Friday 2010-07-30 Dev. update and Discussions

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Bobb4

A simple question from me, will enemy/friendly/other player/ai plane's main operating surfaces move or will we be forced like in the current IL2 to look for othe visual cues that they are trying to sideslip, barrel-roll etc.
At the moment all planes do not seem to show elevator,alerion, rudder or other movements other than on the player controlled plane. I could be wrong but all the visuals i have seen seem to reinforce this. Please tell me I am wrong.
Other than that I have to say everything looks great.

Example
Look at the screenshots of the 109's in formation and the J88's banking and all the control surfaces look static?

Actually, it's clearly visible that the Ju88 closer to the camera has its elevators slightly deflected upwards, the one in front also has a slight upward elevator but it's harder to spot...maybe they've already used their ailerons to bank and they are now just pulling on the stick to make the turn.

Now, as for why they have the exact same control inputs, i think this is to save CPU power in AI calculations. Just like IL2, it seems that AI in formation tend to move in almost perfect unison (although AI planes still do wiggle back and forth a bit in formation, you can check this out if you engage autopilot and up the time compression a bit). It sure would be nice to have some variation to make it feel more "human", but it won't bother me much if it saves processing power for other equally important things.