Hey thanks a lot for posting
Wish you all the best for continuing support for CoD and future projects!
Speaking for myself at least I am having fun with what I have
Excited about the future, and thanks for prioritizing MP. There's a lot of fun to be made online
I like the news about a more user-friendly GUI. The layout, though dark and depressing
, is okay, but the issues with selecting ammo loadouts, saving presets and actually getting them to load is proving a little frustrating. It's like a little tease saying "Look at all the cool ammo you can't use"
The way you did MP home base selection in IL-2 was perfect! Simple and tidy. Perhaps combining the map with easy navigation tools to find the bases + using old IL-2 style plane selection and loadout would be a more welcome approach. That way, fans from the old day will have an easier time to pick up, and new guys will see some logic in the GUI :p I'm sure you are already thinking hard about this, but often the simplest way is the best, and make an "advanced" button for the options not necessary to "jump in and fly" (such as ammo belting, fuzes, convergence). That way the plane selection screen may look a bit tidier
I'm at least finding the scrollbar thing to see all the options a bit confusing from a design standpoint. Also while I'm on the topic of homebase selection, have a number showing how many other players are spawning from that base, that makes finding the action so much easier. Actually for GUI all together, I'd say just draw as much as you can from the old series, and incorporate the new stuff with easy navigation in mind
Sorry, may sound a bit harsh, but it's just my personal experience with the product. I must say I fly the sim as often as I can and even with your great success of IL-2 FB, I simply can't say that I prefer the old game. I feel "wrong" as if there's something better to be flown, which is CoD. I'm still absolutely baffled by the damage model and effects. You have done an excellent job with all the effects this time. Big fuel leaks, small fuel leaks, oil sprays that look different from six o clock and from the side. The smoke effects also seem to vary frequently in size, like you often see from the propwash affecting the airstream the smoke is generated in. It's much better than the original "spinning texture balls" we're used to. The various fires and ability for them to spread is nice. I like the fuel tank explosion when the wings break off with a huge cloud of fuel vapor igniting into a fireball. I am grateful to review my victories, looking at the fallen enemy to see where all my bullets struck, what systems they took out and even where the bullet has exited if it just passed through the fabric. The amount of systems modeled, working together in one plane alone is like nothing I've ever seen before in a combat flight sim, and then add the rest of the planes that are in the fight. The randomness of each dogfight is infinite. It's almost like you built the sim around the damage models, because it's one of the things with the game that you have gotten very close to perfection.
Once you get this sim to a overall pretty stable version and you can start focusing on what you're already waiting for: expanding the scope of the sim, it's going to get even more interesting than it is today
Thank you, I'll be flying this until you build the next generation flightsim, some 10-20 years from now maybe