Friday 2011-02-04 Dev. update and Discussion

[MikkOwl]

Luthier, thank you for these interesting, well written answers. The gag is finally starting to come off. You seem like you had an itch to share all this cool stuff your team has been developing over the past few ages.

Can you talk a bit about how (AI) crew members can be interacted with? Classical example is the rear gunner of the Bf110. He is mostly quiet in IL-2, and cannot speak at all in multiplayer. There was talk from Oleg of improving this area. I'll write the points numbered so replying should be a quick breeze. I expect 'No' as answer to most, but I'm curious enough to ask. Think of it as possibilities if nothing else.

1. Better contact reports?
2. Feeding information of someone on one's tail?
3. ..Perhaps prompted by the player by a button?
4. Instructions on his general behavior?
5. Does he have morale? Panic? Hot on the trigger?
6. Bail out without permission (panic mode)?
7. MG-FF's had to be reloaded by this bordfunker in reality.
8. Report visual damage to own plane he sees? (smoke trail from engine, control surfaces damaged and so on)
9. Gets affected by your maneuvering?
10. Navigation & radio (I'm sure not).

[MikkOwl]

Originally Posted by W32Blaster

Maybe I want to make a decision, if I want to attack?!

Aireal combat is all about seeing the bogie or bandit first and move yourself in an good position for either retreat or attack.

It´s crucial to be have the ability to realize a contact as early as possible.
I just dislike to screw down my resolution to visually recognize a bogie - because it might be overseen with higher resolution.

Therefor I ask for a mechanism to show contact in a comparable size.

Thus not having to cope with the downside of unrecognisable dots in higher resolution.

I think thats not to complicated to understand!

Ideas:

1. Make the dot have some transparency on lower resolutions (more the further away).
2. Make dot larger, or some other effect to slightly increase its visibility on very high resolutions.
3. Permit larger field of view in higher resolutions (makes sense since they are probably physically larger anyway). With high FOV airplanes will pixellate from a further away distance than otherwise.

The only one I can support is number 3. This due to the impossibility of knowing how big the person's display really is and how far away they are sitting from it.

I want to add that physically, most screens with lower resolution aren't really lower resolution - it is the same. Just that the display itself is smaller (like having a smaller window into the world). The pixels are about the same size as the larger monitors. The problem is more with people setting lower resolution than their monitor can handle. I personally don't care about this at all. Having low resolution means it looks terrible and they miss out on a lot of useful information from instruments, gunnery, identification, landscape.

[swiss]

Originally Posted by W32Blaster

Maybe I want to make a decision, if I want to attack?!

Aireal combat is all about seeing the bogie or bandit first and move yourself in an good position for either retreat or attack.

Sure. But here we are talking about the moment where the plane is still a tiny dot.
What do you do with this information?
At this stage you don't know whether it's friend or foe - all you know is there's an aircraft.

(the direction of the plane doesn't help too much, I often penetrate hostile airspace just to stab them in the back on their way to the front )

[Sturm_Williger]

While everyone is asking/talking about dot visibility and so forth, could I perhaps ask Luthier if you have been able to do anything about aircraft visibility up close - ie. sometimes in IL2 you're on the tail of an enemy at about 250m and he dives ( you're at about 1000m or so altitude ) and simply vanishes in the ground textures.

Now I know camouflage wasn't that good and it's more to do with the limitations of a 2D screen and so forth, was there anything you were able to do in CoD to help make the enemy stand out better from the ground ? Or is this a problem that has no real solution ?

[swiss]

To all of the guys having super high res and trouble spotting enemy planes:

Have you tried to reduce AA? Maybe that helps bit.

Now I know camouflage wasn't that good and it's more to do with the limitations of a 2D screen and so forth, was there anything you were able to do in CoD to help make the enemy stand out better from the ground ? Or is this a problem that has no real solution ?

Yep. They call it it wonderwoman view and icons!

Just kidding, sorry.Couldn't resist.

[KaHzModAn]

Originally Posted by swiss

Sure. But here we are talking about the moment where the plane is still a tiny dot.
What do you do with this information?
At this stage you don't know whether it's friend or foe - all you know is there's an aircraft.

(the direction of the plane doesn't help too much, I often penetrate hostile airspace just to stab them in the back on their way to the front )

Hm... to me, the moment you see a tiny dot in the distance is the most important moment... You can take real decisions that will have more effect than just turning tighter than your opponent... Thats called tactics...

And yes, you see just an unidentified bogey, but say, if your in an escort you'll send a pair check it out, or you'll keep an eye on it so he won't surprise you with a dive on your bombers...

But that depends on what type of games you play... sure if you are a lonely hunter in dogfights server... it goes down to dogfighting skills more often... but if your in a team with a clear defined mission, it's a completely different world

[t4trouble]

[QUOTE=swiss;221362]I hope you weren't ironic.

No m8 and yes the same guy.
Fearful opponent you are
~S~

[swiss]

Originally Posted by KaHzModAn

Hm... to me, the moment you see a tiny dot in the distance is the most important moment... You can take real decisions that will have more effect than just turning tighter than your opponent... Thats called tactics...

Sure and I agree.
But it In the end there are two options:
-climb
-run
There is a huge difference between 3 and 5km - but much less when 6 vs 8km.


What is the max distance you spot the planes from?

Maybe I cannot reproduce the problem on my screen.
I'm going to test it....

[Royraiden]

I cant understand why people are complaining about the visibility of distant aircraft, asking for an enhancement to aid them to spot planes better.Did the real pilots in that era had some device that helped them see distant planes better?It is a challenge to spot a plane far away from you, let alone know which type of aircraft it is and which side is it on, but isnt this fun/realistic?When I first started playing IL- 2 and knew there were bogies at 12 a clock for example, I had really hard time spotting them that I got a bit frustrated. further more when I finally spotted some planes I started shooting only to realize I was shooting friendlies.I laughed because I knew that situations like that happened several times during ww2 and this sim let me experience this.By the way...

Thanks again Ilya for answering more questions!!!

[CharveL]

There's a completely different solution to the resolution issue. A partial solution anyway:

Why not simply publish the resolution of the player in some manner for everyone to see? Sure there's probably one, maybe two people out there that will have an old CRT monitor and a P4/1gig/8800GT playing online at 15fps who has to run 1024x768 but most definitely he will be the exception.

For those of you so concerned about points and bragging rights this can be a way to perhaps discourage the other advantage seekers since you would be welcome to disregard - or even boot them from your server if you feel like it - their successes.

Yes, I can see it not being perfect for everyone but no solution ever really is, and it beats adding more cpu-sucking graphics solutions to mitigate the issue, which will not get implemented anyway.