Oleg Maddox's Room #2 QUESTIONS & REQUESTS TO OLEG ABOUT BOB SOW

[ECV56_Guevara]

Originally Posted by JG27_PapaFly

Hi Oleg, i have 2 questions:

1) How will level-bombing be implemented in SOW?

IL2 makes levelbombing very easy: there is no wind, and temperature and air density profiles don't change on a map, so we can strike point targets from 4000m to 8000m with extreme accuracy (e.g. kill a single tank with SC500 from 4000m). This - although not realistic - makes levelbombing very attractive and useful in online campaigns like AW2.
If we would have truly realistic bombing in SOW, bombruns with 1-4 planes would be quite useless, and people would loose motivation.
Will there be the possibility to level the bombsight? In IL2, any change in plane loadout or elevator trim will influence the aiming point.

2) Will there be a reconnaissance feature? This would be very useful for online campaigns. We're currently "simulating" a reconnaissance photo by turning our smoke on/off when over the target area. Taking a real picture would be great.

SOW looks great so far, looking forward to the release! S!

Excelent questions/sugestions!

[76.IAP-Blackbird]

Is Oleg on vacation?! Will there be some friday updates?

best regards

Martin

[Lucas_From_Hell]

I'm not missing the updates, but missing the team's participation here.

But can you guys give anything at all (either an update or the reason why we're not getting them)?

Might shut us up if you have a particular reason for letting us hungry

[DD_crash]

Hello Oleg, Are you going to support the features of the Logitech G940? Tuning the FFB and having the buttons on the throttle change colour etc.

[MOH_Hirth]

Another sugestion:

Enemy, friend and AI COCKPIT view, of course in key settings and after death.

[Blackdog_kt]

I second the interest for level bombing and reconnaisance missions. It's not something we need on release, but it would be nice to have the pieces ready for later inclusion into the sim, through updates or community efforts.

The way i think about it is that you could press the camera key and a jpg is taken, according to where the camera is located in your aircraft. If the new online mode they are talking about is a campaign mode, this would be vey nice to have.

As long as the sim is moddable, it could be done by the community as well. The way i'm envisioning it is something like this. You have the online dynamic campaign manager, which keeps track of important parametes in the server. These things could be few or many and i guess that just like IL2's server managing tools, we'd be seeing more and more complexity added by the community. For example, it could start out as simply monitoring available aircraft for each team and gradually evolve to take into account serviceable or written off aircraft, maybe even aircraft under repairs and available ammo and fuel. I used to play an MMO game that was very complex and a load of things like that are kept in check via XML databases. Of course, this means increased data and bandwidth but not by much, since you don't need this kind of data to actually fly. It would only be useful for the campaign planning menu where you post sorties for the team to fly and for determining if you can use a certain aircraft or loadout, depending on availability.

So, instead of coordinating with your fellow flyers on how to fly a single, objective based DF map, you could coordinate on a bigger scale and plan sorties in sequence for an entire multiplayer campaign. For example, the blue team is giving you trouble by raiding your ports and you lose a lot of supplies because of those Ju88s. Some pilots decide to follow them back from a distance and they spot their airfield, but they can't go too close because of the flak. They tell you about it on voice comms so that the rest of the team can prepare a strike. Being a risk-taker, you decide to fly the recon mission. You get in your recon spitfire or mosquito, take off, climb to 30000ft and head for the airport. Snapping the photos you turn for home as the flak starts zeroing in on you.

Landing back at the base, the film is finally available. You load the planning screen,type a title for the mission and fill in the rest of the details. Number of aircraft needed, type, loadouts, fuel and waypoints, it's like a simplified mission builder. Opening up the jpg photos you snapped on your recon run, you mark the compass points in the corner of the picture for reference, as well as the target's main areas interest, like parked aircraft, runways and fuel dumps in white (the photo is black and white). You also mark the flak guns in red.Finally, you type a briefing and press "post". At this point, the mission is visible to your entire team and anyone can choose to fly it. The system is free-form, so people might choose to spawn on the correct airfields or use alternate ones. What they do get by clicking "accept mission" is the anotated map, photos and briefing in their kneepad. They can also add notes of their own if they want or delete existing ones and re-distribute it among themselves, so that for example a bomber pilot can mark known flak concentrations as red circles in the map, a fighter pilot can delete the information he doesn't need and keep only the essentials and if more people decide to participate they can add their own waypoints to rendezvous with the strike from an alternate airfield, in order not to overcrowd the primary base. For bombers, having a detailed map and a set of navigation tools like those found in the Silent Hunter titles would be very useful and they would be able to make adjustments to their flight plan while flying. For fighters this is not very realistic and maybe the amount of tools and the accuracy of maps should be limited, but i guess that even a single-seater pilot has a pen, a ruler and maybe an angle measuring tool to help him keep notes on his kneepad.

If such a campaign front-end could be coded and moded into the sim at some point for multiplayer, it would be awesome. It's like having a 24/7 DF server that you can join whenever you like plus the realism of coops in one gameplay mode.

[Qpassa]

Will be blood when you get hurt?
Also I bet for a new Forcefeedback system, G940 and new hotas owners will apreciate your work

[distant]

Hi Oleg

I'm interested in knowing whether the game will be compatible with stereoscopic 3D, specifically Nvidia 3D Vision?

Cheers

[Xilon_x]

Dear Oleg Maddox in a war there are basic things like:
the amount 'means
money and resources.
the amount 'of fuel.
the number of men and morale.
in IL-2 are the foundations that have a quantity 'unlimited air
in IL-2 are the bases with Angar and tanks of fuel and fuel tanks unusable
in IL-2 lacks the aerial refueling area and repair aircraft.
in IL-2 if you land an aircraft by damaged after you have the chance 'to predict a new one without problem.
in IL-2 one when you eject from a plane you do not have the chance 'to reach the base on foot or by half.
in IL-2 does not exist reconnaissance and then followed by a study for a tactical surprise attack.

[Skoshi Tiger]

As I see it, photo recon would be easy in a multi crew aircraft. Just make a crew station (like the bomb sight position) that lets you see through the camera viewport. For the single crew fighters these were fixed and the poor old pilot didn't get a chance to see what he would be taking a picture of, just get into the right position and hit the shutter release.

But that leads us to the problem of ground detail. For Photo recon to be useful we need enough ground and object detail to make the photo's useful.

Then it becomes a skilled task to interpret the photo's to make uses tactical decisions and attack plans. ie Hit the parked planes and it removes planes from the line up when a player respawns. Hit the fuel dumps and it reduces how much fuel is availiable. Hit the maintenance facilities and damaged planes can't be repaired for further missions.

It would be fantastic to be involved in a simulated environment like that.

I also think it would be cool to have a "fighter control" table where a non combatant player could plot the positions of their own side, and have the radar contacts of the enemy also displayed. They could act as controller (for want of a better word) that would co-ordinate their own sides aircraft and vector their fighters onto the enemy aircraft. I'm sure there would be enough players that would want to take on this role. From my experience it's the squadrons that are acting as teams that have most success, this would give them a way of co-ordinating there efforts. (of course getting enough of the rogue wolf lone fighters to follow the instructions would be quite a task but that's what court martials are for!!!! ) If nothing else it might remove some of the problems of of 5+ aircraft shoulder shooting a lone e/a while a squadron of them are a few miles away shooting up the ground objectives!

cheers