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IL-2 Sturmovik The famous combat flight simulator. |
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#1
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Pacific Fighters, did someone leave something out? The maps are a sad case of mistakes. The Pacific War was just not studied carefully, or maps would have been different.
I was messing around with the Pacific theatre today and got to thinking why the Pacific Fighters bored me. After I learned to make carrier landings I put the PF back in the box and didn't have any more use for it. I didn't try to analyze it or anything. Afterall, I'm just a consumer.. what do I know about what I want. LOL The Solomons are not there, Rabaul, Pillippines, Northern Australia, Western New Guinea, etc. There are so many islands just isolated on the IL2 maps. You can't fly close to historical missions from one land base to another. The reason the US conquered the islands was to build bases and support the advance towards Japan. Marine and USAAF aircraft have practically negative application in the sim, because they were land based. Iwo Jima was a tough prize and the purpose for taking it was to have bases from which the US could support and launch AC against Japan. Well there are two airbases on the island, but the Japanese didn't use them. So, when the US conquered Iwo Jima... kaput. Nothing else to do, because you can't launch attacks to Japan (another map) I think it must have been in Oleg's mind that the Pacific Theatre was strictly a war of carrier launched aircraft. Where do you fly your B17s, B24s, B25s, B26s, P61s, and B29s from and to? THe US dropped bombs on mainland Japan for quite awhile with the big bombers, long before the A-Bombs were used. OK, so you spawn your heavy bombers like the B29s in the air and they have no place to land after they reach their final mission targets...they can never land? I guess the PF map makers planned for the fighters to land on the carriers and let the bombers fly into eternity. LOL As it worked out, it didn't very well. LOL ------------------- Knowing Oleg's flair for the full realism I'd say the reason the maps are like they are is because the distances would make maps too large for IL2. There is a simple fix... Just move things closer together in the maps. Heck, who wants to fly for 9 hours from one island to another. All the player would do is 8x to the next island. Afterall, this is a game simulation and if Tinian was on the same map as Japan so what. You'd still have a distance to fly. It isn't like we're doing GPS or sophisticated navigation. We get into the plane and waypoint our merry way to and from. LOL Last edited by nearmiss; 03-03-2008 at 03:52 AM. |
#2
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Pacific fighters was never meant to be the be all and end all of the Pacific theater. It was started by a third party that Oleg had to divert his team too help finish. It was the first of many delays to the work on BOB SOW. It was first rumored that the third party was modelling an aircraft carrier then it slowly developed into a standalone sim with a few aircraft and maps of the Pacific Theater.
Edit It was also called Pacific Fighters, not Pacific Bombers, or Pacific Theater. Last edited by Chivas; 03-03-2008 at 04:36 AM. |
#3
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In my opinion PF was supposed to be the ultimate PTO sim, mainly because of the "weird" combination of maps and aircraft. To me it's obvious that there were more aircraft and maps planned ... But with hindsight it's also obvious that a much smaller scale would have been better. A smaller but more focused selection aircraft would have been better for gameplay, same goes for maps.
My 0,02 € ... |
#4
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That's funny... works for me.
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#5
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I think there would have been much more wisdom in concentrating on a single period of the Pacific conflict, and doing it properly and not trying to represent everything from Pearl Harbour to the Home Islands in one hit.
btw, is pacific fighters an oxymoron? |
#6
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Not more than "Air Front" or "Air War" I guess.
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#7
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The IL2 engine never allowed what most Pacific Theatre fan's secretly want: One big map, from Pearl Harbour to Japan. The problem was in the concept, from the beginning.
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#8
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I think the problem was more "People's Expectations" than the development. The developers kept adding maps and aircraft as time allowed, much of the it at the request of the community. It would have taken atleast a couple of more years of development to create more of the Pacific theater. All to the tune of "Vaporware" coming from the community.
It started as a small project that wasn't intended to eat away resources required for the development of their new SOW engine. Last edited by Chivas; 03-03-2008 at 05:36 PM. |
#9
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I mentioned the problem with maps in IL2 couple years back on the UBI boards, but it never changed.
The maps are pristine and pretty. The water that runs from the oceans inland ends in a nice soft arc. There are no trees growing along the waters edge of any body of water. There are large open spaces of land bordering the edges of all rivers and streams. There are large open spaces on both sides of all roads and tracks. The battlefield is just laid out in perfect view for attacking aircraft to find and destroy. ----------------------------------- Alternatively: The Pacific Islands were covered in Jungle. Roads and tracks were barely seeable from the air. Trees often extended very close to beaches, often overhanging waters edge. Trees and greenery was everywhere... jungle. Rivers and Streams would have jungle all along the waters edge borders. ------------------------------------ I just loaded up the old MSFT CFS2 flight sim and flew the Guadalcanal and the Milne Bay New Guinea. The old CFS2 stock map textures are 100 fold better renderings of what those locations looked like. ------------------------------------ I'm not knocking the IL2, because I've always enjoyed it for many reasons. There are certainly good and bad things. Comparing IL2 with CFS2 is just not apples and apples for comparison. The CFS2 never got a single friggin patch. There are a multitude of problem things with the CFS2 that have to be corrected for you to use it competently. Things that should have been handled with a patch. Many are workarounds, because the source is closed to development. Now if you think users should be put out/angry. The CFS2 users should definitely be among those very angry ones. The sad part, if you love CFS it's just the way of it to deal with the shortcomings of all the stuff offered up as CFS. ------------------------------------ THere is a very vibrant user base for Falcon 4.0. This may be the way to go for some CFS enthusiasts. The old Warbirds from WW2 has always tweaked my interest. Flying and shooting stuff at Mach 1, that I cannot physically see doesn't interest me. Flying all the complications of actual flight, well I've had enough of that as well. My interest is to fly, fight and have a good time without it being StarWars. Basically, the historical re-enactment of WW2 air war is my principal interest. ------------------------------------ Haven't installed the 4.09m Beta, because Beta has always had negative vibes for me. There is supposed to be much better map rendering than we've had in the past in the 4.09. Some of you that have the beta installed might be able to affirm that. |
#10
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Salute
PACIFIC FIGHTERS was a valiant attempt, but in my opinion it suffered from two central mistakes: 1) The maps should have been drawn at 1/2 scale. That is, 1/2 real size. The Pacific is too big to map in real scale. Look at the New Guinea map as an example. It is huge, but it still does not include all of the critical areas which were fought over during this campaign. No Rabaul, no Guadalcanal, no slot. The game could have had a code mod to double the rate of gas consumption to make ranges realistic in these 1/2 scale maps. 2) The designers tried to cover too large a set of campaigns and ended up covering none of them well enough. Either more design time, (and money) was required, or the designers needed to be realistic and focus on fewer campaigns. For my money, they should have dropped Pearl Harbour, which was is a one shot deal, one mission map for a campaign. Too much work for no return. Narrow the game down to five campaigns: Solomons/New Guinea, Saipan, Phillipines, Burma and Okinawa. (with southern Japan included in the Okinawa map) With the extra time they saved, they should have built more ship models. Not having ships like Yamato, or the American Battleships was a big ommission. But this discussion is so much hot air anyway, we'll have to live with PF for a LONG time. I don't think we'll see another Pacific Flight Sim for a while. Last edited by *Buzzsaw*; 03-03-2008 at 08:06 PM. |
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