Mate, do i have to spell everything out? Did i say anything about Oleg modelling airliners? What i'm saying is there's loads of money to be had if the SoW engine can "steal" pilots from other venues of the flight sim world.
For that to happen, the engine has to be modular enough to allow addition of extra features by 3rd party developers and players who are into modding.
New civilian sim on SoW engine? Oleg's team gets more money.
New WWI sim on SoW engine by the Over Flanders Fields team? Will probably be better than RoF and Oleg's team gets more money.
New Vietnam sim on SoW engine with everything from O-1 Bird Dog Spotters to F-105s, carrier ops, Mig-21s and choppers? Oleg's team gets more money.
None of this will be possible however, if there's not an option to tweak things under the hood.
Someone please explain how an increased revenue from engine licensing fees (in the case of possible payware add-ons, i doubt there will be licensing fees for free add-ons made by the community), a stream of controllable and thus, officially sanctioned, free add-ons and the resulting competition bringing down the prices on payware as well is going to ruin our fun, when that not only results in more products for us (both free and payware) but also makes the developers more financially secure and possibly enables them to upgrade equipment and hire more staff to bring us the expansions faster, because i seriously don't get it.
This is not aimed at you since you obviously realize the importance of options and user-selectable difficulty, but i get the feeling that we're getting collectively near-sighted hear and losing the big picture. I'm starting to get the idea that all the talk about how this will ruin online play is nothing more than some people being afraid of their favorite servers moving to more realistic/complicated settings which they don't want to adapt to.
I'm not one to take pride in my settings and my virtual achievements (or lack thereof) but there is a part of the community that thinks like that and to them, having their full-real settings in IL2 relegated to a "70% real" score in SoW could be a big deal, as they will have to adapt or lose the "bragging rights" for lack of a better word. If this is indeed the case, then all the rhetoric about lack of resources and how such features are out of place in a combat sim (i guess jet and chopper sims are not combat sims then) is not much more than an effort to drag the upcoming SoW down to a standard they will be comfortable with, but do it for everyone and not just themselves so they can still keep telling themselves that they fly "full real".
Well, there's no thing as full real anyway, just varying degrees of approaching reality, plus i can't see how flying full real equates to advocating simplified settings, as a combat airframe is so much more than weight, armament, horse power and material durability, ie more than simply FM and DM. It's a combat plane for crying out loud, not a bicycle with a gun that i can simply point and shoot once i get a feeling for how it handles.
I still don't see the problem if
1) it is possible resource-wise on behalf of the developer team and doesn't need major recoding
2) it is not a demanded feature on release but
3) there is only the underlying framework to support it so
4) we can do much of it on our own and finally
5) it is user-selectable
That's a lot of ifs, but we're talking about a sim with a projected lifespan of a decade or so that will have to compete with other products down the line. To simply expect a rehash of IL2 with prettier visuals is nothing short of a lack of vision and reasonable expectation on our part, which i think the developer team is not only aware of, but also better than. If people can't cope with some added complexity and a bit of a learning curve now and then, then i guess it's time to quit IL-2 as well, because Team Daidalos is implementing radio navigation and radar and "we don't need to tune radios in combat sims".
