Friday 2010-07-02 Dev. update and Discussion Thread

[zapatista]

Hi Oleg,

thanks for the new screen shots, the planes are looking very good (love the detail and sharpness in the 109 closeup)

can you plz give some insight in the dynamic campaign engine the way it is being finalized right now ?

1) can a campaign server run 24/7 for several months with people joining for a few hrs to fly missions and then rejoining a week or 2 later again and see how the campaign itself has progressed with other gamers having played on it ?

2) when we join a server will the choice of missions have a similar interface to falcon-4 where you see a listed of "tasked missions" and you can choose a specific one you like (for ex: combat patrol, bomber escort, enemy fighter/bomber intercept, "free flight" from any airfield, etc..).

3) will blowing up bridges and railways reduce the supplies reaching the enemy front lines and reduce their fighting ability (including supplies to airfields, preventing enemy planes from refueling and rearming there)

4) can we later on also expect to fly cargo planes in BoB ? so that airfields or troops that are low on supplies can be resupplied by players ? (might not be immediatly important for BoB, but will be for Stalingrad, italy, and north africa campaigns)

5) you mentioned before your dynamic campaign server will have a semi-rigid progress sequence where the eventual outcome of the BoB is predetermined for the english side to "win" (or germans failing would be more accurate), will this campaign server program be open to 3e party editing so we can make servers with an uncertain outcome ? (this would not be for every player action to have a different battle outcome, but big issues like "keeping the english airfield south of london closed due to sustained heavy attack for 2 months", or "enemy looses 80% of their combat aircraft and resupply can not be done fast enough with new pilots and aircraft" etc, and another 5 or 6 pivotal events like that could be listed/triggered like that which alter the outcome of the BoB)

thanks for all your effort and perseverance with this project, cant wait to start flying in the new scenery and environment

[philip.ed]

The damage smoke is all wrong! Smoke that thick would rarely come out of an aircraft, and TBH the texture can clearly be seen to be repeated. I know this is all WIP, but my friend Holy-Grail has hundreds (maybe even thousands) of clips of guncam footage, and smoke this thick rarely comes out of an aircraft.
It should be a lot 'thinner', as the smoke shown is more in-keeping with the kind of smoke from a fuel dump or something like that.

Despite this though the rest of it is just awesome. But this smoke just reminds me of WoP, and it just looks dreadful in my opinion. I know that the MODS may be a taboo subject, but really there is a lot to take from what's been done regarding the effects in the sim

Please don't take this comment as being hugely negative, as it is only one aspect of the sim..

[zapatista]

Originally Posted by philip.ed

The damage smoke is all wrong! Smoke that thick would rarely come out of an aircraft,

you are probably incorrect in this

a military aviator recently in this forum posted the exact opposite observation, and stated that in his experience the combination of combustible material (incl oils etc) can indeed produce very thick smoke of that type, similar to what oleg posted in an older update (and is seen in this current one).

in historical footage of burning tanks, planes, and other military equipment i have seen before you can also see it to be very dense at times. no doubt current smoke is not final, and depending on what airplane and what part of it is burning this will vary, but completely dismissing the current thick smoke as "wrong" is incorrect in itself.

imo the combination of flames and dense smoke on the stuka and immediately behind it looks very good, the trailing flames and smoke to, but the continuing trail of very dense smoke for several 100 meters (and not dispersing) is probably excessive, but that about it

[Feathered_IV]

Have to agree about the smoke. Looks more Hollywood or early AAA than the real thing. Certainly understand that it is beta however. The flak looks very much like a commonly used photoshop brush though.

[Oleg Maddox]

Originally Posted by Freycinet

Real volumetric smoke, it looks fabulous!

- ...But almost looks wrong after I have been getting used to the lovely "cheat" in Il-2, with rotating disks standing in for smoke. Together with the multiple texture layers of dense forests, that was one of the best programming tricks in Il-2, to create a believable world with the few computing resources we had available in 2001.

I wonder which programming tricks there will be in SoW:BoB to create a believable world. There will be many and they'll be very clever I think!

Probably you are right.
However in BoB we use some amount of third party source code... because the product is too complex in many items that to make it at all in a small team.

[Cpt_Farrel]

I can only agree, the screenshots are amazing!

I also agree that the smoke is too thick. Sure thing, on the ground a single aircraft would sure be able to emit smoke as thick as that, but a moving aircraft seems unlikely to leave such a thick trail.

Regardless - this sim will be awesome for sure! Thanks for these wonderful shots!

[Oleg Maddox]

Originally Posted by Doogerie

Amazing Shot's Oleg have you finsihed the singel player map's yet and are you still going for a 2010 release? Anyway looks good I am really looking fowerd to it.

Not finished. There is still many empty places (buildings areas incomplete and no bridges set at all yet). But it is on the way.

[philip.ed]

Originally Posted by zapatista

you are probably incorrect in this

a military aviator recently in this forum posted the exact opposite observation, and stated that in his experience the combination of combustible material (incl oils etc) can indeed produce very thick smoke of that type, similar to what oleg posted in an older update (and is seen in this current one).

in historical footage of burning tanks, planes, and other military equipment i have seen before you can also see it to be very dense at times. no doubt current smoke is not final, and depending on what airplane and what part of it is burning this will vary, but completely dismissing the current thick smoke as "wrong" is incorrect in itself.

imo the combination of flames and dense smoke on the stuka and immediately behind it looks very good, the trailing flames and smoke to, but the continuing trail of very dense smoke for several 100 meters (and not dispersing) is probably excessive, but that about it

It gets complex. As can be seen in my post, I haven't said it is completely inaccurate, but to this degree I think it is. Obviously getting evverything 100% realistic will be hard in this category, as so many things can happen when an aircraft gets hit. With this amount of smoke, from guncam clips I have seen, it usually comes out of an aircraft for less than one-second before being replaced by smoke which is a lot smaller in comparison. to any degree, a military aviator from these times would surely be taking modern jets into account(?) which are totally different from these old war-birds.

[Oleg Maddox]

Originally Posted by Feathered_IV

Have to agree about the smoke. Looks more Hollywood or early AAA than the real thing. Certainly understand that it is beta however. The flak looks very much like a commonly used photoshop brush though.

Smoke looking different at diferent speed. It is wider more close to the plane when the speed is small. And it is not wide for a long distance when the speed is high.
Smae with the leght of flame.

Explosions are not from samples of photoshop
They are done researching a lot of different chronicles of 1939-41 years

Same was with Il-2... Do you thing that "red" tint and form of explosions for russian AA shells are wrong there? Hmm, than you all should read german pilots recalls how they were looking - "tomaten" - color was imposible to restore from the films of that era for us... just image (and not like these that are now on shots). Howere reading some recalls and the show them real pilots we got looking it close to that type of explosions. Even the form of the explosion cloud was different for different types of shells and regions of battles during of WWII.
We currently will have such types as it was possible to recognize in the films of that time.

On the shots are not visible very short time flame explosive at the very first movement of the full air explosion animation. However it is.

[csThor]

Yeah, the soviet AAA was informally known as "Tomatenhändler" (tomato dealers) to the Luftwaffe crews.