Long time lurker, first time poster

[KOM.Nausicaa]

Vectorforfood,

I'll try to answer this. I am not affiliated with Oleg or team in any way, but I have some experience in game and entertainment industry. There are some 3 or 4 reasons, IMO, which can explain the 'long' development time (long, if you count since first announcement in 2004):

1) the sim was not developed with full studio resources before something like 2007

2) the sim has a entirely new game engine. The engine is specifically developed for complex combat simulation, weather simulation, flight simulation etc, and supports further extension, maybe even realistic land and/or sea combat. Writing and coding such a engine easily takes 2 years or more, and eats up a great deal of your resources. This is what the 'common' gaming public most often underestimates.

3) if you want to build historical aircraft, tanks, vehicles, ships and so forth in a correct way you put yourself in the most difficult situation, much more than for a modern racing sim. Most of the stuff you want to build doesn't exist anymore. Want to climb into a Ju88? Forget it. He111 or Me 110? Thin on the ground. And where are they? Scattered sparsely over museums all over the world. And that is just for visual documentation....I am not even talking about the can of worms which is technical performance. And then there are the high standards you put up for external and internal 3D modeling, based on actual factory blueprints (which you have to get first from official archives, factories, private collections etc) : Oleg said some years ago that the 3D building, coding, etc, of one single plane of such high standard takes up to a year for one guy. Having worked with 3D teams, and having led them as art director I know he tells the truth. Now, lets say, you want to make 12-15 flyable planes (the gaming community will already whine at you why you make so few planes flyable)....make the math: You need 5-6 full time modelers to make those planes in two years. And you haven't done the terrain yet, no vehicles, ships, buildings, trains, correct airfields (another can of worms) and so forth and so forth, and ALL of them have to be historically correct also! Why do you think 80% of the games are fantasy and SF stuff? Because nobody in the gaming communities will whine that the laser gun doesn't have the historically correct barrel. That is the reason we are not seeing true and correct, say, 1800's sea warfare sims, or 1600's japanese land warfare sims, or 1200's european middle age warfare sims. I am not talking about the fake historical stuff, like Age of Empires, or Call of Duty, Red Orchestra, or a hundred others, but about true sims, like IL2, Blackshark, ROF, or Steel Beasts. The more you go back in time, the harder it gets (and the more your audience shrinks). It's a shame really.....I would love to see a WW1 land war sim of the quality of steel beasts, or a 1800's naval warfare sim for that matter.


4) last reason: Oleg has not the money to throw against a project like companies as Electronic Arts, Ubi, etc have.


Frankly......I think we should thank the god's of gaming every day on our knees that something of the quality of SoW has the chance to see the light of day. In the current situation, PC games retreat more and more from the scene, and real sims even more.
It's a shameful situation really....the games business makes more money worldwide than the entire movie production business, and there are more and more development companies, some swimming in the money. (Blizzard) Yet, we see less and less serious PC sims, the times of thick handbooks are only memory, and so forth. I could go on for a long time.

It's depressing.