Simulation or Shoot-em-up?

[meplay]

Originally Posted by Heliocon

You got it the wrong way around.

I know what he means....and its true, did you have the hardware for the first il2 when it came out? If you did, you are lucky and maybe rich? hehe

[Rattlehead]

Originally Posted by DogTailRed2

I've been a fan of IL2 and waiting for this game for sooo long.
Being playing for about a month and I can't decide if COD is a genuine sim or a glorified Shoot-em-up.
To be a simulation you need to accurately depict the scenario, environment you are trying to model. I can't fly successfully over land due to FPS issues so I air-start over the channel. I'm in an aircraft that doesn't sound or fly like a front line fighter. I'm presented with radio chatter which sounds like a bad rap recording while I watch my AI steam into a bomber formation (with hyper-drive) and expend all their ammo in a single pass. I love the way 1-11's do snap wing overs when attacked. That's if they don't collide with their wingmen that is.
Then it's my turn to try and I find, due to control lag, I'm porpoising all over the sky and at the critical moment when I've actually got the hun in my sights I get the most almighty stutter and then he's gone.
So this is why, to me, COD is a Shoot-em-up because more and more I'm just setting up scenarios where I can fur-ball for a bit of fun rather than trying to immerse myself in an epic battle. In fact, sad though I say it, I'm flying COD less and less.
COD has no immersion or atmosphere. The Battle of Britain sim it aint.

So basically it's because of poor performance that you're not enjoying it? I can very much understand where you're coming from if that's the case.

However, there are many people that are enjoying good performance with this sim (and yes, it's very much a sim) and are having a lot of fun with it too.
Okay, the dodgy AI can get annoying smetimes and the lack of comms is an issue, but to me when I'm up there flying, I'm as immersed as I've ever been in a sim.

Even over London, higher up, it's playable for me and I certainly don't have a monster rig.
Just the other day I set up a mission where I had to take off and intercept 20 Dorniers bombing the city, complete with dozens of flak batteries defending the city, and although there were several moments where the game stuttered badly and the frames rates dropped well below 30, overall I had a lot of fun playing the mission.
Now fair enough, it wasn't really an accurate depiction of a real bombing raid over London since the bomber formations were much larger normally, but still. In time hopefully that number will change from 20 to 100 bombers, plus escorts, via a combination of more efficient game code and better hardware.

If the performance issues are sorted out, I think you will change your opinion.

Just out of interest, what are your system specs and settings?

[robtek]

I really don't understand why people, which have issues with CoD, almost always have to promote another game??
Especially if those other games already had (and mostly needed) some time to ripen to their actual state.
It is like comparing a prototype racecar to a Taxi.
It will also have the same outcome should they race against in a few months.

[Rattlehead]

Originally Posted by nats

The two games should be able to be compared, especially as the large team on CoD and expense should mean it is far far better than RoF but it isnt.

The team, according to Luthier himself in a PC Gamer interview, is anything but large.
By modern standards, it's tiny - 22 people. I think it's incredible that an undertaking as exhaustive as this was created by such a small development team.

I've read a lot of your posts nats and I fully understand where you're coming from. It's not anything like what you expected and that's fair enough. Maybe like you say it's better in your case (and other people experiencing huge problems) to come back in a few weeks/months and see how things have developed.

[Skoshi Tiger]

I thoroughly enjoying the detail and immersion thats been given to us in COD. The ongoing support by the developers is fantastic. Each patch is giving me better performance. I haven't had so much gaming fun and enjoyment since Pacific Fighters was released and I got into the IL2 series.

Other sims have a lot of merit like ROF and DCS:A10, but the enjoyment from something like A10 is completely different for me. A10 satisfies the procedure side of things and I'm happy if I can successfully get a LBG on target. ROF is fun and immersive. I love the WWI historic side of things, but since I've got COD the only time I've started up ROF has been to look for new patches.

Maybe if COD should have been released like A10 as a pre-purchase and access as a beta there would less of these annoying arguments from the holier-than-thou pontificating crowd. Who knows or cares?
COD is a really great sim with heaps of potential; I think it’s great just to be on the ride!

[usr]

Originally Posted by nats

And most importantly everytime I play I get my sense of belief ruined by something - either its the rubbish scenery over London, or the extremely short view distance of ground objects, or the lolly pop trees, or the cruise engine bug, or the stutters whenever anyone first shoots at a bomber, or the rubbishy looking Channel sea (since when has the Channel been reflective), or the complete lack of radio commands. You just cant do ANYTHING in the game at the moment without meeting bugs and unfinished bits and pieces.

"Sense of belief getting ruined by some technical problem or another" is a very important point. I'm fully on your side with the general concept. This is exactly what is happening to me and probably most others too.

But keep in mind that even the old IL-2 also had lots of potential immersion breakers, even after a decade of ripening. E.g. AI breaking at 400m, light-speed gun sound propagation that made it possible to dodge supersonic bullets by ear and so on, the list could be continued for pages. It did not keep us from loving the sim. Why?

The all-important difference here: we also had many years for adjusting to those shortcomings, for developing blind spots and basically accepting those details as genuine parts of our "virtual reality". Now when something new comes along, we still won't notice immersion breakers a lot if they happen to be the same ones, but if they are different ones they, sadly, will stand out prominently.


PS: you say you did not own RoF until a few weeks ago - well, i've bought it on the day of the european release, and after few days i was happy to write the money off rather as a donation to the flight sim cause than as an actual purchase. It felt exactly as you are describing CoD now, a collection of immersion breakers with serious lack of game wrapped around a core made of technical problems. I've heard it's supposed to be much better now, but i did not really bother anymore. I guess the nats-RoF relationship was being very lucky by skipping over the rough phase (on a related note: the pay-by-plane model is totally unattractive to me: if they'd group them into consistent scenario packs, even with the same average price per plane, my willingness to sink more money would be much larger)

[Blackdog_kt]

So, the summary of the thread goes a little bit something like this:
a) it's not a sim because we can't get two hundred bombers on screen with playable frame rates, not currently at least

b) comparison to another product that was a total mess on release as well.

No offence to anybody, but if RoF managed to get where it is today with a bunch of fundamental flaws built-in by design (like the 2km visibility bubble and the inability to track a big enough number of units), i have no worries that CoD will get where it needs to go.

I've seen youtube vids with 1000 aircraft in the air at the same time. This doesn't mean you can do it on a dual core with an on-board GPU, it means that the engine lacks limits and as we get better hardware the amount of things we can see will increase.

As for what is a sim and what isn't, it depends on how you define it. It seems like a lot of people expected realism by numbers of units and visuals alone (which we all know are the most taxing combination on a PC), they got skirmishes and now they claim CoD is not a sim.

Well, i was expecting the focus to be on flying and operating the aircraft, so in that sense it's very much a sim to me.

It might not be an exact recreation of the BoB, but it's a very good recreation of certain aircraft that flew during that time and some scenarios they would be employed in.

I might not have 1000-bomber raids just yet, but on an individual, per-aircraft level the amount of detail is much higher than anything that came before it.
In that sense, i prefer to fly a correctly modeled bomber, have my current system capped with 40 of them and then add more as i get better hardware in the future, rather than getting the ability to have 200 bombers on the current build by simplifying the aircraft systems and damage model. Getting a nice 3d-model without all the other stuff to let me run a lot of them on screen would do nothing for the long run, because it would just be a "shell" of an aircraft without any character.

In other words, i prefer running a scaled down version of increased realism, rather than a 1:1 scale version of decreased realism.

I don't see why people are surprised really. It's always been like this. I remember when i got my first ever IL2 version back in 2001, the attention to aircraft detail was so much better than anything else before it but it brought my system to its knees. I couldn't run missions with more than a couple dozen aircraft for the initial 1-2 years of IL2's life.

What i did was fire up European Air War when i wanted some massive battles and fire up IL2 when i wanted attention to detail, until i got to a point where i could run IL2 with an adequate amount of aircraft, then i stopped flying the older sim.

I don't see how anyone can expect CoD to have the content of an already running 10-year series, while at the same time being easy to run on mid-range PCs at increased detail levels (not only visual detail) on a massive scale. These things take time and if you can't have everything at once, you pick and choose what makes more sense in the long run.

I'm just glad they decided to focus on the inner workings of aircraft and built an engine that's geared around that and future expandability. Graphics can be made prettier 5 years down the line by swapping a couple of textures with higher resolution ones, but rewritting the damage model from scratch at a a later point in time (where there will possibly be extra aircraft modeled) is a much more massive undertaking.

[jojimbo]

lets be patient, luthier and his team are working round the clock and once we middleware simers can play reasonably well on medium (which still loks really good btw) we will start to get some good user campaigns going.
cant wait for an epic scale BoB realistic campaign like the old cfs1 days.

would be interesting to have the ability to mod the terrain though, i would rather a photorealistic terrain texture with nothing on it, than laggy trees and houses, just have eye candy for the airbase.

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by col123

I cant see much more effort being put into COD to be honest..i mean even after 6 years of effort and it was still released broken and bugged to a somewhat hoodwinked market, the amount of work needed to fix ALL the broken bits will take a lot more of that effort and money..i doubt 1C will invest much more time and cash trying to fix this sim...for all we know after its release to the USA market the Devs may just quietly leave it at that and move on counting their losses and turning their attention to other things with less hassle...after all thats what it appears has happened with Oleg so whos to say the whole team wont follow!.....am not saying that will happen and i hope it wont, but you never know...my confidence rating for 1C at the moment isn't very high to be honest..i cant see them wasting what little revenue they may receive on COD sales updating and patching it over the next year or so..and it wont be fixed in the next few months...its just not feasible looking at all the issues...and i don't just mean smooth and reasonable FPS....

The whole sim is lacking any coherent structure with so many quirky innuendos and strange mis matches in consistency and major bugs its a miracle they have got away with releasing it in the state it is to be honest.. I remember Il-2 and it was never as bad as COD on release!

If the plan was to drop support for COD, there would have been a world wide same day release, where they took the money and run. They certainly wouldn't have done an Eastern release with all the bad publicity that caused, then worked 24/7 for months for the western release. The plan is still to support and add on to the series for years. The early release just enfused the project with much need cash to continue work. The devs and publishers have certainly taken a serious publicity hit, but I suspect most in the community understand the process and have enough foresight to see the product improved for many years.

I feel the 'No' immersion factor too, i think that will improve tenfold if they let users sound mod with the SDK.
I think small things like wind when opening the canopy, and having weather will create a much more immersive flying environment. I'm just pissed that i bought this thinking it was in there cos i was told it was, now i have to be patient and forgiving and wait. I'm still shocked about the lies that were told in all honesty.