Friday 2010-02-25 Development update:Interview by Grégory Lemasson/Discussion Thread

[tagTaken2]

Originally Posted by Oleg Maddox

Didn't understand. If you speaking about some unprecise things in IL-2 over 10,000 meters then I would say that SoW has totally new physics engine.

Sorry, asking if SoW engine will support space flight parameters, very very high altitude and speed.

Example, in future, would it be possible to do X-15 expansion properly with this engine?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15

Thanks.

[MikkOwl]

Originally Posted by Oleg Maddox

The features of this is freezed already. Open was only about trims.

Frozen, ok But I was asking: force feedback taking any step forward (significantly) compared to IL-2? And then I made a wishlist request on how it could/should behave.

[Oleg Maddox]

Originally Posted by Freycinet

HB252, thanks for the link to Spanish civil War Messerschmitts, some great pics there! Lovely photo of Mölders and really funny photo of the two 109s with broken landing gear. If they had only learnt from that they would not have had so much trouble with the 109 in WWII...

Oleg, now you have had a chance to see the wonderful comics by Romain Hugault. Incredible, aren´t they? I really think you should consider having him work with you. He is very happy to do work outside of comic books, and he knows your sims too. He could do some magnificent illustration for SoW-BoB in a very momorable and unique style.
- His blog:
http://romain-hugault.blogspot.com/
- Cover of his latest album, girls and planes, what more can you ask for!:
http://rhugault.free.fr/images/bd/PW2couv.jpg

BTW, if you go to rome one day, you should really see the Italian air force museum at Vigna di Valle. Quite a few well-preserved WWII types there, I think you would find it interesting...
- Panorama of one of the halls:
http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/d...Valle-2009.jpg
- more pics:
http://www.airliners.net/search/phot...(LIRB)+(closed)
- Info and link to home page:
http://luftfahrtmuseum.com/htmi/imh/iva.htm

Thanks for the links. Sad, I never was in Italy. Just my wife was there several times with our son. If I will be there - of course aircraft museums are my target to visit. I do it simply in every country if there is such museum.

Comics I saw alive

[Oleg Maddox]

Originally Posted by MikkOwl

Frozen, ok But I was asking: force feedback taking any step forward (significantly) compared to IL-2? And then I made a wishlist request on how it could/should behave.

Can't say you right now. We put it in the final development.
As for my personal opinion - FF doesn't reflect real things. No one existed. And in realistic flight sim really FF is more bad then the good feature comparing to real life.

So the work over FF is the very secondary in our plan. This should be important for totally arcade game.

In the past I tried to communicate with all manufactures of FF joysticks to make some standard in forces, that would reflect more realistic things... Really only Trustmaster and partially Saitek were listening me in the past.

Hope with BoB this communication will be again up and probably we may set the stadards in future. But untill that time to spend a lot of time for FF I personally very dislike.

This should be done by some third party - special driver for any FF joy.
Manufactures should follow that standard (non MS SDK code, that we were using in the past with Il-2). Should be tunable special separate tool not in the sim, only external.

I can't spend right now time to explain all my thoughts about this issue.

You should talk to real pilots asking their opinion about joys with FF.
Probably they will say the same... also they would say that Joystick do not replace real control column 100% in feel of aircraft control.

With some of manufactures we had in the past the speech about what should be done for realistic control column useful in flight sims... But the price would be really more higher... and effect on the market (to sell it) will be not so successfull.

However I have several good ideas and drawings how to make it with more or less commercial success. But for this - SoW should be on a horse...

[Flanker35M]

S!

Thank you for the answer, that covered it all. I agree on the checklist etc. IT is a lot of work to implement correctly as you would have to know the procedures Luftwaffe, RAF and others used for their checks. And investing time for research it, code and implement = not worth it in terms of returns it gives. And most users would not use the feature after a few times anyway. So best is to just implement those that are used, not too hard to implement and give immersion to the sim.

Museums..you should visit some plane museums in Finland too, some nice planes to see. I have great interest in the VL Pyörremyrsky (Typhoon) and if it could be done for IL-2, we took pics and such at museum last time visited. 1 was made and it flew 27h and 31 flights. Performance surpassed Bf109G in climb and turn easily, speed was somewhat the same.

I am sure Ville and Raimo did speak about them when meeting you. Boy was I green in face when they showed the pics and told how it was Maybe some day could haul my son and myself to Moscow, Monino would be great to see and MAKS

[Oleg Maddox]

Originally Posted by dce21b

Hi Oleg I'm a stalker on forums usually just read a lot and ask a question from time to time so I would just like to say hello and say how wonderful your products are.

With what you are saying is possible as far as adding vehicles and people etc have you ever thought of maybe the next add on would be for ground warfare? I have read somewhere that you are allowing Human controlled AAA on airfields which is really cool.

What I am getting at is that sims for all niches are hard to sell and be profitable and If it were possible to make the community explode by having an all in one game like World War 2 online. It is so hard to find a game where all aspects can be represented.

Sometimes I will crash near a target area and just hang out to watch the AI tank battles etc and think how cool it would be if I could be in control of that King Tiger on the hill pushing through to capture a town and its airfield.

We are living in amazing times and technology is advancing everyday, IL2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles has lasted 10 years and still looks and plays great. So with a life expectancy of maybe another 10 great years would this be possible?

I know some people would say that this type of game, with this type of detail, would take to much resources. But what if the add-ons you released were stand alone as well.

For instance perhaps you are a tank simmer and you have no interest in flying at all you just want to drive tanks etc. You could buy Tubruk, Operation Barbarossa or how ever you wanted the timeline to go.

Im not sure how well the game would look to troops on ground level but you could have their stand alone adapt for them where as all the graphics and mechanics of the game would be geared for "tank simulation". And it would be able to interact with SOW.

Where as all the flight mechanics wouldnt be needed and could be instead be replace with the tanks. Then for online play the way the missions are setup you could just have the tanks spawn in a staging area on the map where as not to be too far from the frontline. Possible have tanks be AI controlled unless taken over by Human. Have breakthroughs where your line crumbles from not enough air support and now your pilots have to stop the blitzkrieg from reaching the town.... the possibilities are endless.

Point being is you make such a quality game if you could unite the differents sim communities together in one package with high quality sims that work together it would be amazing. Then that for sure would garuntee the success of the game. Imaging if you add human soldiers you would get lots of FPS players to the game. Not only supporting a great sim but helping to grow the community. Even naval warfare is possible.

How sweet would it be if you could have a Normandy scenario where everything was alive take your posion... invade or defend the beaches bombard the beaches with your ships strafing the beaches in your 109.

Wow Im rambling sorry its just that this has been a dream of mine for so long and I hope to see the day it comes true. I just know it will but when.

I hope that in time some of listed of your dreams will be possible.
Its way aleady in BoB we put so many ground objects, AI for them...
Simply because BoB shouldn't be limited only for battles over channel.
It is important for online gameplay, for other than channel scenarios, developed by users and of course by third party.
It is important for futures modifications...

You also should understand that we unable to make everything by our small team.
Say... that to contro tank there should "cockpit", system modeling, charging shells system and o on, control system ... and... command interaction with other such units doesn't matter AI or player controlled.... It is simply sim in the sim.
But it is possible in future if, i will reapeat:

1. Success of BoB.
2. Support for and from third party
3. Probably understanding of publishers or other owners of my team to invest in that direction even with separate team inside. 1C has other teams... but they are busy with other projects. That is a problem.

So without item 3 - just part of my and you(all) dreams are possible...
Howver is possible licensing of engine and work in cooperation with other teams...
But it shouldn't be like it was in the past with Il-2 where finally we simply gave sourse code for nothing....

[Freycinet]

Regarding the civil flight sim, I realise it is probably too much to start a huge, big project covering all the Earth and complex airliners.

But, what about a smaller project based on SoW, which would open up the eyes to the 3rd party scene regarding the potential to work with the engine?

A small modern sim showing off superior modelling of flight, weather, landscape.

OK, I will admit, I already have one idea in mind But I will keep it to email, I think. "You´ve got mail" at your 1c.ru-address.

[MikkOwl]

Originally Posted by Oleg Maddox

Can't say you right now. We put it in the final development.
As for my personal opinion - FF doesn't reflect real things. No one existed. And in realistic flight sim really FF is more bad then the good feature comparing to real life.

So the work over FF is the very secondary in our plan. This should be important for totally arcade game.

In the past I tried to communicate with all manufactures of FF joysticks to make some standard in forces, that would reflect more realistic things... Really only Trustmaster and partially Saitek were listening me in the past.

Hope with BoB this communication will be again up and probably we may set the stadards in future. But untill that time to spend a lot of time for FF I personally very dislike.

This should be done by some third party - special driver for any FF joy.
Manufactures should follow that standard (non MS SDK code, that we were using in the past with Il-2). Should be tunable special separate tool not in the sim, only external.

I can't spend right now time to explain all my thoughts about this issue.

You should talk to real pilots asking their opinion about joys with FF.
Probably they will say the same... also they would say that Joystick do not replace real control column 100% in feel of aircraft control.

With some of manufactures we had in the past the speech about what should be done for realistic control column useful in flight sims... But the price would be really more higher... and effect on the market (to sell it) will be not so successfull.

However I have several good ideas and drawings how to make it with more or less commercial success. But for this - SoW should be on a horse...

Agree that there should be standards. Third party tweaking - hmm. Sure, why not. It can allow specialists, or the manufacturers themselves, to tweak things to suit their hardware. Users too. Instead of having to rely on game developers to work with specialized hardware OR having 'one size fits all' force feedback which is not ideal either.

I have a personal story that I want to relay regarding the topic of force feedback. I like racing simulators, and racing around a bit in real life as well (especially in the past). The force feedback wheels used to be very crappy. The racing sims did not use even that old hardware well either. Back then, maybe I thought a bit like you, that it just isn't close enough to a real car and is even worse in many ways. But then comes some better simulators using hardware, and then the Logitech G25. It completely changed things. I have it now and it really turned force feedback from something clumsy and badly flawed into the most realistic option (for consumer price range).

Flight sims are the same now (SoW not yet released) with force feedback as 9 years ago. Maybe even worse. Manufacturers have not done anything for force feedback sticks over this whole time, except some optimizations (quieter, smaller etc). Only Logitech's G940 which just came out advanced the hardware noticably. But the market is empty of flight sims that use the hardware.

And think about what you said: you asked me to ask pilots what they think of force feedback joysticks with sims in the year 2001, not what it can be with existing hardware. If I ask racers what they thought of FF wheels with sims from the year 2001 they would also say it is horrible compared to reality. It is not a sound argument against force feedback for flight sims. You have such an innovative approach; I think you might have overlooked how the new hardware can be used, dismissing it based on how it was like in the year 2001.

EDIT: Maybe I was a bit unfair. You did point out that you cannot relay all thoughts on it, and that you have tried to make the manufacturers more responsible for allowing better force feedback programming (not just the hardware itself in the past) etc. I hope SoW will bring something new with FF to the market because that sort of thing is needed to get FF advancing. Only having hardware, or only software without hardware, does not bring it forward well.

[Flanker35M]

S!

Freycinet, maybe 1930-1940's airlines first as many are there..like Ju52 for Lufthansa, DC2/3 for others, Dragon Rapide..We already would have maps of that era with SoW Just a thought..then later expand to more modern days..

[SlipBall]

(quote)
And think about what you said: you asked me to ask pilots what they think of force feedback joysticks with sims in the year 2001



I think what he meant was to ask real pilots about stick forces in real aircraft...ff is very arcade and unreal in flight sim