ROF has gotten many of it's kinks worked out over 3 years. But it will never be anything more than a dog fight game. There's no ground war to support the air war. There's not even any real trenches in the game - both in the in game map or even as an object for the mission builder. Kinda important in WWI don't ya think?
With that said, it runs smooth to a point. But this point is because server hosters know what they are limited with. IE - they have to make missions with this in mind. You try to build some sort of WWI scenario and your mission won't even load or it would simply crash the Dserver. You can't even have as many AI as I have fingers in an online mission or the server is toast. Around 50 players is all you can have online, taking into account that in order to do that you can't really have any AI (3 AI in a mission don't count), can't have hardly any ground objects, or any other objects in general, all this directly relates to the games master browser where it must phone home and control everything. Any sort of overage, too many objects, too many players, too many people dropping bombs at once (yes - really), and the master server (ET phone home) loses connection and the server crashes.
In other words, what you are left with is flying around in a baron wasteland with no front lines, no objects, and hardly any players - dog fight game. With that said, this isn't a jab at the ROF team. They've polished what they've got to work with quite well. They keep adding more things for realism - just like they finally made all the guns have different rates of fires, instead of every single machine gun on every plane being exactly the same. But you can only polish the engine from which you started so much. Those restrictions/limitations will always be part of that game. Therefore ROF will never be anything other than a dogfight simulator. To some people that's perfectly fine, to others like me that see it, it's not. I played ROF from the start and harped about the limitations and just like any sim forum was met with the people with the blinders on attacking me for trying to make the sim better.
Now, Cliffs on the hand has more problems than I can list. But the one problem it doesn't, which IMO is the #1 thing any company should look at in making a sim, is the engine itself. Sure the game engine has problems, but that's not my point. My point is, it was made to support massive amounts of players, objects, planes, etc. It might run like absolute dog crap, but I can throw 1000 AI into the air at once and the game won't crash. My GFX card might turn into a blow torch, but it loads. I can throw 10's of thousands of objects into a mission and throw it on a server or load it through the FMB and again, my game won't crash, server won't crash etc. It might take me 45 minutes to join the damn server. But I eventually can. This is what I call the foundation of something great. This is why I will support these guys until they've said the doors are closing. If all these issues get sorted, this will be the best combat flight sim ever made, right next to the old best flight sim ever made (46).
Many things are frustrating - the bugs, communication lines, the amount of time to get some sort of fixes happening. But in the end of the day, there's no other sim that has anywhere near the amount of potential this does. Broken or not, one only needs to open up the mission builder for both games and notice ROF has about as many objects in it's entirety to use for a mission as IL2COD does just in types of fences. They've painstakingly modeled thousands of objects for a reason. I'm hopeful that someday we'll get to see that.
Coming to this forum and preaching about ROF is pointless. It's a fine game for the airquake. But it will never resemble anything else. Even the owner of ROF stated to "fix" the game engine would cost millions and they aren't going to do it. That's the same time I finally said buying scarves, pistols, water, fuel, and temp gauges, gun sights etc., was enough.
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07-15-2012, 09:03 PM
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