Friday update and discussions 2011-03-11

[Insuber]

Originally Posted by louisv

edit: the shadows are parallel, but we see them in perspective...

Bravo, that's what I meant ... shadows are in perspective, as all objects are.

Cheers,
Insuber

[major_setback]

Originally Posted by Insuber

Bravo, that's what I meant ... shadows are in perspective, as all objects are.

Cheers,
Insuber

It is more than just that, there is a lens effect too. The screenshot is taken using a very wide angle effect. It is distorting the image.

Sorry, couldn't find a better picture:

Wide angle lens:

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by LukeFF

Blackdog, seriously, your posts are wayyyy too long.

I usually post a lot of stuff in a single post, other people like to post a little bit in a lot of individual posts...the final amount of text is more or less the same

Originally Posted by Robert

So are Stephen King novels, but that doesn't mean they're not fun to read. LOL I do wonder if Blackdog gets paid by the inch, though.

Lol, this has dirty connotations that i'm not going to delve into

Originally Posted by Theshark888

It is quite disturbing that release is only weeks away and this is what we get as an update. Eventually this will become a great sim when it gets updated and hardware catches up to its potential. Looks like it is going to run quite rough on todays PC's and the missions will be nowhere close to the needed "hundreds" of aircraft (much like IL2 was). In hindsight Oleg should have started out in a theater with less expectations for the amount of aircraft in the missions. You cannot fight the Battle of Britain with a dozen aircraft in the air!

Not knocking it since it will probably be the best flight sim around, when released, but some of you guys on this board are much too easily impressed and buy into the company line and Olegs laurels from IL2.

To be honest, it's not about buying the company line but what kind of features each one of us prefers. You are right however when you say that they might be getting complaints for choosing a theater/battle which historically had a lot of "traffic".

On the other hand, imagine if we got a 1941-1943 channel front simulator as the first release and they progressed backwards into battle of Britain from that. Having a total of 60 aircraft visible at the same time would be very realistic for the kind of cross-channel skirmishes (plus i'd have a Fw190 to play with a little bit earlier ). The scale would be just fine, but i give it less than a month before people would complain that the scope is limited and "since we can get 60 aircraft, why not 100? they should have done the BoB first"

My theory is that this is not about graphics, but CPU. The new FM/DM with many individual subsystems is probably the main resource hog here. When flying in single player everything is done by our own CPU and the complexity of the FM/DM limits the total amount of aircraft we can display.

I mean, why would the single player limit be 60 aircraft for a minimum spec PC, when the multiplayer limit is double that amount? The answer is easy, in multiplier your CPU only has to deal with your own aircraft, the others are dealt with by the CPUs of those flying them and the server just sends you positional/vector data on where your PC needs to draw them. In singleplayer however, your PC needs to deal with the FM/DM of your aircraft as well as the AI/FM/DM of the AI aircraft
This all points to the amount of aircraft being very CPU-dependent due to the new FM/DM.

My personal opinion is that this title is the foundation and building block for something that will take at least a couple of years to fully mature, simply because we don't have the hardware to run something so ambitious yet.

It's all a compromise: we can't have aircraft done at this level of FM/DM and systems modeling AND have 100s of them visible at the same time without using simplified FM/DM AND have this kind of visual/graphics quality and effects. Something will have to be turned down a notch and in this case, it seems to be the scale of what the sim displays.

However, the way they did it makes sense because the focused on completing the features that take the most work.

When we get better hardware in the future, it will be easy as pie to go into the mission builder, open the properties for each aircraft group and change the amount of units from 10 to 100 for each bomber formation and save it...rinse and repeat and voila, we can refly the scripted campaign with accurate numbers of aircraft in the air. Not to mention that even though there's not a stock dynamic campaign provided, they said that through a combination of output logs, scripting tools and possibly the SDK to be released later on, we will be able to have community made dynamic campaign generators (like DCG for IL2). And once we have that, we will be able to set the highest amount of unit density that our PCs can handle, just like we can in DCG today.

On the other hand, if there's not built in support for things like advanced FM/DM, engine management and so on, it's much harder to add it at a later stage when the sim will have grown from 12 to 50 flyable aircraft and it's definitely not something that can be done completely by the community.

I'm glad they focused on the features that have to do with how aircraft operate and fly, because that's not only the most important work for creating a sim that has an ambition to span multiple theaters and aircraft types in the future, but also the hardest part to get out of the way. Increasing the numbers of aircraft in missions is just like increasing graphics settings, after a year or two and 4-5 patches all we'll need to do is click on a slider. We can't code the new complex engine management on our own though, so i'm glad they did it for us

Originally Posted by zauii

As far as i've heard about 50-60 planes on each side which isn't bad considering how detailed the product is,
i'd rather have that than 200 ai planes with inferior ai, modelling etc. The game will catch up eventually indeed.

I agree, except on the last sentence. It's the hardware that has to catch up

[zauii]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

I agree, except on the last sentence. It's the hardware that has to catch up

My bad,
Yep obviously I meant the hardware will catch up indeed

[major_setback]

What are the cars shown in the update? I think one might be a Morgan, but I can't find it on Google.

[sallee]

Originally Posted by major_setback

What are the cars shown in the update? I think one might be a Morgan, but I can't find it on Google.

I think it's an MG (TC?) and an Austin Seven, but wait to be proved wrong!

[peterwoods@supanet.com]

Sports car is an MG TA, (wipers mounted high whereas TB had them mounted low). The TC was not made until 1945, after war's end. Saloon almost certainly an Austin 7. I believe I'm correct in saying that all pre-war Morgans were 3 wheelers, (single wheel at the rear). but I'd need to check that.
Pete

Edit: Checked and stand corrected. Morgan's first four-wheeler was the 4–4, for four-cylinder engine and four wheels. The first production 4-wheeled Morgan was released to the public in 1936 and is known as the Morgan 4–4 Series 1. Three-wheeler production continued alongside the 4–4 until 1952. You learn something everyday if you have an open mind.