Friday 2010-07-23 Dev. update and Discussions

[Oleg Maddox]

Originally Posted by Viikate

Remember how the original IL-2 development shots looked like?

http://www.combatsim.com/memb123/htm/jan99/IL-2.htm
http://www.combatsim.com/memb123/htm/jan99/IL-2b.htm

Totally different than the actual release

Right words.

[JVM]

Originally Posted by hellbomber

on the note of tracers, if you've ever fired a heavy machine gun loaded with tracers (i have), they do indeed look like streaks to the human eye

the old ww2 clips dont do them justice they look different on camera than they do to the human eye, due to the way film captures light vs the way the human eye captures it

even when you just try to capture a picture of it the tracers dont appear as long in the picture as they do when you see them in person

you see long streaks this is because the bullets are moving so fast the bright lights will appear long and 'burn' the image into your cornea, although during bright light in the day the effect is alot more subdued, if there is heavy cloud cover out covering the sun or if its dusk / dawn the tracers will look alot longer and brighter, tracers never look like an individual point of light to the eye, sometimes on camera they will as there is time in between frames and the image is captured in frames wheras the eye captures it in continuous motion, they look like streaks, even when they bounce of rocks and stuff they look like cool "L" or "v" or "w" (if they skip) shapes, it would be cool if at night the images from the tracers would temporarily leave streaks on your screen as they will irl at night the light leaves streaks in your eyes like a camera flash will

I like your explanation...I had forgotten of the retinal persistence consequences!

JV

[Cpt_Farrel]

I'd love to see videos too but the screenshots are showing more and more cool stuff! Sure, there are things that need tweaking and I'm sure they will be tweaked. Off course it's good with CONSTRUCTIVE criticism, but whining and rudeness, perhaps not as much...

Also, for every unhappy poster I bet there's 10 (100?) that likes what they see but won't comment but simply move on. I know, I've done it often enough... Trying to redeem that now!

I'm really excited at the level of detail of the aircrew and I sure hope we'll see a video of that soon!

[luthier]

Hey everybody, greetings from sunny jetlagged California!

Our tracers are perfect. End of discussion.

We can finetune thickness - color - transparency - luminosity, but in theory ours are the most perfect true to life tracers ever modeled anywhere. Tracers in real life look like that, like straight dashes of uniform thickness. There's a spot at the tail end of a bullet that emits plasma. It doesn't fade out towards the end. It doesn't get thinner. It doesn't wiggle. Sperm-style tracers you're used to from other video games are Hollywood.

We have that emitter that draws out a line of specific length based on tracer speed and "exposure". The tracer shots you see were not taken in pause, because in pause our tracer turns into a dot - those mysterious white dots in the first shot are stopped tracers in pause.


Our fire and smoke are extremely WIP. Everyone hates them here even more than you guys hate them. Calm down and trust us a little bit.


Finally, the surprise from last week is failing to materialize. We were going to release some PSDs to give the skin makers an early start, and maybe even team up with you guys to make some historical skins or something. But we hit a little snag because, as it turns out, you can't very well make skins with just a PSD, and we can't very well release our plane models with the skins. We need to figure this out, hopefully very soon.

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by luthier

Hey everybody, greetings from sunny jetlagged California!

Our tracers are perfect. End of discussion.

We can finetune thickness - color - transparency - luminosity, but in theory ours are the most perfect true to life tracers ever modeled anywhere. Tracers in real life look like that, like straight dashes of uniform thickness. There's a spot at the tail end of a bullet that emits plasma. It doesn't fade out towards the end. It doesn't get thinner. It doesn't wiggle. Sperm-style tracers you're used to from other video games are Hollywood.

We have that emitter that draws out a line of specific length based on tracer speed and "exposure". The tracer shots you see were not taken in pause, because in pause our tracer turns into a dot - those mysterious white dots in the first shot are stopped tracers in pause.


Our fire and smoke are extremely WIP. Everyone hates them here even more than you guys hate them. Calm down and trust us a little bit.


Finally, the surprise from last week is failing to materialize. We were going to release some PSDs to give the skin makers an early start, and maybe even team up with you guys to make some historical skins or something. But we hit a little snag because, as it turns out, you can't very well make skins with just a PSD, and we can't very well release our plane models with the skins. We need to figure this out, hopefully very soon.

Thanks for the explanation on the tracers. That sounds positively great in terms of how they are being done. If I understand correctly the part about the exposure has to do with lighting conditions at the time? So tracers will appear differently at night or under a cloud as opposed to in direct sunlight? Sounds interesting in my head anyways

[Tone71]

Originally Posted by SlipBall

IL-2 was done very well, to the point that we all still fly it. I really don't expect SOW to look that much different from what was very much, near perfection. It certainly will look better in the end, just stop the critique of every up-date, and say thank you for a change of pace.

Couldn't agree more. Let's not forget that IL-2 is almost 9 years old! And graphically still puts many new games to shame.

Originally Posted by Tone71

Couldn't agree more. Let's not forget that IL-2 is almost 9 years old! And graphically still puts many new games to shame.

That's maybe true but why don't you think further.
With the graphics we have seen in the last updates, how can these "put many new games to shame" in 2020.

I would say, the graphics of SoW BoB are nearly ok for 2010/2011 but not for much longer.

Don't always compare to the previous game. Compare it to what is standard.

Originally Posted by Hecke

....
Don't always compare to the previous game. Compare it to what is standard.

The "previous game" [IL-2] IS the standard. When SoW is released IT will be the standard. Before IL-2 was released CFS-2 WAS the standard. But only by comparison. It still puzzles me that with the resources and talent at Microsoft they can't even hope to compete with a relatively small team from Russia.

Originally Posted by Old_Canuck

The "previous game" [IL-2] IS the standard. When SoW is released IT will be the standard. Before IL-2 was released CFS-2 WAS the standard. But only by comparison. It still puzzles me that with the resources and talent at Microsoft they can't even hope to compete with a relatively small team from Russia.

I do not mean comparing it to only one game that contains some of all aspects but to the several parts (graphic, sound, physics) of other games that built the new standard where they are better than others.

I would really like to know how many people are working on SoW BoB

[nearmiss]

Originally Posted by Old_Canuck

The "previous game" [IL-2] IS the standard. When SoW is released IT will be the standard. Before IL-2 was released CFS-2 WAS the standard. But only by comparison. It still puzzles me that with the resources and talent at Microsoft they can't even hope to compete with a relatively small team from Russia.

It is like so many things when people have too much money. Money isn't ever the most important ingredient... it's committment.

Think about all the very excellent development systems, like Foxpro,dbase,etc. that were bought out by companies with the big bucks.

Foxpro is the only one left, but MSFT hasn't done anything with it compared to when it was in the hands of the original developers. Foxpro was hot, and the developers were always doing new things. I just read where MSFT will not support it past 2015. Kinda sounds like the death bells to me.

Same with the MSFT combat flight series. They had a winner in CFS2 that was the benchmark sim. I remember when Sim-outhouse and netwings had enormous numbers of users for CFS2 and the IL2 had a squeaky little corner on the site (no users).

CFS2 was the big dog until MSFT hired the ferrets from Red Baron to update the sim. What a debaucle. They tried to rework the sim and screwed the pooch. If they had just improved what they had it would have still been a contender as a favorite. The very best mission builder tools of any WW2 combat sims, the CFS2 and Jane's ww2 FIGHTERS.

Even today the CFS2 has the best mission builder.

I am hoping BOB SOW could very well take us into a new era of mission builders. Two very most important tools for Offline users are the mission builder and high standards of AI performance.