[Sutts]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

I know what you mean.

Sometime in the future when hardware is powerful enough, i'd love to have a lifesize map of most of mainland Europe. You could start with a group of Mosquitoes and go on an anti-shipping raid to Norway, hop in a Ju188 for some solo night intruder raids in the UK, fly as a pathfinder in a Mossie or bomber in a Lancaster in RAF night raids, intercept those with Luftwaffe night fighters, etc etc. If we end up having a mini campaign mode for multiplayer with a day-night cycle on the server it would be awesome.

As for the distances involved and time required, a variation of MDS and some of the already planned features for CoD would solve that. We've already seen a video where Luthier is changing positions from one aircraft to another. If we could set up a bomber raid to start at a certain time as AI and then jump in and take control as it nears the target, all we'd need to do is schedule the flight to arrive at the target at a time we are free to fly. So, you could set up a raid the night before and have it start under AI control while you are still at work, then when you come home and have dinner the bombers are over the north sea. After that point, you could fire up the simulator, join the server and jump into your aicrarft to fly from the point of entering hostile airspace to the target.

It would also be useful in the long run for single player, especially if higher time compression settings were available.

The disadvantage of a life sized map is the amount of time it takes for aircraft to travel over it and the effect this has on playability (not a lot of people would fly 4 hours to Berlin just to be shot down by a lucky 88m flak shell), but with some imagination it's possible to sidestep that issue and enhance playability without compromising realism too much (like in the above examples).
However, the biggest advantage of a 1:1 scale map is the realistic payload considerations it brings to the table. A lot of us would fly very differently if we knew that 25% fuel will not be enough or that we have 500 miles of enemy airspace to go through with a damaged plane before we are safe.

Well, we can dream that someday things like that will be possible

I'd love to see these maps stitched together too. I wonder if we'll be able to edit the stock maps too - the community has far more time to get the details right than the devs ever will.

Does anyone know if Oleg's engine is capable of loading the next chunk of map as you fly closer to it - only keeping in memory the portion required around the player? I guess this is the way they probably designed it. If that is the case then perhaps the only limit on map size is the time it takes to develop the darn things.

I like your idea for making long missions possible Blackdog. I also would really like to see the ability to save state mid-mission one day....so you can break up a mission over a number of days if required.