Friday 2010-10-15 Dev. update and Discussion

[Osprey]

As long as Punkbuster aren't involved. Awful awful software and hideous support and help from the vendors. You can have a legal game etc and still get problems because of innocuous programs which are nothing to do with the game.

[Ekar]

Thanks Oleg/Winny for your comments #page 31.


Cheers,
Ekar

[SlipBall]

Originally Posted by winny

Heres a modern day image from the same area, around Deal in Kent.

Coulours are always gonna be open to artistic interpretation.

Yes this is a personal perception for each of us. One in ten males have some form of color blindness. Men that are not color blind, see colors differently than the man standing next to him. Woman see colors much more accurately then do men, and women amongst themselves, also see colors differently. So you see the problems associated with true color interpretation, to each is different, even drastically so. I am red/green color blind, and am restricted to day light hours only piloting.

[Hunden]

Originally Posted by PeterPanPan

Excellent news Oleg, thank you so much . Now, it's Saturday, so please stop working soon and have a rest!!

PPanPan

OH sure get your question answered then tell him to take off

[Raggz]

Great update and answers Oleg. Keep it up

[Skoshi Tiger]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

Interesting.

On one hand, it seems that the multiplayer interface is decided by the publisher. I'm just theorizing here but i guess it will probably be integrated with a copy protection method and to be honest, i dislike mandatory online requirements unless they are a "once in a lifetime" online activation, or i get something worthy in return that enhances the gameplay experience. I want to be able to play a game i paid for whenever i want, not whenever my ISP or some cables allow me to.
On the other hand, since it will be possible to add 3rd party tools for online server browsing, maybe i'm totally mistaken (hopefully) and things are not that hard-coded. Maybe it's not DRM and multiplayer rolled into one, but just an integrated lobby browser for multiplayer, which would be fine.


The most positive note of course in all the above is the player limit. Having 128 players with that level of detail will be an immense experience

In principle I think I agree with you, though to be honest the online activation etc that has been put into titles from DCS and Rise of Flight havent really been too bad IMHO.

Cheers!

[Madfish]

Originally Posted by Flutter

Hi Oleg, thank you for posting both updates and answers.

As far as I can see, the current ground texture system uses a network of borderlines that look organic but repeat fairly often over the terrain. The area within one set of borderlines is then filled with an appropriate texture (golf course / field a / field b / field c / farm / forest / village / city / industry ) and with the appropriate models (vegetation, buildings etc). Then the borders themselves are applied, these being hedges, paths, roads etc. For a quasi procedural texture system, I believe this is one of the best solutions available, and your results look overall very nice. However, the system does not look too good when such a field is cut by a railroad. Screenshot No. 3 illustrates my point. The REAL geometry (railroad lines, big highways) does fit badly into the texture when compared to the basic borderlines. The only solution I can imagine would be to treat such a road / railway line as yet another borderline, and apply different textures to the different segments that have been divided by this geometry. It would not be perfect, but it could be coded, and it would make these roads and railways fit better into the landskape, making them both blend better into it and be more visible in that they change the landscape around them.
The mockup picture below illustrates my point.
Flutter

Excellent point. It sure caught my eye as well. Although I'm not totally ok with your solution yet it probably is a very good suggestion to improve upon. For example make a special railway border with hedges etc. - if it is wide enough it would look organic if the smaller "over-cut" vector of the field is not too small compared to it's total size.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Skoshi Tiger

In principle I think I agree with you, though to be honest the online activation etc that has been put into titles from DCS and Rise of Flight havent really been too bad IMHO.

Cheers!

Actually, i don't have either one of those titles because of their activation methods and i haven't regretted it yet. If it takes 5 years of waiting before i can fly a sim the way i want to i'm perfectly content with it, assuming it hasn't been surpassed, i totally lose interest in it and end up not ever buying it by that point. I guess the effect on sales is obvious

There are a lot of arguments pro and con, but in the end when viewing entertainment software purely as a product and not something more (which is what the distributors do), i think we're entitled as users to apply the same criteria of judgement and kick up a storm if we're not getting value for money, added value to compensate for drawbacks of certain features or, as is more often the case, if the product's value is artificially diminished by features clumsily tacked on at the publisher's demand, long after the original coding work is done and usually with little thought on how it will affect the software's usability.

I think Oleg's mentality on the issue is pretty close to what most of the users agree with, as evidenced by one of his more recent interviews on SimHQ, but sadly these issues are usually a publisher decision. For now, i'm just being happy about the progress of SoW. If someone outside Oleg's team manages to screw things up for us it will really be a pity, both for us and for the developer team as sales do tend to suffer when the potential customer runs the risk of being locked out of a perfectly legally purchased piece of software.

I'd hate to turn a perfectly good thread into a DRM flamefest (not implying anything about you, it just tends to happen a lot when things like that are mentioned), so i'll stop here. However, it's an issue that should be discussed somewhat as we near the release to get a feeling of the community's thoughts on the matter and avoid being faced with a "done deal, take it or leave it" scenario we might not agree with. Maybe a separate thread in free-form discussion to give us the main trends on what people think, so that we could then compile them into a poll would be a good idea.

[Foo'bar]

Originally Posted by Xilon_x

Sorry Mr.OLEG MADDOX but real pilots of ww2 not have red or blue arrows for search enemy in the sky.

Real pilot use your eyes for search enemy in the sky.

I hope that those arrows are optional or the game simulation transform to arcade simulation.

il-2sturmovik 1946 not have arrows.
i remember CFS3 have the arrows.

I can't believe that after all those years Il-2 is on market there's still someone out there who hasn't seen that arrows yet.

[150GCT_Veltro]

About landscape, we'll have the same textures for both France and England?