Announcement of the game "IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad"

[LukeFF]

Originally Posted by zapatista

the RoF "game engine" is not able to reproduce real time modeling of flight physics for aircraft

How in the world did you come up with that conclusion? Nothing could be farther from the truth.

[kendo65]

That is something I've seen repeated a lot here recently.

Give a lie 30 minutes head start and you never catch up with it....

[arthursmedley]

Originally Posted by JG52Uther

Its the future Avro, the old model just won't cut it anymore. I just hope the new development doesn't cut into RoF/WW1 expansion.

Yep. Lets face it; most of us are eccentric old farts and we're numbered in the thousands so we're going to have to adapt to a new way of doing things if we're to enjoy a high quality WWII combat flight sim on PC. I think this is a very welcome development. I think it will be very good for RoF as new developments of the Digital Nature engine could be applied to RoF too.

And remember, the PC as we know it is dying a death too. Of course if we were into shoot 'em up/fur bikini/wizard/swordplay/sportscars on Xbox or ipad then the future is bright and shiny.

@excellent post Kendo.

Originally Posted by kendo65

That is something I've seen repeated a lot here recently.

Give a lie 30 minutes head start and you never catch up with it....

Yep, Luthier had everyone believing his for the last 36 months. Give this new sim a chance guys, they finally have people in charge that have a proven track record of good comms and honesty. Lets wait and see before we start getting our necks red.

[LukeFF]

Originally Posted by ATAG_Bliss

Welcome to a 1v1 dogfight simulator that doesn't even have cockpit damage modeled. If it follows the same ludicrous business model of buying fuel gauges, compasses, gunsights, pistols, ammo, weapons etc, expect an HE111 to cost $200. This is the final nail. The ROF engine is terrible. Vanilla 46 has 10 times the features in the FMB.

Still holding a grudge after all this time?

[d.burnette]

Originally Posted by arthursmedley

And remember, the PC as we know it is dying a death too. Of course if we were into shoot 'em up/fur bikini/wizard/swordplay/sportscars on Xbox or ipad then the future is bright and shiny.

@excellent post Kendo.

Very good point, with the popularity of the tablets, readers, fancy phones, etc, these days - PC sales are certainly declining. It will be interesting to see where all this is in another 10 years or so.

[LukeFF]

Originally Posted by zapatista

nonsense !!

after a few years of doing this and sales lagging, RoF decided to give you the initial 2 plane "game" for free but with limited options of how to play it.

Nonsense. The Free-to-Play version of the game is the full version of the game. Multiplayer, single player, quick missions, career mode, etc.

this was done very deliberately to sukker in a whole new swarm of players that would otherwise not have bought the game, and to be able to sell to a large percentage of them more planes and other items over the following months

Well, duh! It's called having a business strategy. 777 Studios is not a charity, after all.

[LukeFF]

Originally Posted by pirke

this will be new engine ?

http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?topic=637.0

No. The Digital Nature engine, i.e., the same one ROF uses.

[=CfC= Father Ted]

Originally Posted by kendo65

I've read a lot of the comments on this forum and the new one and feel that some very hasty judgements are being made before we have seen the detail of what is to come.

There are two main arguments that have been made (very vociferously by some) that I want to comment on.

The first is that COD was on the verge of turning the corner and that its engine should have been used in the future.

I think the truth is to be found both from reading between the lines of today's official announcement and from an honest appraisal of what has happened in the 18+ months since COD was released.

In answer to the question:

Why was the Digital Nature engine chosen instead of the CLOD engine?
The answer describes the Digital Nature engine as: "being relatively bug free and well-functioning"

compared to the COD engine presumably, and

"Using the Digital Nature engine will provide users with a well-functioning product at launch that can be brought to market fairly quickly."

We can also conclude from the painfully slow progress made remedying COD's initial faults that the engine was an absolute bugger to fix - remember Luthier confidently stating last year that the patch was 'almost done' and should be out before Christmas (2011 that is...). That is the patch that we got in final form a few months ago! The only way to explain such a massive delay is by concluding that they continually ran into unforeseen and hard to resolve issues deep in the code. I suspect that there were deep design flaws. How else to explain Luthier's admission that the only remedy for the non-collidable trees was to have far fewer of them in the next game!!

It seems clear that the biggest reason for COD's failure was poor management decisions regarding the scope and scale of the project. They tried to do too much, bit off much more than they could handle and unfortunately failed on a lot of the basics. Some examples - why, in a Battle of Britain scenario, was so much effort expended on exquisitely detailed but superfluous vehicles, when NO Royal Navy ships were completed? How much did we really need to be able to change our pilot's outfits?! The effort put into driveable vehicles and mannable AA guns also must have deflected effort and attention from other more important areas.

Because of this so much of what they tried to do was unfinished or implemented in a half-assed manner. Dynamic weather, the original sound engine that had to be redone from scratch, the flawed unfinished AI, the poor quality in-flight chatter (worse than original il-2), the commands system, the appalling GUI, even the fact that a year and a half after release there was no properly functioning AA.

It's clear that the project is now going to be run by the ROF management team and imo that's good news. Some are complaining that this means we will get a project with much tighter scope and with features left out. Probably true, but as I argue above COD's downfall was Luthier/Oleg's apparent inability to leave out any feature at all, no matter how minor.

The second issue is complaints about the perceived capabilities of the ROF/Digital Nature engine

I don't think any of us know exactly what the engine will be capable of with further work and development. It will obviously be changed in a major way from its current capabilities so much of the criticism I've seen is premature and a little childish I think.

It's pretty obvious that a WW2 sim will require more complex modelling of cockpit and engine systems than a WW1 sim. Just because the Digital Nature implementation in ROF does not currently have certain features does not say anything at all about what it will have in 2014.

For example, ROF doesn't have any radio comms at all - none - nothing - zilch, but I think we can all agree that it is highly likely the dev team are aware of the need to provide such a feature for a WW2 sim and will be working on it over the next year. Ditto for almost every other complaint I've seen thrown at ROF so far.

Cut them some slack. Let's be a bit patient and support what could be a very exciting future for the flight-sim community.

Pretty much nail head hit I say, especially the bits about where CloD went wrong in terms of its scattergun deveolpment approach

[MB_Avro_UK]

Avro sits back for a moment and reflects. His new born son of 14 weeks is murmuring in the background. Neither CoD or RoF will change the most important things in life.

Best Regards,
MB_Avro.