Just wondering, do you think that IL2 Sturmovik (original)was way ahead of it's time?

[Blakduk]

I cant remember which version i first played- it was il2 1.????
I recall being awestruck by the atmosphere and scrolling terrain, but i had to turn all the visuals way down just to get it to run. I also recall seeing AI doing amazing hammerhead turns that quickly got referred to as 'bat turns'- they were a real immersion killer for me, they looked so out of place.
I dont recall so many beta patches coming out back then, but then i was solely offline and hadn't really discovered the forums. If 1C can hold their nerve and release patches that are robust i expect great things again.

[C6_Krasno]

"From all people I know who have bought IL2 Mk I on release concur with this. They all say that in the beginning it was unplayable and full of bugs. Some even say that IL2 got really good only after patch 1.4 "


I believe IL2 has had only patches up to 1.2 (before going to Forgotten Battles).

[Seeker]

IIRC, the following was going on, on or about the time IL-2 came out:

Air Warrior was dying, Aces High was starting, Warbirds was in decline (it's chief staff having left to start Aces High) and EAW was beginning to sink into mod madness and suffering from a graphics card generation change it couldn't cope with, and I can't quite remember when Rowen's Battle of Britain was released but I think it was around the same time or slightly earlier.

I certainly bought IL-2 as soon as at came out (I'll buy any WWII prop sim); and I was wonderfully impressed by the graphical beauty, but I very quickly shelved it again due to the funky view system (this was long before Track IR) and the lack of Spitfires!

I picked up again for Forgotten Battles (Spitfires again!).

The only apparent revolutionary things in IL-2 were the bail out animation, plane set and the fact that it was Russian, which was unheard of at the time, every thing else had been seen before (from a features/end user perspective, I've no idea if the code had new solutions to old problems).

Edit: I'll take some of that back, there was something new for IL-2: The training missions. A genuinely new idea as far as I know. Unfortunately, every patch seemed to break it, and Oleg never seemed bothered about one of the few features that were genuinely unique. Thinking back, the Current crew could probably avoid a hell of a lot of moaning by including training tracks on how to cope with CEM, and maybe even a "Technical officer briefing" on game set up including graphic options and what they do.

Another huge, massive hole in the whole IL-2 series has been some sort of collated documentation on the finer aspects of conf.ini and RCU file tweaking. The RCU idea _could_ have been developed into something unique, but for some reason it never seems to get any attention, being hidden away in the file system, a place where ordinary users have no business!

In many ways, Clod is only now catching up with EAW's feature set, and then only just. It still lacks Airwarrior's online mission briefing tools, Aces High's linked buff AI, any online sim's multi crewed buffs and a slew of features common in the better sims of the last centuary.

Nothing about Clod is revolutionary, not a thing.

[Baron]

Originally Posted by Seeker

Nothing about Clod is revolutionary, not a thing.

True to some extent, except the complexity of everything from graphics to damage model and trying to put everything together in one package.


Witch, as everyone have noticed, isn't a easy thing. (not referring to CoD only here)


The more game developers can do the more complex it gets and harder to get to work properly.

[Seeker]

Originally Posted by Baron

Except the complexity and trying to put everything together in one package.


Witch, as everyone have noticed, isn't a easy thing. (not referring to CoD only here)

Really? Remember WWII online?

Originally Posted by Seeker

IIRC, the following was going on, on or about the time IL-2 came out:

Air Warrior was dying, Aces High was starting, Warbirds was in decline (it's chief staff having left to start Aces High) and EAW was beginning to sink into mod madness and suffering from a graphics card generation change it couldn't cope with, and I can't quite remember when Rowen's Battle of Britain was released but I think it was around the same time or slightly earlier.

I certainly bought IL-2 as soon as at came out (I'll buy any WWII prop sim); and I was wonderfully impressed by the graphical beauty, but I very quickly shelved it again due to the funky view system (this was long before Track IR) and the lack of Spitfires!

I picked up again for Forgotten Battles (Spitfires again!).

The only apparent revolutionary things in IL-2 were the bail out animation, plane set and the fact that it was Russian, which was unheard of at the time, every thing else had been seen before (from a features/end user perspective, I've no idea if the code had new solutions to old problems).

Edit: I'll take some of that back, there was something new for IL-2: The training missions. A genuinely new idea as far as I know. Unfortunately, every patch seemed to break it, and Oleg never seemed bothered about one of the few features that were genuinely unique. Thinking back, the Current crew could probably avoid a hell of a lot of moaning by including training tracks on how to cope with CEM, and maybe even a "Technical officer briefing" on game set up including graphic options and what they do.

Another huge, massive hole in the whole IL-2 series has been some sort of collated documentation on the finer aspects of conf.ini and RCU file tweaking. The RCU idea _could_ have been developed into something unique, but for some reason it never seems to get any attention, being hidden away in the file system, a place where ordinary users have no business!

In many ways, Clod is only now catching up with EAW's feature set, and then only just. It still lacks Airwarrior's online mission briefing tools, Aces High's linked buff AI, any online sim's multi crewed buffs and a slew of features common in the better sims of the last centuary.

Nothing about Clod is revolutionary, not a thing.

Your last phrase is imho very subjective and a bit simplistic as you only refer to some game features like play modes or animation sequences.

There are a lot of other aspects for a flight sim beyond this few you focus on.

I say in terms of graphics and damage model CoD is definitely pushing the bar very very high in the genre of flight sims.

There are many features I never heard of before such as the possibility to use scripting language for mission building as is possible in CoD. That I would say is a pretty new feature but perhaps a feature you don't care for. But others do.

Also I am very much looking forward to the moment when the devs turn on the weather module. This will be awesome I am certain.

So will CoD revolutionize the flight sim market? I am sure it will do it as much as IL2 did. It will become the standard in ww2 flight combat simulation and setting a standard. It is no secret that most people switched to IL2 when it was on the market and only few remained with other simulations like Aces High or Battle of Britain Wings of Victory. The same will happen and is already happening with CloD.

[Blackdog_kt]

I remember playing through the IL2 demo and getting stutters and freezes every step along the way, but it was so much more advanced that everything i'd seen before that i decided to buy it.

I remember getting the first IL2 release back in 2001 and being unable to run missions with more than a dozen aircraft or so.

I remember that firing rockets from zoomed-in view caused an almost two second freeze due to the smoke particle effects, which led me to either pull up while the image on the screen was still frozen or switch to wide view just before pressing the rocket triggers, otherwise i would end up slamming my sturmovik right beside the panzers i was supposed to attack.

I remember flying European Air War in parallel because it was a more well-rounded title that i could run easily on my PC while recreating massive battles, but always hoping that one day i could run IL2 with EAW's numbers. Well, it happened, just not immediately after IL2's release.

I remember the initial Fw-190 which had the acceleration and energy retention of a truck.

I remember there were only scripted campaigns on the first version and there wasn't even a difficulty option to allow you to advance the missions regardless of result. If a mission was particularly hard (and many of them were, because the scripted campaigns tried to closely follow actual happenings) you could very well be stuck and unable to advance the campaign because you couldn't succeed in one mission.

I remember when flying a career with level bombers that the AI wingmen would initiate a diving attack from 5000m of altitude because no level bombing AI routines were present.

I remember people testing, discovering and reporting on the forums that in order to improve frame rates and performance when using certain high rate of fire machine guns, the game completely disregarded normal rounds and only took tracers into account.

I remember the myriad inaccuracies in terms of flight models, scale issues and ammunition loadouts.

I remember that a lot of graphics options where completely absent from the in-game control panels because no PC could run them when it was first released. They were enabled during the course of future patches and add-ons and people had to manually edit configuration files to get them.


That's what IL2 was. It's not what it is today though. It got patched, it got fixed, it grew and it got the place of the king in the prop-sim genre.

It's still not perfect because nothing can be and it's still not the most immersive or user friendly piece of entertainment software. It's just that force of habit means that we prefer dealing with a set of intricacies we are familiar with while b*tching and moaning to a disproportionate degree when having to deal with other, not necessarily worse, but simply unfamiliar quirks of another software title.

To describe the current situation all i would say is, let's take a look back and stop pretending it was all roses with the previous series just because it's the best it can be today, have a bit of faith and stop getting our collective panties in a twist.

[the Dutchman]

Ahead of it's time?
Not more than 2 weeks..............

[lorddweeb]

Originally Posted by Seeker

Really? Remember WWII online?

WWII online is still around. Its flight model hasn't advanced much since the early days (beyond all the massive bug fixing they had to do back then), so flight-model-wise it can't compare to the newer sims. Even though IL-2 was obviously better from a flight model perspective back then, there were still things I liked better about WWIIOL, such as the head bob/movement from maneuvering. It was a total mess on release up until about 6 months later but it still had a ton of firsts in it. Its still the best tank sim around IMO.

2001 was actually a great year for SIM innovation, even if lots of the products ranged from buggy to horrifically buggy. IL2, wwiiol, operation flashpoint, bf1942. (yes I realize that last one isnt really a sim)

But anyway, it does seem like IL2:CODs issues might stem from similar problems. Wasn't there even some rumors way back when that the reason for all the crazily-detailed ground units and so on was that Oleg basically wanted this game to eventually mature into a massively mutliplayer "total sim" type thing?

[Rattlehead]

The original Il-2 was definitely way ahread of it's time and more importantly, it has stood the test of time.
Up until earlier this year I was still playing it, and vanilla too!