Desireable level of realism in a comabt flightsim?

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

If this were a scalable option, as it should be, I will guarantee you that in the online side of the game it will be an almost universally unused feature.

Some of the mods have the selection of using a proper warm up time before taking off. It's a nice mod really, but not even the most dedicated online realism fanatic uses it. Why? Because it adds not one thing to the air combat experience. Please remember that this is an air combat simulation, not a takeoff proceedure simlulator. Now I know this will raise the hackles of you offline, total realism types, but that's the way it is. It doesn't have any thing to do with "furballs" or "vulching" or any of the other stereotypes that offliners use to disparage the online side of the game. We "fly" the sim to "fly", not to be bogged down in the minutiae of proceedure. I would welcome realistic engine heating and cooling effects in flight, because as they are, most aircraft overheat far too easily (I know this goes against the common belief as well, but, you is wrong, be sure!) And some improvements in maximum boost use times are certainly in order. But totally modeling the start up porceedure for all the different aircraft is a waste of time and will take enjoyment away from the majority of users.

So, if you offline guys want it, that's fine, but make it a selectable option, so those of us who have better things to do, can just get on with it.

Oleg has understood this from the start, thank goodness.

Nobody said it should be mandatory, we totally agree on this one.

What we both don't like is one part of the fliers imposing their preferred difficulty setttings on the the rest

As for what kind of use it could get online, it depends on the scalability of it all. I recall you had a try with RoF and despite all the things i disagree with in that sim, there are actually some it does pretty well and are worth mimicking, so i'll use that as a basis for an example.
Where they wrong to implement engine limits and a start-up sequence? Not really, especially since you can toggle the warm-up separately from the rest of the CEM and the start-up is automatic, but you can still see the airframe going through the correct motions for a start-up.
You have to set throttles and mixtures right before pressing "engine on" and even then, an invisible ground crewman turns the prop, your automated hand turns the magneto switches and sometimes you might need to try 2-3 times before it finally manages to start.

That's neither hard to do or slow, nor is it crippling for online play, plus it's more realistic than the prop simply springing to life each and every time, regardless of how cold and damp the air might be on that day or the pilot setting his mixture backwards.

Something similar in SoW as an optional difficulty setting would guarantee enough use online, plus there's also quite a lot of offline-only people who would use not just advanced CEM options but also things like random failures, which would not see much use online. That's no reason not to include them, there's an audience for things like that, it's just a slightly different one.

If it was my call, this is what i'd do. Have the flyables working as close to reality as possible (think A2A accusim quality), provide an easy to code and easy to use interface for them like pop-up menus as a stop-gap measure and finally, give the players the ability to customize their inputs with separate controls for each airframe, direct assignment of a button or HOTAS/stick function to aircraft-specific commands and support for editing clickable functions into the cockpits, so that they can come up with their own preferred interface.

This would also stop the interface issue from becoming a red herring against added realism. I wouldn't need to do it all myself, i'd just have to show the people how to do it on their own, if they wanted to. After a little while people would be swapping their control assignment scripts and mappings, community made files for clickable functions, everyone would mix and match to his heart's content and all would be fine

Then, i would make provision for settings to automate parts of it. You're very accurate to spot the distinction that while engine and system parameters don't have as much of an importance during preflight (unless you have random failures enabled, then the engine run-up is a very important diagnosis tool), they do have a very real and significant bearing in flight and thus we can't do away with them completely.

So, the best compromise for me would be to include all the realistic bits and then provide a way to automate them, instead of pressing "I" and the engine magically and unerringly springing to life. Essentially, the realism settings should be "auto this" and "auto that", instead of "enable/disable". Some things should always be enabled under the hood with the difference being if it's controlled by an AI helper routine or the player. That would give everyone the chance to feel what really goes on and have a realistic experience, even if they are not willing to be swamped by the learning curve. Your plane' systems would function like the real one every single time, the difference would be the inclusion or not of an imaginary co-pilot.

What i would do to achieve this, is have sub-options for the difficult stuff in the realism settings. In this case, setting advanced engine management to on would open up a sub-option "allow automatic start-up/shut-down". Essentially, what Black Shark does. The engines don't start magically, they start automatically while following the correct actions and that's a big and important difference. It's just that instead of me it's my AI/ghost copilot that does it, plus if i know what i'm doing i can still do it manually and faster than him.

So, this would enable advanced CEM to have a place online, without making it too much of a hassle to transition between airframes in a DF/persistent server. If the start-up/shut-down part is allowed to be automated by the server admins, i could safely fly even the aircraft i'm unfamiliar with as the engine operating limits are clearly marked on the cockpit instruments. Thus we also solve the problem of having to "marry" a single airframe to make it work. Then, if i picked my regular ride for the next sortie, i would do it manually instead of pressing the auto-startup key and save some time (because i'd know the sequence well enough to perform it faster than the AI routine).

The "allow auto start-up option" wouldn't disable manual inputs, it would just automate a sequence of them, done at a pace that provides some sort of incentive to go manual (ie fast enough but still possible for the player to do faster on his own if he learns it). Essentially, setting this to on would be like the sim running a HOTAS script that maps one function after the other with a set delay between them to a single button press, nothing more.

Originally Posted by Sutts

Let's face it, we're almost all WANNA BE warbird pilots. The only difference is that some of us want the experience to be closer to reality while others are happy with fantasy combat where the only thing you need to worry about is where the bad guys are.

A WWII fighter is a powerful and dangerous machine. Things can get out of hand very quickly if you don't know what you're doing. At the moment, you don't get that feeling with IL2.

That's the scare factor i was referring to earlier. I think we need a bit more of it, user selectable of course

P.S. I think we'll see a lot of complicated stuff in SoW and i'm glad for it, because they won't be complicated just for the sake of it, but for the sake of accuracy. If IL2 is slated to get a tune up that will make navigation instruments more realistic by using nav radios and morse code identifiers, what makes you think SoW will be lacking in similarly complex affairs?