What Sim will SOW be?

[Blackdog_kt]

I remember back in the day, Microprose's European Air War could do 256 planes in the air at the same time. It had BoB campaigns for Luftwaffe and RAF, as well as another campaign starting in 1943 where the USAAF was also featured, so there was a lot of big bomber formations. It also had one of the best radio/command systems i've ever seen and wingmen who actually did as they were told.

I don't know how they did it but i doubt CPU bubbles made a difference, since all planes were in the same vicinity.

I have in fact flown sorties in that sim where i nearly hit the limit and it was running just fine. There were 3 formations of 36 heavy bombers (three full groups) and 3 flights of 12 escorts each...144 total on the allied side. On the axis side there was my flight of 12 Fw190s, another flight of 12 Me109s, a flight of 12 Me110s and a further 2 flights of reinforcements with 12 aircraft each (you could request them from the radio menu, sometimes you got one flight, sometimes none and very rarely you got two) for a total of 60 axis planes. All in all, 204 aircraft in a very small part of the sky.

They could be using CPU-bubbles for the random encounters though. You could either use time compression or skip to the next waypoint. Skipping gave you the scripted events of the mission, you appeared a few miles away from the target to get set up and went at it. However, if you used time compression you got random targets too. When using high TC, the view changed from the cockpit to the map but TC dropped to x8 whenever there was something interesting close by...so, you could returning from an escort mission to Berlin with ammo to spare and when the TC dropped you knew there was a convoy or something similar to strafe. Since skipping to the next waypoint/encounter never gave you bonus targets, i'm led to believe these targets were obviously spawned when the player actually flew over certain areas, even in time compression, instead of being hard-coded into the mission, sort of like an AI unit bubble mentioned before.

The point is, EAW was a much older sim with much worse graphics and less sophistication, but it also had to run on the much less powerful PCs of the day. SoW will be much more complex, but it also has much more powerful hardware available to it.

I'm not expecting to run SoW with 256 planes in the air at the same time on full detail. It would be nice however to be able to run sorties with 100-150 planes at a fluid FPS rate by turning down a few post-processing filters.

As for ingenious ideas to create atmosphere, there are a lot in this thread:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=10993

Finally, on the question of interface, i'm expecting options to suit most standards. Immersive or not, clickable cockpits are a must for those of us who want the full experience of doing everything there is to be done in a plane but don't have expensive HOTAS sets or home cockpits.
I mean, how am i supposed to work the autopilot's electric/servo panel ,the engine controls, the bombsight controls, the radio navigation equipment and i don't know what else in a B17, if all i have is an aging MS sidewinder precision pro 2 and a keyboard? Sure, there's no B17s in SoW yet, but if this is to become a series of sims, i'm sure the team has planned ahead for most eventualities. With the added complexity of multi-crewed airfcraft i doubt it's possible to operate everything without a mouse, unless i use a custom sim-pit that costs a small fortune. Clickpits may not be optimal, but they are the cheapest interface for high realism/high complexity simulator modelling. I'm glad that their existence has been confirmed, because i don't want to miss out on all the added realism of SoW just because i lack custom-made or high-end controlllers.

Likewise, the option to map everything to keyboard and HOTAS should be there for people who don't like using the mouse.
In my opinion Black Shark does just that, you can use the mouse but everything is mapped to a keyboard shortcut as well and you can also re-map it to something else. It's just that Black Shark features a modern helicopter, so that naturally the keyboard shortcuts become too many to remember because of the complexity of the aircraft.

Personally, i'd use a hybrid system in SoW. Stick and keyboard for important things (armament, flaps, gear, things i need to use in combat or fast), mouse for the controls that i will need to use once every 10-20 minutes (switching fuel tanks, priming the engine, turning on the fuel choke, these things happen between one and three times per sorties so i wouldn't want to waste a key-map on them).

That is a question of clever interfacing and it's negotiable. What is not acceptable to me would be to dumb down the simulator because some of the fans dislike a certain interface. For example, if some of the fans say "no clickpits" then give them the option to use other means of control. However, don't go about disabling things like complex engine management, switching fuel tanks and the like for everyone else just because a portion doesn't like the controls available to use such functions.

This has been an obvious red herring argument in the past, when a part of the community used the disadvantages of the clickpit interface to argue against increased complexity of aircraft operation in the new sim.