[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by SlipBall

Yes I would love to have all of these included, I enjoy (love) IL-2 but it is lacking in so many areas. I would like to see SOW advance in this direction, more complexity, more like what it was during the war. It would really set it apart from what we have now, and would give to us many new challenges to under take. I can understand why most would not want such a demanding sim, so there lies the main problem for the rest of us. I think that it very possible to have a scaled game with these features in the "expert" selection. I think that would be the only way to have our cake, and keep everyone happy.

That's exactly what i want as well. The interface is a secondary question, but it is important to move along with the times and have the option to use an extra peripheral or two.

Originally Posted by TUSA/TX-Gunslinger

With that said, clickables have been around for a long enough period that they would seem to be a "standard" feature. [.....]

Take LOMAC for instance - same developer, no clickables. If you've tried LOMAC after coming from Il2 - the first brick-wall you may have hit was the dramatic increase in assignable commands. No HOTAS has enough buttons to cover everything (no matter how many layers you assign), so you end up with more controllers or revert to a hoard of keyboard commands. That's really immersive, huh?

Exactly! I've read the Black Shark manual, do you know what was my first thought? "Woah, good luck remembering all those shortcuts".

If you feel that ctrl+shift+right alt+; is something easily remembered for when you need to eliminate the drift on your gyro compass, then you have a very good photographic memory and should probably better spend your time making a fortune by playing Blackjack in some casino I find it much simpler to point the mouse over the little knob and click, or roll the mousewheel a la FSX.

And we come to the basis of the whole debate of why we can't have realistic systems modelling in a survey sim.

Originally Posted by csThor

Apples and Oranges, Blackdog. In BS you had one (= 1) type of helicopter modeled and as it looks each following release will include just one more type. SoW on the other hand will have to incorporate more flyable objects right from the start and with each theater there will be more "must have"s on the list. It's simply a pointless discussion because you can't compare the two venues because of their drastically different focus.

I don't deny this but take into account that average WWII fighters of the same time period will have very similar controls. You need a knob to set the altitude meter correctly, a knob to set your compass and so on, it's not like they each had their own radar set with different modes.

I know this seems to contradict the quoted part about Lock on, but bear with me while i explain. Yes, someone might argue that "since the systems of the time were not so complicated we might be able to do with a keyboard only interface. Furthermore, modelling all those systems will delay production time for each new flyable, so why bother?"

My answer to this would be that first of all, most of the well known warbirds have manuals of them floating around the internet, it's not contemporary top secret electronic equipment, it's an aircraft of half a century ago. In fact, research on proper DM and FM will take much more time and effort than those needed to find the startup checklist of a P-38. I think i even have it lying somewhere in my hard drive and i'm not even one of the guys who collect aircraft manuals, like a lot do.

Now for the other part of the contradicting hypothetical argument, the interface. For me, evolution in the fidelity of systems modelling in the sim's aircraft goes hand in hand with the evolution of control methods. The reason? Well, we can pretty much use the keyboard for the basic controls that all aircraft of the era have. E.g ,these buttons are used to calibrate my altimeter, these buttons are used to calibrate my compass and they work in every fighter that has adjustable altimeters/compass, etc. However, take a look in IL2 and see how much of your keyboard is taken up already, with the limited amount of aircraft systems modelled. Imagine if we suddenly have fuel tank selector valves and other things like that. Now think about plane specific controls, that due to their less-frequently used nature will be relegated to obscure 4-5 keystroke combinations that nobody will remember.

And finally, think about the cost of a good Hotas set to map funtcions to. We are reaching a point where people need an increasing amount of peripherals to remain competitive in online play if we decide to increase the amount of things we simulate. Not everyone can afford a Cougar and a Track IR, but if you've got a gaming PC capable of running SoW chances are you'll have one of the two, or some sort of other equipment.

So what do we do? Do we make sims only for the elite few big spenders? Isn't this driving the sim down into a smaller niche market?

Or do we stay stale and rehash old recipes with slight improvements in graphics, sound and FM/DM?

Well, i'd like it if we could find a middle ground between these two. A WWII sim has an advantage that modern ones don't. The simple nature of the aircraft compared to a modern jet means that you can simulate every last switch in the cockpit for 4-5 WWII fighters in the time you'd need to get just one modern cockpit correct. Now if we can also have customizable controls for the whole lot we're getting somewhere.

I think it's silly to say "nobody will use such features" because there's clearly a debate going on and people want more realism. Your aircraft is more than the sum of your guns, ammo, engine and armor.And in order to make this work without a second keyboard or fancy and expensive gaming pads, we'll have to include a point and click function as well. It's not about realism or even immersion, it's about the mouse being suboptimal in many cases but also the most versatile and cost effective controller on your PC. Given the necessary software a mouse can do everything, from rotating your virtual head ingame , to clicking cockpit buttons, to typing your credit card number in a secure onscreen virtual keyboard and so on. It's a jack of all trades and master of none but it will have to do until you buy that customized gaming keyboard and install TripleHead2Go with TrackIR4.

I'm not much of an online ace, but i've been into flight sims for the past 16 years and to tell you the truth, pressing ctrl+D to drop my external tanks doesn't do it for me anymore. I'd prefer to have it the real away, moving the fuel selector to another fuel tank or risk the engine cutting out during combat if i forget to, and even then risking the tank not separating. This is the stuff we read about in aviation books and the stories of brave pilots who made mistakes, corrected them under enemy fire and managed to return home with a plane riddled full of bullets, but alive and with a story to tell.

Adding a realistic pilot workload will in turn multiply the chances of error and produce much more realistic combat scenarios. If you need to keep your head in the cockpit and monitor some of your vital systems it's that much more possible to suffer a surprise attack. Workload creates the possibility of error, error creates the possibility of imbalance, imbalance means an advantage for someone and that means someone is about to get a kill, and a realistic one at that.

People who don't like this sort of gameplay can scale it down offline, or use another server online. But having the possibility to properly model aircraft subsystems will add a new definition to the term "flying full-real".

I think we would be nuts to miss out on all the extra things that could be included and the awesome gameplay that could be generated as a result, because we act like we don't have adequate controllers to map a few cockpit switches to. That's all.