all-tim bench mark for online air combat and worth every second of the long wait.
Now to the point of my post. The latest rumour in the online air-combat community is that BoB SoW is to finally be published in November 2009 later this month with the first patch to come in 2010.
You are THE MAN Oleg so is it true?
(I have had it on pre-order and pre-paid for for ages.)
I have built my whole new PC system in anticipation of BoB and am anxious to start engines and get airborne.
So will there finally be a Scramble Klaxon in November?
Hell I even have a fan on my desk so that when I srt engines with the cockpit open I will feel the backdraft and yes I am a retired single man whio urgently needs a new girl friend! LOL
Tally Ho!
