Give me some "holy sh... did that just happen" ideas

[Tbag]

Again, I'm sure that it's been proposed before:

- An inflight-map that I can draw on and which contains notes from the briefing (or in full-real you have to draw the notes yourself during the briefing).

- I know animations are very far down the list but at some later stage: Crewmembers asking for permission to smoke/eat on long distance flights.

- Getting diverted to another airfield if the weather is too bad at the home field

[Borsch]

Incorporate SNEAKING into flight!

Sneak up on a sleeping morning airbase - could be alone for one mission, with an active wingman for another, and with a whole squadron in a third (explsions ahoy!).

Use scripting to allow player take out planes during take off from the base - very satisfying!

Recreate the Hartmann momment where he sneaked on two planes
performing acrobatics for the troops entrainment and crashed their party.

Make bouncing a completely unsuspecting escort a reality. Eg fly on a hunting mission like germans did against early war soviets. Drop on the first and torch it before it realised you were there (AI needs to be not omniscient like it is in IL2). then use energy advantage to dispatch the other 2 (Soviets flew in 3s in beginning).

Sneak in low level fog and attack a heavily escorted transport plane with an enemy general. quickly hide/ escape in the fog after your attack.

BOunce a huge and very tight formation of bombers and drop a bomb on one (like german pilot Knocke) to cause it crash into other bombers - domino effect. Scripting needed for that one.

Dive thorough big formation of enemy fighters with all guns blazing ( Marseille's style) causing some of its pilots o loose control and crash into each other.

With Soviets and Americans patroling the same sky, sneak up on one, attack and watch them shoot/fight each other in confusion!

[zodiac]

I remember reading somthing about a german experiment with flamethrowers that they put on the back of some DO-17s as defence weapon. I believe the goal was to keep fighters at a distance and/or blind them by smoke and light. I think those Dorniers were on the big raid of 15 september. The effect of the new weapon was not that impressive (RAF pilots often thought it were just burning bombers) and I don't think it made some kills back then...

But I think that in the sim it woud come as a real suprise to face a dornier like that. If you play the whole campaign,a player udually has developed a kind of routine tactic for approaching a DO-17. Trying not to end up in a sudden fireball would be a nice and unexpected feature in that mission.

I've only seen some pictures of he-111's and ju-88's equiped with flamethrowers, but it seems that there wasn't much visible of that weapon on the surface of the plane. I think only a small tube was visible, coming out of the tail. So, good news if it should be modelled

To give you an idea how the fireburst looked like, there are some pictures of it at the bottom of this page:

http://www.luftarchiv.de/index.htm?/...te/waffen2.htm

[Blackdog_kt]

Feathered's ideas are excellent once again, plus his narrative puts you right in the action. For me the top 3 would be:

1) Believable AI and a solid communication system:
Incorporate the kind of modular and mission specific commands that Feathered describes in the player's interaction with the AI, whether that AI are wingmen, ground control, ground troops, crew members or other friendly units.

2) Realistic start-up sequences and systems modelling, with the possibility of later mods/add-ons for optional clickable cockpits:
Despite certain shortcomings in the FS series, FSX does a pretty good job at this. Even if the buttons are hidden under the yoke, you can cycle the camera to the appropriate cockpit spot to press switches or take a closer look at hard to reach instruments. RoF does this well too, pause the TrackIR if you have one, move your viewpoint via the assigned keyboard functions and save it in your presets, which are by the way aircraft specific. This could be toggle or snap view. So for example, pressing keypad 8 in a fighter gives you a zoomed-in view of the gunsight, pressing it in the bomber's pilot seat zooms in on the primary flight instruments and doing the same while in the bomb aimer's seat will give you a look through the bombsight, or through the drift-meter when you are on the navigator's position.

Of course, this doens't have to be a click-everything-yourself affair if you don't want to. Just like in FSX and Black Shark, there should be an automatic engine start and shutdown sequence BUT it should also go through the full checklist and the engine might not fire up if it's cold, you might need to dilute the oil first or ask the ground crew to feed some warmed up oil into the engine. Then, you should have to pay attention to how the engine works and warm it up properly. Imagine this when flying a scramble with enemy fighters approaching, interesting stuff.

Also, please use the rated power settings as per the manufacturer's instructions whenever possible. Just because the Spit can make 25lbs of boost or the 190 can reach 1.4 ata manifold pressure, doesn't mean it was possible to run the engine at those settings forever like we can in IL2. For example, the maximum sustained rating for most Spits was 8lbs and similarly, the FW190 was, if i remember correctly, rated at 1.2 for climbs and 1.4 was used only in emergencies for 5 minutes or so. Ideally, we wouldn't need "throttle:100%" messages, but we should be opening our kneepad if we don't remember the values off-hand (see below), check the recommended power settings, advance throttles until the manifold gauge shows the desired readout, adjust prop-pitch to the desired RPM and that's it. The RPM needle would dance a bit back and forth before stabilising and the manifold pressure would slowly drop as we climbed, making it necessary to push the throttle forward a bit more every few thousand feet gained, but that's how real aircraft fly too.

The bottom line is that we need to get past the point of modelling only the aircraft behaviour and consequent tactics and finally start modelling the systems in some detail, putting the gauge back in the game. It makes flying more complicated and rewarding, gives you something to do that has a real impact on the outcome of your mission instead of just flying along a certain heading until you reach the target, it's an extra incentive to interact with your AI crew or human co-pilots in multi-crewed aircraft and it will make you think more and plan ahead on how you conduct your attacks in single-seaters. For example, the P47 is much more powerful than the Fw190 up high, but the 190 is fully automatic while the P47 needs some careful monitoring of the turbochargers and so on.

If you to know what i'm really talking about, search youtube for the P47 add-on for FSX made by A2A simulations and make sure you view the videos of the accu-sim enhanced aircraft, the way they model the aircraft's systems are superb. For multi-crewed aircraft, their Boeing Stratocruiser with the accu-sim patch is also very well done. It's a four engined plane and each engine presents some variance in temperatures, produced power and generally in how their systems operate, just like in real life. Your throttles are all in the same position, but engine 1 might be running a little hotter than the rest, the turbocharger on engine 3 might be running a bit hot as well and you have your hands full just flying the plane. Luckily, you have crewmen to monitor such things and report to help you out, the flight engineer can take care of calibrating the turbochargers for you and the co-pilot will call out the appropriate speeds and call "rotate" during your take-off run.

Having something similar in SoW would make flying multi-crewed and mutli-engined aircraft much more interesting and rewarding, plus it would make flying fighters something that requires a bit more caution. With all these systems modelled there's a good chance that a careless pilot might break his engine before the enemy has a chance to do it themselves, which will lead to more cautious and realistic flying on everyone's part.

3) Navigation maps, charts, notes, kneepad and a thorough briefing:
This would obviously tie in with the previous two points, as in mutlti-crewed aircraft you could let the AI do the navigation and just give you vectors to correct your course. You could switch to the navigator's position and look at the map yourself, or you could open the communication menu by pressing TAB and ask him to give you a fix on your position, ETA to the next waypoint and so on. Let's have the appropriate systems as well, communication radios to tune to the correct frequencies, direction fiding equipment and radio-navigation aids that fit the time period in question.

As for the briefing, take a look at this documentary of RAF bomber command night operations. That guy has about a dozen sliding blackboards full of info and each crewmember needs to take note of different things. It also features a post-op debrief:
http://www.factualtv.com/documentary/Nightbombers

Ideally, when flying you should be able to open your dossier and view anything from aircraft checklists to mission briefing to personal notes. These notes could be made during the briefing or even during the mission, on top of the original briefing material, the nav map or a blank piece of paper. Just give us an in-flight notebook and some colored pencils, so we can note down the radio frequencies we need to use or mark that new flak battery on the map for another flight to suppress tomorrow.

As for the maps and charts, i'm thinking of the usual ingame map, zoomable and slewable, but with some extra perks. For example, having separate charts showing the layout of friendly bases, tower frequencies, available facilities and the usual approaches would be good. That is because when flying an expansion 3-4 years from now, your battered Lancaster makes it back to England at 3am and it's pitch black with fog, you can take a look at the map and pick the nearest airbases, look them up in their airfield specific charts and request to divert to one with big runways and a FIDO defogging system.

Sitting on the navigator's bench should not just mean that you look through the side window, since you should have a couple of slide-rulers to make conversions and calculations with, plus some plotting tools. I'm thinking something along the lines of Silent Hunter III, with a compass, a ruler and a protractor to measure angles and be able to draw up a flight plan, even on the fly when actually flying the mission if the need arises. In IL2 the gyro compass might automatically point to the next waypoint, but in reality you have to set the heading bug and estimate the distances yourself, or with the aid of your navigator/copilot.

Of course, this would make flying single seaters all the more challenging, as it would also mean that you are either good enough to fly visually and not get lost, rely on the heavies you are escorting for guidance, or you have made a good flight plan before having to engage the enemy. You can't really draw pretty lines on the map with a 109 on your six over occupied Europe, but you can do it before the flight, while the rest of the wing is taxiing to take-off positions or even during the climb-out over the North Sea when things are still calm, using the base briefing material that the sim always supplies you with on each flight as a start. Having a lobby within the server where players can draw up detailed briefings in multiplayer, make notes and distribute it to others will come in handy too.


Now i know some of this stuff seems like too much, some might not be top priorities and all would take quite some time to come to fruition. I'm fully aware of that, i'm not in a hurry and i'm not expecting them to be in the boxed game on release day. However, i would be very delighted to see them come along as the sim progresses, since it will add a totally new dimension to prop-era combat flight sims. I've been having a go at some civilian flying on a friend's PC, he's got FSX and some quality payware add-ons and to tell you the truth, i realised that there's so much involved to actually just flying the plane, any plane, monitoring the various systems and navigating within certain rules and procedures, that i'm missing it on combat flight sims now. I think we should go towards combining these intricacies of flying a plane into the combat flight sim genre, so that just flying around over the countryside in a Hurricane, or buzzing Abeville in a 109 will be an involving, satisfying task in and of itself, long before the shooting even begins.

[robtek]

I'll drink to that!!!

[AdMan]

some people need to look up the word "moment"

[Blackdog_kt]

Well, you have a point there, but since this has turned into a general wishlist thread and various people are coming up with some very cool ideas, i thought i might group what i found most interesting, add some personal dressing and serve in the interest of some more food for thought.

It might not be moments, but having those moments in a non-scripted (scripted=predictable after a while) fashion requires laying down certain game mechanics beforehand. I'd rather they released a stable, working game and then gradually patch into it some sandbox-type game mechanics and accurate systems and operating procedures modelling, instead of for example simply adding some scripted events with a random chance. Scripting means that you need to define each and every occurence yourself. It's faster initially but limits your scope to these 4-5, or 20 effects that you specifically coded. After a while it's "oh,look, that bailing out opponent is giving me a salute again" or "i'm bored with my no2 wingman being the only one who has random engine problems, why doesn't no3 or no4 ever get one?" and so on

Laying down game mechanics however broadens the scope considerably. It's more work to do initially, because you need to define certain variables and how they interact with one another. However, after doing that you can then let them run wild on their own, depending on the greatest randomizing function of all, player input. There's no need to script much at all if you get accurate systems and failures, because half of the time something will invariably come up due to player error under combat stress, enemy action or a combination of both.

[Ernst]

BlackDog,

You resumed in your two last post all features that a 'hardcore' player (grognard) would want. However it ll be interesting, regard the presence of clickable cockipts, possibility to assign some of this commands to keyboard buttons too (ex. flaps, pitch, trim and other resources commonly used in combat) for faster use.

But your ideia is very cool!

[Blackdog_kt]

Of course, there should be keyboard/HOTAS assignments for all of the primary functions. I mean, when i fly MSFS on my buddy's PC i never click and drag the throttles,mixture levers, or flaps, i do it with the stick throttle and keyboard.

However, there are lots of systems and functions to model and at some point you run out of keyboard combinations or they become too complicated to remember. That's where clickpits help, because you can keep adding systems without having to worry if the pilot will have enough keys to use them.

For example, the easiest and most often used case is setting the instruments for the course you need to fly. You could do it with the keyboard too, but i just look where the gauge is, pause the TrackIR with a button on the stick to keep the picture steady, place the mouse pointer over the little knob on the gyro compass and roll the mouse wheel...voila, the indicator of the desired heading moves left or right, depending on whether i roll the wheel up or down. Sometimes functions like these provide a faster and more precise control than having to press the same key combination 15 times, like using the trim wheels for example.

The thing is, mouse activated controls should not be primary controls because clicking with the mouse is slower than pressing a key or two (can you imagine having to click the gun trigger on the stick with your mouse? of course not ). However, they are very useful for controls that you don't use all the time and most importantly, things you don't use during combat but are also part of your aircraft, because that means less key combinatios for you to remember. If there's a complex engine start procedure according to real life aircraft manuals for example, there's no reason not to use a mouse. You only need to start the engine at the start of the mission (hopefully), so i guess it's easier to just click through the switches than setup and memorize 4-10 new keyboard assignments

[Alien]

Originally Posted by zodiac

I remember reading somthing about a german experiment with flamethrowers that they put on the back of some DO-17s as defence weapon. I believe the goal was to keep fighters at a distance and/or blind them by smoke and light. I think those Dorniers were on the big raid of 15 september. The effect of the new weapon was not that impressive (RAF pilots often thought it were just burning bombers) and I don't think it made some kills back then...

But I think that in the sim it woud come as a real suprise to face a dornier like that. If you play the whole campaign,a player udually has developed a kind of routine tactic for approaching a DO-17. Trying not to end up in a sudden fireball would be a nice and unexpected feature in that mission.

I've only seen some pictures of he-111's and ju-88's equiped with flamethrowers, but it seems that there wasn't much visible of that weapon on the surface of the plane. I think only a small tube was visible, coming out of the tail. So, good news if it should be modelled

To give you an idea how the fireburst looked like, there are some pictures of it at the bottom of this page:

http://www.luftarchiv.de/index.htm?/...te/waffen2.htm

I think you mean THAT:

Originally Posted by luftarchiv.de