CO-OPs again...

[Blackdog_kt]

First of all, let's not get confrontational among ourselves over something that is not directly in our hands.

With that being said,

Originally Posted by JG53Frankyboy

in the high times of IL2 coop onlinewar flying, the waitingtimes in the Hyperlobby slots were actually quite short very often.

one has to mention, 9 months after IL2 releasecthere was no online war running. it took its time to organizice them, and they improved a lot during the time. perhaps some can remember the manual reports in the debriefing screen in the first IOW
Open Coops were flown alot after release, BBury's Valley of Death anyone But without the working Hyperlobby, all this would not have been possible. Il2 online playhad a lot of benefits because of a 3.party tool. cant imagine what would have happened without the HL.
The UBI.com lobby was crap, IIRC i was there once and than never again.

I will wait what the community is able to do online with this software in , lets say, 2 years after its release.....
in the moment the online possibilities of the software and the scenario of the BoB is boring for me.

Pretty sound arguments. A lot of people are expecting a newly released sim with not much in the way of 3rd party tools yet, to be what IL2 was after a couple of years of 3rd party involvement.

I'm not much of an onliner and mostly used Coops to train a mate who was returning to flight sims. When i wanted to fly online i always joined one of the objective based DF servers to get the best of both worlds: there is a mission to win and tasks to achieve, but there's also enough fluidity to ensure unpredictability and no waiting times.

I think the only thing needed for CoD is two switches: synchronise spawn times and no respawn. Then whatever we have will be able to work like an old-style coop which to be truly honest, would be most beneficial for arranged squad matches and squad training.

For an on-going online campaign with some sense of dynamic nature built in, the old coop interface is a bit long in the tooth frankly, as it would miss the opportunity to use certain appealing capabilities of the new engine.

Slapping up a quick and dirty training scenario for training people? Perfect. Making detailed scenarios that want to ensure the players follow a specified mission plan? Perfect. Making an online war? Workable but far from what can be actually implemented.

Mind you, i'm not saying the coop interface is not needed. What i'm saying is that sticking to it will limit the things we can do in the long run. It is needed, but mostly to bridge the gap until we get the really cool stuff happening.

Long term, i'd rather prefer a situation where a supply system is implemented (this means scripting), so that hitting targets has an effect on the enemy's ability to fight back. Then, depending on difficulty settings we could have respawns, limited respawns, no respawns or even virtual lives (eg, resettable stats and a counter on how many lives a player went through during the current campaign).

Even more, we could limit the ability of players to switch sides and even positions in a multi-crew aircraft. That's the reason these features exist in the difficulty options.

If i was running a more relaxed campaign i could allow people to come and go as they please. If i was running a more regulated campaign, i would have people register for a certain team for the entirety of the campaign through the server's forums, so that they can't get intel by simply joining the other team. Then i would have two sub-forums, one for each team, where they could plan their actions and operations without the other side having access to them.

This way (especially if dynamic/moving targets were scripted) players would have to actually fly recon/armed recon sorties to locate targets, instead of briefly hopping to the other team, taking off and making notes of the defences for the airfield they spawned at, switch back to their own team and plan a sortie to attack it.

If we wanted to take this further, we could even make it so that players sign up for a specific task or squadron for the entire campaign (eg, fighters or bombers), or even a specific crew position for the really hardcore crowd (like flying the entire campaign as a bombardier).

What this would need is a forum interface where the players sign up for their preferred team/task/etc and a parser adding that information into a script that controls what the players are allowed to do when actually connecting to the server.

The possibilities are endless and i thought up most of it within a week of release, just by looking at the difficulty options and wondering "now why would they have an option to limit this and that?".

Have some imagination people, we just have to wait for scripting to evolve or the SDK and manuals to be released.

The good thing is that since i'm now studying computing i'm getting to grips with how objective oriented programming works and C# is pretty similar in structure to most of the OOP languages. The bad thing is that it won't be before summer that i'll have the time to possibly sit down and code something

The best thing is that we already have people working on it, see Jimbop's link:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=28559