Possible new eastern front maps - some food for thought

[Lagarto]

Once, being curious, how much terrain is missing from the game, I made these two maps (I had posted them some time ago at SimHQ forum). Now, with new hopes about updating DGen, I thought I'd revive the subject. The areas currently integrated into the DGen are outlined in red.

northern bit (Kurland is more to the left):



And southern bit (with Stalingrad more to the right):




As you can see, two large maps covering the northern 'void' (south of Leningrad) and southern 'void' (most of the central and eastern Ukraine) would vastly enhance continuity of DGen campaigns. I'm curious of your opinion.

[28_Condor]

I think the map of Moscow also is missing much of the area of the Kalinin and Moscow itself!

[IceFire]

If I remember correctly...Kharkov and surrounding area is somewhere that I'd like to see on the Eastern Front. We do have pretty good coverage of some of the major areas where battles were fought... but there are gaps of course. It is the longest front of the war.

[Lagarto]

The area between Kharkov and Sea of Azov is where JG 52 and JG 77, among others, where heavily engaged.

[zakkandrachoff]

dont forget the TREES!

and will be nice put the date of the battle in each selection

[Treetop64]

I think it's a great idea.

One of the rare things that I really hate about IL-2 is the very limited size of the maps. The Leningrad, Kurland, Slovakia, and Romania maps are currently the only Eastern maps worth flying over any more. The rest make you feel as though you're flying over a game board on the coffee table.

For contemporary equipment ten years ago, rendering small maps was necessary and acceptable. There's just no excuse for it today, though.

At a minimum, make three separate maps; one each for the territories covered by the three German army groups, with some overlap between the groups. A separate map for Scandinavia would be nice. Heck, include an option - if practical - to load the entire Eastern front. It may take up a bit of HD space and extra RAM, and take a few more seconds to load, but believe me, that would be something I would be more than happy to live with.

Man, just think of the dream DCG scenarios one could come up with if proper maps were available, as well as for DGen!

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Treetop64

I think it's a great idea.

One of the rare things that I really hate about IL-2 is the very limited size of the maps. The Leningrad, Kurland, Slovakia, and Romania maps are currently the only Eastern maps worth flying over any more. The rest make you feel as though you're flying over a game board on the coffee table.

For contemporary equipment ten years ago, rendering small maps was necessary and acceptable. There's just no excuse for it today, though.

At a minimum, make three separate maps; one each for the territories covered by the three German army groups, with some overlap between the groups. A separate map for Scandinavia would be nice. Heck, include an option - if practical - to load the entire Eastern front. It may take up a bit of HD space and extra RAM, and take a few more seconds to load, but believe me, that would be something I would be more than happy to live with.

Man, just think of the dream DCG scenarios one could come up with if proper maps were available, as well as for DGen!

You are right... There are several maps on the eastern front that we could have much larger than they are right now. Kuban and Crimea could be one big map. Stalingrad could cover the entire battle space instead of just centering around the city. The Kursk map could extend north and south to cover that entire battlespace. We're talking a boatload of work here for map makers so I'm going for cloud 9 here.

But I don't believe there is any way we could load the entire eastern front in the IL-2 engine. When IL-2 loads up a map it has to load up every piece of geometry and every object on it. Yes our computers are that much better but the engine itself that drives everything isn't... a modern engine (I believe IL-2 Cliffs of Dover uses this technique) would load segments of the map and stream in segments as necessary loading and unloading dynamically from memory. This is how you can get loads of detail without the performance hit from having to track a billion objects. Not to mention the eastern front is the single longest battlefront in the history of warfare.

[Lagarto]

Apparently the old IL-2 engine can handle a lot. The latest Solomons map is huge by IL-2 Standards, spanning nearly 1,000 km - much larger than the Leningrad map (the distance from Tallinn to Leningrad is just over 300 km). Of course, most of it is water
Anyway, an MTO map of that size would cover entire Sicily, Malta and a big chunk of Tunisia (it's roughly 270 km from La Valletta to Palermo and 400 km to Tunis) - AND with most of it being water.

The red, diagonal line is 900 km long:

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Lagarto

Apparently the old IL-2 engine can handle a lot. The latest Solomons map is huge by IL-2 Standards, spanning nearly 1,000 km - much larger than the Leningrad map (the distance from Tallinn to Leningrad is just over 300 km). Of course, most of it is water
Anyway, an MTO map of that size would cover entire Sicily, Malta and a big chunk of Tunisia (it's roughly 270 km from La Valletta to Palermo and 400 km to Tunis) - AND with most of it being water.

The game engine is impressive given what it was originally designed for. No doubt about it! But a 1000km map isn't a problem when the majority of it is water and uninhabited islands. That's exactly why you can get away with doing that map in such a grand scale.

Looking forward to a map that has Rabaul on it some time too!

[JtD]

If I have to chose between a huge map and a detailed map, I'd rather have the detailed map.