I hope this game doesn't get any DRM at all. People who don't want to pay can't be forced to pay anyway (if pirates can't get a game for free they don't buy it, they just don't play it at all) so why should the rest of us, the paying customers, have to suffer the drawbacks of DRM?
A cd-check, a serial, maybe even a one-time online activation (one that you can activate and deactivate at will, so that you can reinstall your game after a system upgrade or format) will be enough to dissuade casual piracy. This is the kind of piracy worth battling, because it's the preventable kind. Hardcore piracy can't be controlled and if they can't get it for free they'll simply bypass it altogether. So, why not focus on making money by keeping the real customers happy, spenting the time and funds on things they will want to buy, instead of on setting up DRM infrastructure or paying royalties to 3rd party publishing platforms?
On the topic of instruments now...
I think the main reason for better instrument visibility in civilian sims is the increased resolution. I don't know about X-plane but i fly FSX on a friend's PC every now and then and it's the same deal. You can easily make out the instruments even from a wide angle view. I fly with the 3d-cockpit and TrackIR 99% of the time and the only 2-d overlay panels i use are individual instruments that i want to keep track off continuously (eg, a VOR gauge that lies to the right of the cockpit, i might pop up the 2d-panel for that so that i don't have to strain my neck looking at it with TrackIR all the time).
If you couple this with 6-DOF capability to zoom in/out (even without a trackIR) and the possibility of saving snap-views individually for each plane, you can keep track of everything just fine. The only question that remains is whether we will be able to save our own snap-views for each aircraft, a la RoF. Just like some FSX add-ons have separate cameras of the 3-d cockpit from different viewing angles (for example, a camera looking below the control yoke so you can see the electrical switches), in RoF you can move the camera where you want it and "memorize" its position by assigning it to a certain key. This is done individually for each aircraft.
If this is implemented in SoW it will be a big help for people who lack head tracking software. For example, you could memorize a set of keypad commands and say that "ok, i want keypad 0 to always give me a view of the engine instruments, regardless of aircrat". Of course, the position of these instrments relative to the player's "head" camera center position are different for each plane. However, if SoW could "memorize" different snap-views for each aircraft it would be no problem. You would just have to look at the instruments once and assign a keypad key to that camera angle, to be pressed whenever you wanted a quick glance at your engine parameters.
Judging from the in-cockpit shots we've seen of SoW, i think the resolution is high enough. Heck, there are 3rd party high resolution cockpits in IL2 that are perfectly legible from the wide angle view, so i have no doubt that official SoW cockpits will be even better. We also know it will have 6-DOF head panninng, so i guess we'll be able to manage just fine.
Just look at that Blenheim cockpit shot posted in one of the previous updates, the instruments look so crisp and detailed that i got "cockpit and switch mania" and got a sudden urge to go fly something with clickable cockpits
