Quote:
Originally Posted by Treetop64
I think it's a great idea.
One of the rare things that I really hate about IL-2 is the very limited size of the maps. The Leningrad, Kurland, Slovakia, and Romania maps are currently the only Eastern maps worth flying over any more. The rest make you feel as though you're flying over a game board on the coffee table.
For contemporary equipment ten years ago, rendering small maps was necessary and acceptable. There's just no excuse for it today, though.
At a minimum, make three separate maps; one each for the territories covered by the three German army groups, with some overlap between the groups. A separate map for Scandinavia would be nice. Heck, include an option - if practical - to load the entire Eastern front. It may take up a bit of HD space and extra RAM, and take a few more seconds to load, but believe me, that would be something I would be more than happy to live with.
Man, just think of the dream DCG scenarios one could come up with if proper maps were available, as well as for DGen!
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You are right... There are several maps on the eastern front that we could have much larger than they are right now. Kuban and Crimea could be one big map. Stalingrad could cover the entire battle space instead of just centering around the city. The Kursk map could extend north and south to cover that entire battlespace. We're talking a boatload of work here for map makers so I'm going for cloud 9 here.
But I don't believe there is any way we could load the entire eastern front in the IL-2 engine. When IL-2 loads up a map it has to load up every piece of geometry and every object on it. Yes our computers are that much better but the engine itself that drives everything isn't... a modern engine (I believe IL-2 Cliffs of Dover uses this technique) would load segments of the map and stream in segments as necessary loading and unloading dynamically from memory. This is how you can get loads of detail without the performance hit from having to track a billion objects. Not to mention the eastern front is the single longest battlefront in the history of warfare.