Friday Update, Q&A - December 23, 2011

[carguy_]

Originally Posted by JG53Harti

It seems, you never played a good online war like IOW/VOW.....
All would have been impossible without a well functioning coop mode
What we have now is, let me think about it.... nothing...
Only a big online gangbang

You are spot on, Harti. I have been waiting since premiere day for co-op mode and it is end of 2011 and all I can do is fly skirmish offline or airquake online. That is bad.

The progression of online war system in IL2 proved that the sim could be so much more than just server based fights. It was played like a game of chess by the red vs blue leaders on the online war site, then the pilots would take the chosen resources and put them where ordered. Whole historical campaigns rewritten : Moscow conquered, Smolensk conquered, Caen defended. Everything was there : shortage of resources, logistic worries, Reds ramming Heinkels just to stop them from bombing red tanks. Whole tank battles assisted by IL2/Ju87 assisted by fighters on multiple altitudes. It is just too much to wrote about. And on top of it all, every pilot could feel how it is to fly a loooong sortie, go back home to rtb, land safely and talk about the mission with teammates. It was this accomplishment of surviving a war flight sortie.

You simply can`t substitude this with deathmatch servers.

Oh and PS.
Regardless how airquake players read it : there is a whole crowd of squads waiting for CloD to get online war - ready. You can`t ignore those folks.

[Steuben]

Originally Posted by carguy_

You are spot on, Harti. I have been waiting since premiere day for co-op mode and it is end of 2011 and all I can do is fly skirmish offline or airquake online. That is bad.

The progression of online war system in IL2 proved that the sim could be so much more than just server based fights. It was played like a game of chess by the red vs blue leaders on the online war site, then the pilots would take the chosen resources and put them where ordered. Whole historical campaigns rewritten : Moscow conquered, Smolensk conquered, Caen defended. Everything was there : shortage of resources, logistic worries, Reds ramming Heinkels just to stop them from bombing red tanks. Whole tank battles assisted by IL2/Ju87 assisted by fighters on multiple altitudes. It is just too much to wrote about. And on top of it all, every pilot could feel how it is to fly a loooong sortie, go back home to rtb, land safely and talk about the mission with teammates. It was this accomplishment of surviving a war flight sortie.

You simply can`t substitude this with deathmatch servers.

Oh and PS.
Regardless how airquake players read it : there is a whole crowd of squads waiting for CloD to get online war - ready. You can`t ignore those folks.

Absolutly agree! Without COOP Modus (maybe implemented in the current system) like in Il2 CLOD is dead for me!

Even if they can fix the many bugs and a new graphic engine! Without proper online COOP modus this game will not work for many squads!

[smink1701]

Originally Posted by KG26_Alpha

The Q & A make no sense to me........it reads like a suicide note.

It is what it is...we all hope and wish for more but the history of CLoD and current situation point to the fact that this baby was prematurely delivered, has severe defects and is unloved. While the potential was huge and Oleg's vision for the game monumental, it is the Chernobyl of combat flight sims. Maybe someone like 777 will come along and rescue this baby. On a positive note, it has made me rediscover Rise of Flight.

Merry Christmas.

[HR_Naglfar]

Originally Posted by carguy_

You are spot on, Harti. I have been waiting since premiere day for co-op mode and it is end of 2011 and all I can do is fly skirmish offline or airquake online. That is bad.

The progression of online war system in IL2 proved that the sim could be so much more than just server based fights. It was played like a game of chess by the red vs blue leaders on the online war site, then the pilots would take the chosen resources and put them where ordered. Whole historical campaigns rewritten : Moscow conquered, Smolensk conquered, Caen defended. Everything was there : shortage of resources, logistic worries, Reds ramming Heinkels just to stop them from bombing red tanks. Whole tank battles assisted by IL2/Ju87 assisted by fighters on multiple altitudes. It is just too much to wrote about. And on top of it all, every pilot could feel how it is to fly a loooong sortie, go back home to rtb, land safely and talk about the mission with teammates. It was this accomplishment of surviving a war flight sortie.

You simply can`t substitude this with deathmatch servers.

Oh and PS.
Regardless how airquake players read it : there is a whole crowd of squads waiting for CloD to get online war - ready. You can`t ignore those folks.

Seems like my message got lost among all the pesimistic stuff, so I'll say it again.

There's no need of old coop GUI to make online wars right now. All the process of generate the mission, fly it, and report the log is obsolete and not needed. With scripts you can make whatever you want (an online war with real time air and ground movements, ordered in a web broswer map, for example).

There are a lot of possibilities to make online wars way better than all that we had with IL-2. But of course someone have to make it.

If there's a problem that makes impossible to fly online wars right now is the ram leak problem, not the lack of a not needed GUI.


PS: Anyway, I think that right now it's also perfectly possible to make old style online wars. The mission file structure is similar to IL-2, so there's no problem to generate a mission, and you can have a log of all the mission events.

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by carguy_

You are spot on, Harti. I have been waiting since premiere day for co-op mode and it is end of 2011 and all I can do is fly skirmish offline or airquake online. That is bad.

The progression of online war system in IL2 proved that the sim could be so much more than just server based fights. It was played like a game of chess by the red vs blue leaders on the online war site, then the pilots would take the chosen resources and put them where ordered. Whole historical campaigns rewritten : Moscow conquered, Smolensk conquered, Caen defended. Everything was there : shortage of resources, logistic worries, Reds ramming Heinkels just to stop them from bombing red tanks. Whole tank battles assisted by IL2/Ju87 assisted by fighters on multiple altitudes. It is just too much to wrote about. And on top of it all, every pilot could feel how it is to fly a loooong sortie, go back home to rtb, land safely and talk about the mission with teammates. It was this accomplishment of surviving a war flight sortie.

You simply can`t substitude this with deathmatch servers.

Oh and PS.
Regardless how airquake players read it : there is a whole crowd of squads waiting for CloD to get online war - ready. You can`t ignore those folks.

Your totally wrong, players have been flying, missions on the IL-2 Warclouds server for years that are mission based, and not airquake. Yes at times there will be people who join the server that arn't interested in the mission, but that can happen on Co-op servers aswell. The best part is you can join the mission 24/7 with no waiting, and you don't have to worry about someone running you over at the start of the mission and having to wait hours for the next mission to start.

The ATAG server in COD is mission based, and there are people flying bombers with full human crews, on long bombing missions. The tools are there like AI use and will only get better as the bugs and features are improved and more players join the servers.

[Mysticpuma]

Firstly let me quote the following replies:

Orville:

"So people who could care less about the Battle for Moscow have to pay yet more in order to see features that were misleadingly continually mooted as being in development for CoD, pre release (though cleverly not 'technically' promised I suppose for the pedagogue Sophist's around) . No matter what anybody says, that is the truth. Kept that one quiet pre-CoD release, eh? Fantastic. No more ships or planes either for CoD (AKA 'Slight skirmish over Peckham'). Happy times. I might even be daft enough to buy the sequel.....but you can guarantee others won't. In any event, certainly won't be pre ordering this time. Fool me once.......

Shocking, really."

jg27_mc:

"It's a shame that the most important air battle of history (IMHO) has been reproduced on this simulation the way it is... I fell completely cheated! Damn this thing had a huge potential... "

csThor:

"The way I am reading things - and I admit that the following contains pure speculation on my part - I am beginning to believe that Maddox Games consider CloD a failed effort and not worth the hassle to fix it. Rewriting the engine (FM, sound, GUI ... anything left that'll not be changed?) tells me that the current engine is not salvagable. IMO the new management 1C got when it merged with Softklub last year is another factor in this (read: money grabbers).

If BoM is indeed all that Ilya wanted for CloD then that would be nice, but from my PoV - and I have been an ardent fan of the Il-2 series and I have done little bits and things for almost each version of the game, at least until Oleg departed - that product will have to be just as big a hit as the original Il-2 was. It needs to be thematically sound, needs to have all the relevant objects and aircraft, it will need a much less complicated and nerve-wracking GUI, it will need a campaign system that is worth the title ... In short it will need to contain everything that CloD is missing right now. That's a tall order, especially since Maddox Games was never particularly good at developing gameplay factors or not wasting effort on pointless objects/aircraft."

AnttiK:

"I'm at loss... So to get currently very much incomplete product completed we have to buy the sequel? I'm not talking about which planes and which maps we get, I'm talking about broken features. I thought we'd get the game patched to a standard gold level as per usual for the price we paid for? Did I miss something?"

BigC208:

"Luthier is praising himself for still working on the game after 7 months. I see that a bit different. As far as I'm concerned we're still in the 7th month of a paid for Beta. I'll regard it the release version when the next patch delivers on the performance increases and bug fix promises. I don't expect a multimillion dollar sim experience for $50. What I do expect is a finished product at some point. If Clod is not playable for all (min box spec) before BoM is released I'll wait with buying untill the reviews are out. "

csThor:

"And here we seem to disagree on a very fundamental level, Ilya. I do not know the business realities of Maddox Games nor do I wish to know, but in my book CloD is at the moment nothing more than an unfinished game engine which is about to be rewritten. It's not a full game, the offline part is too minimal and too incomplete to provide much offline entertainment and the online part is bugged with the crashes, the FMB is still "touchy" in a few areas (i.e. the weather controls) and even the Channel map has a few annoying bugs (i.e. the holes in the landscape). Right now CloD is - in my opinion - not more than an early Alpha. It runs but the content (apart from the aircraft) is not really there, yet.
So this is my impression of the state of things when you posted that certain "features" will be postponed until the sequel. Even for me, and I am not short of a €, this does a lot to increase the WTF? state of mind I'm finding myself in WRT CloD. Are you seriously expecting the customers just to shrug and swallow that they'll have to pay yet another full game price just to get features which were promised for Clod (some features which I personally regard as vital for any game like a decent campaign mode)? Are you really expecting us to shrug off the total omission of the Royal Navy?

My point is that switching full-throttle to the production of the sequel, given the way things are ATM, is indeed quite a slap into the face of customers who have bought the product in good faith, customers who were looking for a good representation of the Battle of Britain with all its phases."


I have to say I very much agree with everything above, all of it really hits the nail on the head!



Luthier:

""The graphics reload has finally reached a sufficiently stable alpha state. Public beta is within reach.""

"The ground modeling staff and myself have subsequently made the fully switch that department to the sequel."

Luthier:

"We are however trying not only to patch up major issues, we're working on improving things that generally work - and we're doing that for free seven months after release. We are doing that by trying to parallel tasks as much as possible and improving CoD while developing a sequel."

Just hang on here Luthier, the issue is this;

This game is not working properly. Please don't think we should be grateful that you are continuing to work on the game and make it work as it should have from the release date?!

Look at the last 7-months of development as punishment for releasing a piece of unfinished software to a clamouring public who were/are willing to forgive a lot, but not now.

I think it is disgraceful to say that you will fix all the issues and let people play CloD as they should have been able to on the release day...BUT ONLY IF YOU BUY THE SEQUEL!

You see you have to buy the sequel to have all the features that were promised in the software that was purchased 7-months-ago, because if you don't buy the sequel, well you can carry on playing your half-finished product, continue bleating about it...but don't worry, Luthier, you can tell us that all is well, because we can pay for a patch that fixes it and the patch will have a name called "Battle for Moscow"

So now, 1C can start a new trend where software companies can say they will release a game/sim and then when people have paid for it, these software companies can then say..."but if you want it to work without crashing, include the terrain fixes that should have been in the original, include weather effects that should have been in the original, include a campaign that should have been (working properly) in the original (although altered for Russia as BoB isn't important really!) and many other features.....wlell don't worry, you can now buy a patch to fix our faulty software as we no-longer provide fixes to make our software work correctly, for-free!"

I think it's pitiful that you now say if you want your software to work correctly, you'll have to pay for an update to fix it....but we'll call it a new add-on as saying it was a patch wouldn't look right

I agree with others, 1C has disappointed many customers with this news and I will certainly be waiting for reports on the new update before even touching it with a Euro.

However don't worry, if BoM doesn't work correctly..we can pay for a patch to patch it!

MP

[JG4_Helofly]

Originally Posted by carguy_

You are spot on, Harti. I have been waiting since premiere day for co-op mode and it is end of 2011 and all I can do is fly skirmish offline or airquake online. That is bad.

The progression of online war system in IL2 proved that the sim could be so much more than just server based fights. It was played like a game of chess by the red vs blue leaders on the online war site, then the pilots would take the chosen resources and put them where ordered. Whole historical campaigns rewritten : Moscow conquered, Smolensk conquered, Caen defended. Everything was there : shortage of resources, logistic worries, Reds ramming Heinkels just to stop them from bombing red tanks. Whole tank battles assisted by IL2/Ju87 assisted by fighters on multiple altitudes. It is just too much to wrote about. And on top of it all, every pilot could feel how it is to fly a loooong sortie, go back home to rtb, land safely and talk about the mission with teammates. It was this accomplishment of surviving a war flight sortie.

You simply can`t substitude this with deathmatch servers.

Oh and PS.
Regardless how airquake players read it : there is a whole crowd of squads waiting for CloD to get online war - ready. You can`t ignore those folks.

+1
The best time was on VOW with my squad.

DF server are fun, but it's nothing compared to a good coop mission.

[RickRuski]

Nothing in the replies from the team to get me excited, no information on progress or problems that have been solved ready for the next patch. To be truthful, sorry 3 out of 10 (and that would be generous) for keeping the community informed on real progress. Doesn't sound like we will see anything major until 2012 sometime.

Rick

[15.Span_Valalo]

Sorry guys but this is bla bla bla...

[Steuben]

Originally Posted by Chivas

Your totally wrong, players have been flying, missions on the IL-2 Warclouds server for years that are mission based, and not airquake. Yes at times there will be people who join the server that arn't interested in the mission, but that can happen on Co-op servers aswell. The best part is you can join the mission 24/7 with no waiting, and you don't have to worry about someone running you over at the start of the mission and having to wait hours for the next mission to start.

The ATAG server in COD is mission based, and there are people flying bombers with full human crews, on long bombing missions. The tools are there like AI use and will only get better as the bugs and features are improved and more players join the servers.

Sorry but telling people they are totally wrong is ........(insert angry word here)! You obviously dont understand what the problem is! ATAG server is nice sometimes! But me in my squadmates want to fly together our handmade online campaign! We cant do that right now! Only maybe with some poor workarounds (which is not worth the trouble)! Handmade coop missions and campaigns were the best thing IL2 1946 had to offer! Period!