Friday 2010-10-01 Dev. update and Discussion

[swiss]

Originally Posted by diveplane

pray they dont sound like flying lawnmowers this time, il2 was terrible in prop audios. however saying that theres some very nice audio mods that corrected a lot of the stock sounds.

really hope they study audios and sound dynamics this time and use real aircraft samples.


hardest audio to emulate in a game is flyby audio effect distant sounds
reverbs.

what kind of soundcard/speakers were you using?

[Tempest123]

Wow, I'm late to the party on this one, excellent update!! Love the weathering on the italian planes. Looks like real progress being made, can't wait!

[Hoverbug]

Originally Posted by philip.ed

Sorry, poorly worded from me the same is true everywhere (at least every-where I've been)

Obviously some clouds will differ, but usually the cloud base/bottom is quite profound.

That said, having flown in both Britain and the U.S. I'm amazed by the variety and complexity and variety of clouds in Britain. The reason is indeed geographical - all of that dry arctic air is continually colliding with the warm water moving up from the Gulf Stream and all sorts of interesting things happen.

[Splitter]

Originally Posted by swiss

Still you can't use them on servers which are located in a country with swastika ban.
I thought I need swastikas for a quite some time - but spending most time on German servers I learned that I in fact don't, I even deleted most of the skins with it, just to avoid confusion.
Try to fly without 'em, you'll get used to it very soon.

Just to add to that (and this was in a past thread), Oleg and company will likely not be including anything that allows swastikas out of the box. No "hidden" settings where you can flip a switch and get them. Someone tell me if I interpreted that wrongly.

Eventually I am sure that third parties will develop those skins but you would probably run into the issues Swiss mentioned.

If Oleg and company allowed an "out of the box" switch for those symbols, it might be construed as a no-no by his own government. And of course, there are other countries that would consider it a no-no.

Stupid laws with dubious motives? Sure. But that's neither here nor there, they exist some places and there's no reason for the developer to put out two versions. I personally find the lack of swastikas a small detail that I have not bothered to correct as the absence is really of no importance to me.

I hope I touched on all sides of that issue as a summation so we don't need to further derail this thread lol.

Splitter

[NLS61]

This all heavily off topic.
I've seen only Italian Axis.
But these updates are my weekly fix so dont wine them away or stop Oleg giving any to us by off topic posts.
Btw If i good get the sim looking like it is presented here ill go for it.
Full real wil never happen as one can press replay in this day and age.
Niels

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by kendo65

Haven't posted on the update before now as I was just too pissed off with the attitudes of some people here to be bothered.

As others have already said, to get such a level of ungrateful whinging after being told we may not even get an update at all made pretty bad reading. No wonder Oleg got annoyed.

I suspect part of the problem we're hitting now is a growing mismatch between what people have been able to imagine the game would be and the approaching reality of what it actually is. You can detect an air of disbelief in some posts - "that isn't the 'real' terrain/smoke/texture/clouds - Oleg's holding it back to nearer release date..."

We've all had plenty of time, unencumbered by too many inconvenient 'facts' to create a fantasy of complete perfection - a cinematically-perfect recreation of 1940 aerial combat in which every facet that is most important to us is perfectly recreated - be it 100% accurate fm/dm, cinematic terrain, perfectly reproduced clouds, totally accurate aircrew uniforms, etc.

And we've been able to get away with this for so long because we didn't have evidence to the contrary.

Now the release date is getting closer and we find that all we are going to get is a very good flight sim! The best on the market no doubt and with room for growth and improvement, but falling short of perfection in areas where we'd begun to feel a sense of entitled certainty.

And so the disillusionment kicks in.

Anyway, I'm sure things will continue to improve up to release (and beyond). As others have said, until we really see this nearer to final production release on high settings without jaggies, etc it is next to impossible to judge its overall quality anyway - personally I am already pleased with what I've seen - it won't take too much more tweaking to get it very, very good.

But maybe we'd better get used to the idea that 'perfection' might have to wait a little longer?
-------
MD_Titus said it pretty well...

...while also claiming the record for the longest forum post I've ever seen (narrowly beating Blackdog_kt's recent efforts. Blackdog always puts in well-reasoned and interesting posts, but God, they're long. One of these days I hope to read one all the way through )

I agree 100% with what you say about expectations and reality. It's not bad to imagine and want things, that's what brings advancements in every field of technology. What's bad is to demand things on a short time frame no matter what, while also expecting them to work flawlessly as if they had been tested and put through their paces for years. These two are just incompatible.

I expect a lot of things too, i just happen to know that many of them will not make it into the first version and some might even not make it in the series at all during its entire life.
I think the difference between constructive input and whining is not what you ask for, but how you ask for it.

I'll use myself as an example, as i've had loads of ideas about things i would like to see in SoW and none of that concerns graphics or sounds. They are all things that i believe would improve the gameplay first and foremost, in a way that combines extra realism with the capabilities of PC software.
If i went about saying that the ability to edit scripts for AI crew members is the cornerstone of this sim, that we haven't seen anything about it and hence the sim is a failure, while i woudln't really know if such things are possible on the new engine, and demanding to see it on the initial release version, then it would classify as whining. I still want these features, but i understand it might take a while before they make it into the sim, if they make it at all.

Just think about it, if i campaign these ideas in an obnoxious manner it doesn't really help my cause, does it now? People would be all like "it's this know-it-all and his impossible ideas", so i woudn't have any support from other community members and by irritating the devs i would only serve to put my ideas in the end of the very long line of features that are planned or requested for this sim. If on the other hand i simply describe what the implementation of these ideas would do to enhance our gameplay, it's much more likely to gather support from other community members and then the devs will take notice and think "there are quite a few people who like this guy's ideas, maybe we should look into it sometime".

To put it shortly, i prefer providing ideas and asking if they are possible to implement, than giving orders to professionals while being an amateur myself. It's not only about what we say, but also how we say it. Keep that in mind people

This scripting thing i mentioned is one of my far-fetched ideas. Maybe SoW could at some point have an interactive, virual co-pilot that you can assign specific subsystems of the aircraft to monitor, or support for user-made scripts to do the same. For example if you are flying complex aircraft like twin-engined light bombers or four engined heavies, it might be possible in the future to select certain subsystems for the co-pilot to monitor, similar for the navigator or the flight engineer.

So, you could be flying a Lancaster at night and have your AI navigator giving your vectors to follow, while the radio operator is taking care of electronic equipment like radars and countermeasures and the flight engineer is adjusting intercoolers and cowl flaps to keep the engines within operating limits. This way, the aircraft would still function to a higher degree of realism but you wouldn't have to do everything on your own (there's a reason they were multi-crewed after all). You would simply concentrate on flying the aircraft, following the route given by the navigator and having to worry only about the fundamental engine controls like throttles and prop pitch, but the aircraft would still be highly detailed and not simplified in the way its functions are modelled. Of course, if you wanted you would switch between positions and do things manually.

This is basically a shameless rip-off from what i've seen in some FSX add-ons (one for the B17 and another for the Boeing Stratocruiser, which is essentially an airliner conversion of the B29), where you can either work everything by yourself or designate certain systems to be monitored by the co-pilot. The thing is, it adds quite an air of authenticity and the illusion of having a live crew with you when
a) in these multi-engined aircraft the performance of individual engines actually varies from one to the other
b) you have to make sure you synchronise them to prevent asymmetric thrust and
c)you have a virtual crew to help you do it, with your co-pilot informing you that "captain, the turbos on engine 3 are running a bit hot".

Originally Posted by swiss

So you just delete the posts you don't like?
This is the Internet and I am free to to give a shit about someones opinion - I hope that's what Oleg does.
Censorship is very bad idea.

Nearmiss is doing a good job.

I didn't say that. A good moderator doesn't delete the posts he doesn't like out of spite, in fact that's the perfect description of a bad moderator. What a good moderator does is enforce the forum rules, which the participants implicitly agree to follow by posting here in the first place.

So, if forum rules say "it's ok to go off-topic in every thread except the update threads", then in the case of this thread the moderatior deletes the posts that are dragging everything into off-topic grounds, like this one of mine and the one of yours that i'm replying to and many others in this thread, or posts that create flame wars.
Some forums have stricter moderation than others, some communities manage better with slack enforcement of forum rules because the members can contain themselves and not descent into chaos and some communities can't contain themselves and need someone to separate the brawlers so the rest don't have to watch a repeat of the same fight each Friday, that's all.

It's perfectly fine for eveyone to say their point, it just makes it too low on the signal-to-noise ratio scale to have the same people fighting among themselves each week. There's no reason to delete their posts either, just move them to an official big off-topic post and they can continue their fight there

Originally Posted by swiss

The problem is they expect something else than Sow will be.

They expect a movie-like game, "photorealistic".

As far as I can tell, that's not going to happen.
This will be a Sim with a very complex engine focused on mechanics rather than just optic appearance, although I'm sure they try to make as photorealistic as possible, it's just not 1st priority but 2nd.
That's ok for me, I share this opinion.

I could be wrong though.

Hello Swiss...You are right about our high expectations....But photorealistic is exactly what Oleg spoke about when he was asked at what level he was hoping to get SOW...He was also building his new code to be integreted in hi-tech cinematic process...
Well, maybe after the release , if it is not already there , he will have time to push his engine to the limit ?...

Salute !

[Jaws2002]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

Thank you Oleg for all the efforts in keeping us up to date with all these updates. Please know that there are lots of people watching these and discussing them in our squad forums and we are all very appreciative of all you do to keep us informed. Our resident former RAF pilot is chomping at the bit to fly a Hurri!

As to this edition's turn for the worse.

Some of you should be thankful I'm not a moderator here, and even more thankful that I was not your school master in the lower grades. Your parent's failure to inculcate tact, manners, and decorum would not have gotten past me.

BE VERY SURE.

+1

Thx Oleg for the updates! The vast majority of the community apreciates your work.

I think the moderartors should make a list of this guys (is allways the same short list of kids without manners), and just ban them every friday by default. This would make the interaction with the developers A LOT more positive and Oleg would have the dialog with the 99.99% of the community not with the 0.001 this people represent.

Logon - click User CP near top of page - click edit ignore list at left side. Type in user name to ignore and don't forget underscores, they kind of hide in the user's sig.

Thanks for the reminder BadAim. This thread is improving with each choice. It's against my nature to ignore people but Friday updates was becoming something less than a positive experience lately.

Originally Posted by Jaws2002

+1

Thx Oleg for the updates! The vast majority of the community apreciates your work.

I think the moderartors should make a list of this guys (is allways the same short list of kids without manners), and just ban them every friday by default. This would make the interaction with the developers A LOT more positive and Oleg would have the dialog with the 99.99% of the community not with the 0.001 this people represent.

So for you interaction between developer and potential customer means to constantly say:

Awesome ...
Appreciate ...
Excellent ...
Can't wait ...
Thx Oleg ...
Wonderfull ...
Everything is coming together nicely ...
...

I don't think Oleg can make any use of this sort of comments.
Has Oleg ever answered a post which contains only such phrases? No ...