Daidalos Team's Room -QUESTIONS AND REQUESTS ONLY - For 4.11

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by JtD

How many of the planes listed/shown have complete LOD models and not just the first one? Which match the polycount and texture size limits as set by 1C? Which ones do not violate some copyright law? Which authors want to have their creation in an official patch in the first place? And what's not subject to the NG issue?

Good questions. Assuming that you weren't asking them as rhetorical questions, here are my answers.

Proper modeling: I had assumed that full LoD, damage and shadow models were required for any plane to be imported into the game. Obviously I was wrong. Is there an easy way to figure this out without having to hack into the game?

Polygon and texture count: For fighters and other small single-engined aircraft, it's very hard to exceed the polygon count. Poly count could be a problem for the P.37 and P.23/P.42. Texture size might be a problem for any of them. Is there an easy way to figure this out without having to hack into the game?

Copyright: Again, good question, but AFAIK, the mods I mentioned are original models or are reworkings of models which have been released into the public domain. There might be a few planes on the list which have been adapted from other games, though, so that could be problematic.

Northrop-Grumman: None of the planes on my list are made by NG or any other company it's bought up over the years (Ryan). And, most of the U.S. planes I mentioned are just variants of planes that are already flyable in the game. Everything else was made by companies that went out of business, were nationalized, or which were on the losing side (so copyrights and whatnot were taken by the victors as "spoils of war").

Why haven't modders contacted TD?: Language barriers? Ignorance? Dislike of TD and its policies? (The last one is stupid in my opinion. There's too damned much politics in the IL2 modding world.)

I do know that modders have big active web sites, which have extensive resources to help people create content for the game. That means that talented newcomers tend to gravitate towards mod sites.

Meanwhile, TD barely makes its email address known and the closest thing there is to an "official" guide to making content for the game is the "IL2 Bible" which hasn't been updated in 8 years.

As for good mods which should be in the game, look at Checkyersix's command and control mod, Certificate's AI mod and Frog's formation mod.

[Luno13]

DT are already working on the AI. Some members have mentioned it a few times although it's not in this update thread.

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Good questions. Assuming that you weren't asking them as rhetorical questions, here are my answers.

Proper modeling: I had assumed that full LoD, damage and shadow models were required for any plane to be imported into the game. Obviously I was wrong. Is there an easy way to figure this out without having to hack into the game?

Polygon and texture count: For fighters and other small single-engined aircraft, it's very hard to exceed the polygon count. Poly count could be a problem for the P.37 and P.23/P.42. Texture size might be a problem for any of them. Is there an easy way to figure this out without having to hack into the game?

Copyright: Again, good question, but AFAIK, the mods I mentioned are original models or are reworkings of models which have been released into the public domain. There might be a few planes on the list which have been adapted from other games, though, so that could be problematic.

Northrop-Grumman: None of the planes on my list are made by NG or any other company it's bought up over the years (Ryan). And, most of the U.S. planes I mentioned are just variants of planes that are already flyable in the game. Everything else was made by companies that went out of business, were nationalized, or which were on the losing side (so copyrights and whatnot were taken by the victors as "spoils of war").

Why haven't modders contacted TD?: Language barriers? Ignorance? Dislike of TD and its policies? (The last one is stupid in my opinion. There's too damned much politics in the IL2 modding world.)

I do know that modders have big active web sites, which have extensive resources to help people create content for the game. That means that talented newcomers tend to gravitate towards mod sites.

Meanwhile, TD barely makes its email address known and the closest thing there is to an "official" guide to making content for the game is the "IL2 Bible" which hasn't been updated in 8 years.

As for good mods which should be in the game, look at Checkyersix's command and control mod, Certificate's AI mod and Frog's formation mod.

The modeler would fairly quickly be able to answer some of these questions.

I'm in total agreement with you... there are some great mod packages out there with some really well deserved updates to all sorts of aircraft. Some of it looks top quality to me... have they produced a finished product or made one that works just "good enough" I don't know. Two or three guys I even asked them if they intended to bring their aircraft to TD to see about implementation... total silence.

There are several guys who have worked with TD and received fantastic support in my mind. The fruits of that labour are already showing in some of the current patches with more to come.

[EJGr.Ost_Caspar]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Proper modeling: I had assumed that full LoD, damage and shadow models were required for any plane to be imported into the game. Obviously I was wrong. Is there an easy way to figure this out without having to hack into the game?

Polygon and texture count: ... Is there an easy way to figure this out without having to hack into the game?

There is. Since the kind of modding is, that you have everything in an open structure, you will just to download the mods, open the packages and see, how many mesh files there are or how big the texture are.

Meanwhile, TD barely makes its email address known and the closest thing there is to an "official" guide to making content for the game is the "IL2 Bible" which hasn't been updated in 8 years.

The "IL2 Bible" is indeed still actual, if it comes to modeling for 1CMaddox standard (which is also DTs standard). On base of it you can make all the nice things, that have been released during 1CMaddox development times (excluding maybe the very first models). There is no need to update it.
And as IceFire said... the newest 3rd party models, that will be soon available via 4.11 and ongoing patches, show very well, that the (all so blamed) old standards are way enough to produce wonderfull content.
Higher standards or technologies are just good to help poorly skilled modeling freshmen.

[Sita]

many ModMakers are asking, why DT keep working under that old 1C MG standarts?
they told that performance of current grafik cards, with 1 gigabyte and higher, will enough for work with models, which exceeded poly count of older standarts, or they can handle with texture bigger then 256 or 512... or complects textures which higher than 8 mb...

EJGr.Ost_Caspar, you know that we are working in rights direction... and trying to fit into the requirements
and we like, that our work looks not bad for today and In this case we fit into the limits


just curious...

(p.s. sorry for my bad english)

[JtD]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Good questions. Assuming that you weren't asking them as rhetorical questions, here are my answers.

Certainly not rhetorical and thanks for your answers. But I can't answer your question, so best listen to Caspar.

I hate politics, too. I want one version of the game that has the very best of all worlds, a common effort by the community. I hate to see things wasted, one way or the other, by having folks go in different directions. And I'm afraid that much of it is down to ego, nothing else. Some folks just can't take a seat in the second row - idiotic but human.

[FrankB]

Originally Posted by Sita

many ModMakers are asking, why DT keep working under that old 1C MG standarts?
they told that performance of current grafik cards, with 1 gigabyte and higher, will enough for work with models, which exceeded poly count of older standarts, or they can handle with texture bigger then 256 or 512... or complects textures which higher than 8 mb...

I, for one, am grateful that the old limits are still enforced. I can't afford to buy a new computer every 3 years.

I've been playing IL-2 on AMD Sempron 1800, 1.5 GB RAM, ATI X550 with 128 MB, resolution 1280x1024. It fully satisfies all my needs except when there are many objects in IL-2, but I keep hearing that is a problem even on today's high end computers.

[JtD]

Originally Posted by Sita

many ModMakers are asking, why DT keep working under that old 1C MG standarts?...

What's your frame rate if you have a mission with a couple of hundred planes and several hundred ground objects?

Bottleneck isn't necessarily the graphics card, but I still get noticeable frame rate losses when flying over an air field with a hundred static planes on it, or over a city, and most recently I noticed even a cloud related frame rate drop.

Now if all the objects have twice the poly count, I'd get the same drop with half the objects, and even now the object count is too low for my taste.

[Sita]

understand)

[Mustang]

REQUEST