Friday 2011-02-04 Dev. update and Discussion

[Defender]

There are A LOT of WWII sim aviation enthusiasts and IL-2 still has a massive following, I'd be very surprised if this sim didn't do well financially. Flight sims in general seem to be making a small come back so hopefully commercial success for this sim follows.

[Richie]

Originally Posted by Defender

There are A LOT of WWII sim aviation enthusiasts and IL-2 still has a massive following, I'd be very surprised if this sim didn't do well financially. Flight sims in general seem to be making a small come back so hopefully commercial success for this sim follows.

I think it will be something like 2001 all over again.

[Redwan]

Originally Posted by Defender

There are A LOT of WWII sim aviation enthusiasts and IL-2 still has a massive following, I'd be very surprised if this sim didn't do well financially. Flight sims in general seem to be making a small come back so hopefully commercial success for this sim follows.

Flight sims are making a small come back ? Did you know that Microsoft is ending the FSX serie ? It means that the rentability sucks .... You should reed the news ...

And in such a context, it won't be easy for BoB to take it's place on the market as the graphics will be very poor for a modern simulator (no wheather effects, cartoony clouds, problems with the aspect of trees when seen from far, unrealistic textures ...)

[klem]

On the Cockpit Management and the Landing questions you might find this interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzsJB...ailpage#t=136s

Thr RL startup was not so complex as some people might imagine and it adds just a little more immersion if CoD has it.

On the landing, if you watch the last minute or so you will see that the Spit does skip, wheels even, on the first touch and lands unevenly on the second, left wheel first, but settles immediately.

In IL-2 that second bounce would have the gear off or the a/c on its back as the wobble increased until disaster struck. I am hoping CoD will be more like the real thing.

[Baron]

Originally Posted by Redwan

Flight sims are making a small come back ? Did you know that Microsoft is ending the FSX serie ? It means that the rentability sucks .... You should reed the news ...

And in such a context, it won't be easy for BoB to take it's place on the market as the graphics will be very poor for a modern simulator (no wheather effects, cartoony clouds, problems with the aspect of trees when seen from far, unrealistic textures ...)

Might be because FSX is a dead end (for MS)...maby?

And the rest, what does "problems with the aspect of trees when seen from far" mean for ex?

Feel free to elaborate on the other stuff to, like "poor graphics for a modern simulator". Im particularly interested in knowing what u compare to. (im gonna enjoy this one)

[CharveL]

Like I said, there's a simple solution to the whole resolution dot-size issue - which, due to more LOD's isn't going to be as much of one in CoD.

Just publish each players resolution settings on the scoring screen for everyone to see. Maybe even let the host discriminate for resolutions below 1280x1024.

Either way This let's the point advantage whores self police amongst each other.

[Royraiden]

Originally Posted by klem

On the Cockpit Management and the Landing questions you might find this interesting:

Thr RL startup was not so complex as some people might imagine and it adds just a little more immersion if CoD has it.

On the landing, if you watch the last minute or so you will see that the Spit does skip, wheels even, on the first touch and lands unevenly on the second, left wheel first, but settles immediately.

In IL-2 that second bounce would have the gear off or the a/c on its back as the wobble increased until disaster struck. I am hoping CoD will be more like the real thing.

Definitely want to start up like that.Even if some switches and levers are there for cosmetics purposes, I will use them.

[zapatista]

Originally Posted by kendo65

Ok Zappa. Thanks for the considered reply. i'll look into it a bit more.

But surely the most distant depiction of any aircraft at maximum range will be a single pixel? This is what i understood, and a post earlier today from Oleg ( I think - could've been Luthier?) said as much.

For newer high-res monitors that single pixel will appear smaller on screen and thus be harder to spot. My point was that real-life pilots had to contend with similar issues - and that the max distance depiction of a near-invisible single pixel would be closer to that reality than the larger, more easily visible pixel on say an 800x600 screen?

----

ok, home now, and had another look. Yes - I can see what you're getting at.

Part of the problem too was a bit of sloppy use of language in my original post - as you identified concerning 'rendered more precisely'.

Seems I have made a few assumptions which may not have been correct. Seems the key issue as to whether it is more realistic or not is when the lod-switching is triggered - and I can see that in the move to higher res that could skew the original balance.

Basically, I'm not a competitive online flyer, so it isn't something that has been an issue for me

Kendo,

afaik the most distant "aircraft dots" in the il2 series sim do not use a single pixel to represent the distant object, they us a square clump of 4 pixels (2 black and 2 grey ). as you probably know close up aircraft/ship type objects in il2 are represented currently with 3 LoD models, which transition to a progressively smaller LoD model the further you get away from the object. iirc somewhere between 1000 and 1500 meters (depending on object size) this smallest LoD model will transition to a number of pixels drawing the rough shape of the very distant aircraft, and at the furthest distances this will then transition to a single 4 pixel "dot" untill at about 5 km the dot disappears completely.

in any discussion like this you need to differentiate between distant aircraft seen against an open blue sky background (reasonably easy to see), and those drawn against a terrain scenery background (almost impossible to see in most circumstances in il2, and very unrealistic in its "aircraft spotting" distances, particularly since in most instances in il2 we fly with near perfect visibility). and to illustrate with 2 simple screenshots how this problem becomes even much worse in il2 when you add a variation in screen resolution, see the illustrations below

the initial screenshot is with a 30' lcd in its native resolution, note no faint aircraft dot in the middle of the screenshot (we are searching for a low altitude pghter aircraft somewhere below us), but the snow covered scenery looks fairly good video quality and is "pretty"



next shot is of the exact same situation but now we have halved the screen resolution, meaning the pixels now used to display the 4 pixel dot is 2x larger. as you should be able to note now, you CAN see the faint black dot of the enemy fighter below you ! and that is exactly why many experienced flyers *who are into online stat counting) will "game the game" by halving their resolutions. you should also be able to note the scenery quality has gone downhill, and is now noticeably not as pretty or "good".



the point of all this is to ask yourself "what could a historical ww2 fighter pilot see from his cockpit in that exact same situation" ? and that is basically what il2/BoB should presumably aim to "simulate".

there are other issues and problems relating to this "pixel display" problem representing distant aircraft in il2 . another good example is in this flight of four i-16's heading in your direction (illustrated here with a zoomed clip with these 4 aircraft against open sky). i-16's are at roughly 1000 m distance, 3 km alt, game paused and screenshot taken in external view at 1280x1024



as you can see only one of them looks vaguely like a "plane" (yet it is a formation of 4 planes flying together), the others are just an erratic irregular group of pixels, AND those drawings constantly change shape depending on the view angle ! instead of seeing a solid "aircraft looking pixel group" coming your way, you catch intermittent glimpses of a jumbled shape of loose pixels coming your way (and this is against open blue sky). Now if you put this in front of the complex shaped and colored "ground terrain" textured background, the human eye simply cannot track this irregular moving cluster of loose single pixels, due to the lack of well defined shape to visually "lock on". You can intermittently reacquire the target when it changes to something more visible as it comes closer and transitions to a larger LOD's, but in a combat situation where both aircraft are doing 300 km/hr and are rapidly closing (or he is trying to sneak up on you) this is not "simulating" what a real pilot would/could see, and therefore doesnt allow realistic combat engagements because you situational awareness bubble has shrunk to 30% of what it should be.

the same problem is illustrated by trying to hunt for ground targets in open fields or on roads. during the normandy invasion allied tank busters would scan the scenery for german targets from 1500 m alt, and could see individual tanks/trucks stand out clearly in open fields and on roads. ever tried to do the same in il2 ? you cant, you need to be at about 350 meters or even lower to do the same (which then makes you more vulnerable to ground fire, and because you also have to fly slower it makes you more vulnerable to enemy planes).

note: people who "game the game" in il2 will often use an artificial zoom by briefly narrowing their FoV setting to 30 degree's and then scan the ground/sky for targets, but this is not he solution and is the equivalent of using binoculars. in short, when your monitor is correctly calibrated and you have the right FoV setup for your monitor size, you SHOULD be able to see from your cockpit what a real human could see in the same situation from his cockpit, in il2 this was NOT the case this was a major issue, probably the single biggest downfall of the whole series.

note 2: oleg was well aware of this problem and in patch 3.02 (iirc) he significantly increased the pixel clump size that represents these distant aircraft. this did correct the problem (but probably made them a bit to visible now), but the whiners got the upper hand at the time and oleg removed his fix in the next patch, and for years didnt want to discuss it again (but i know he has taken it under consideration for BoB/Sow)

[kendo65]

Yeah - pretty conclusive. Nothing much more to say except that I was wrong.

...though still have suspicions that you may have photoshopped the second image

[swiss]

Zappa:

There must be something wrong.

low-res: plane is 6-8pixels
high: plane is 2pixels

Do you still have the ntrk? If so, please host at somewhere I would like to conduct some tests too, but to do that we need the same picture.