I know, I've "heard" this too. Is there any ingame screen shot or video with this amount of aircraft? I have a feeling that we will be playing 12 against 12, or something close to that:(

There are at least two pics showing 20+ Blenheims in the sky maybe 30.Not a huge amount but Im ok with that.

there's 128 player online feature. I don't think that is meant as a joke :grin:

If it works online it should work offline, we will see how that goes.

Goodness me you nice man if you think thats what the next ms sim will look like you better start saving for you cray super computer it's fmv you intelligent person.

Calm down, no need to insult other people.

I think that Microsoft movie is actually real life footage.

Sorry I am just so fed up with the people who talk xxxx its funny because any time i have played il-2 i was too busy trying to shoot someone down or trying not to to worry about minor flaws reading these forums can be a real pain with people crying all the time do they even fly i wonder if they do because i'm not sure where they get the time for looking at every little thing that is not perfect:evil:

It is more than just that, there is a lens effect too. The screenshot is taken using a very wide angle effect. It is distorting the image.

Sorry, couldn't find a better picture:

Wide angle lens:

http://www.fototime.com/65CB82517402CA6/orig.jpg

I usually post a lot of stuff in a single post, other people like to post a little bit in a lot of individual posts...the final amount of text is more or less the same :grin:


Lol, this has dirty connotations that i'm not going to delve into :-P


To be honest, it's not about buying the company line but what kind of features each one of us prefers. You are right however when you say that they might be getting complaints for choosing a theater/battle which historically had a lot of "traffic".

On the other hand, imagine if we got a 1941-1943 channel front simulator as the first release and they progressed backwards into battle of Britain from that. Having a total of 60 aircraft visible at the same time would be very realistic for the kind of cross-channel skirmishes (plus i'd have a Fw190 to play with a little bit earlier :-P). The scale would be just fine, but i give it less than a month before people would complain that the scope is limited and "since we can get 60 aircraft, why not 100? they should have done the BoB first" :-P

My theory is that this is not about graphics, but CPU. The new FM/DM with many individual subsystems is probably the main resource hog here. When flying in single player everything is done by our own CPU and the complexity of the FM/DM limits the total amount of aircraft we can display.

I mean, why would the single player limit be 60 aircraft for a minimum spec PC, when the multiplayer limit is double that amount? The answer is easy, in multiplier your CPU only has to deal with your own aircraft, the others are dealt with by the CPUs of those flying them and the server just sends you positional/vector data on where your PC needs to draw them. In singleplayer however, your PC needs to deal with the FM/DM of your aircraft as well as the AI/FM/DM of the AI aircraft ;)
This all points to the amount of aircraft being very CPU-dependent due to the new FM/DM.

My personal opinion is that this title is the foundation and building block for something that will take at least a couple of years to fully mature, simply because we don't have the hardware to run something so ambitious yet.

It's all a compromise: we can't have aircraft done at this level of FM/DM and systems modeling AND have 100s of them visible at the same time without using simplified FM/DM AND have this kind of visual/graphics quality and effects. Something will have to be turned down a notch and in this case, it seems to be the scale of what the sim displays.

However, the way they did it makes sense because the focused on completing the features that take the most work.

When we get better hardware in the future, it will be easy as pie to go into the mission builder, open the properties for each aircraft group and change the amount of units from 10 to 100 for each bomber formation and save it...rinse and repeat and voila, we can refly the scripted campaign with accurate numbers of aircraft in the air. Not to mention that even though there's not a stock dynamic campaign provided, they said that through a combination of output logs, scripting tools and possibly the SDK to be released later on, we will be able to have community made dynamic campaign generators (like DCG for IL2). And once we have that, we will be able to set the highest amount of unit density that our PCs can handle, just like we can in DCG today.

On the other hand, if there's not built in support for things like advanced FM/DM, engine management and so on, it's much harder to add it at a later stage when the sim will have grown from 12 to 50 flyable aircraft and it's definitely not something that can be done completely by the community.

I'm glad they focused on the features that have to do with how aircraft operate and fly, because that's not only the most important work for creating a sim that has an ambition to span multiple theaters and aircraft types in the future, but also the hardest part to get out of the way. Increasing the numbers of aircraft in missions is just like increasing graphics settings, after a year or two and 4-5 patches all we'll need to do is click on a slider. We can't code the new complex engine management on our own though, so i'm glad they did it for us ;)

I agree, except on the last sentence. It's the hardware that has to catch up ;)