I completely agree that CloD is the best, even considering its flaws.

I know what you mean and i am all for a comparison BUT if i went on the rof forum and spammed about cod i would be banned...

there should be a rof subforum ;)

ROF has gotten many of it's kinks worked out over 3 years. But it will never be anything more than a dog fight game. There's no ground war to support the air war. There's not even any real trenches in the game - both in the in game map or even as an object for the mission builder. Kinda important in WWI don't ya think?

With that said, it runs smooth to a point. But this point is because server hosters know what they are limited with. IE - they have to make missions with this in mind. You try to build some sort of WWI scenario and your mission won't even load or it would simply crash the Dserver. You can't even have as many AI as I have fingers in an online mission or the server is toast. Around 50 players is all you can have online, taking into account that in order to do that you can't really have any AI (3 AI in a mission don't count), can't have hardly any ground objects, or any other objects in general, all this directly relates to the games master browser where it must phone home and control everything. Any sort of overage, too many objects, too many players, too many people dropping bombs at once (yes - really), and the master server (ET phone home) loses connection and the server crashes.

In other words, what you are left with is flying around in a baron wasteland with no front lines, no objects, and hardly any players - dog fight game. With that said, this isn't a jab at the ROF team. They've polished what they've got to work with quite well. They keep adding more things for realism - just like they finally made all the guns have different rates of fires, instead of every single machine gun on every plane being exactly the same. But you can only polish the engine from which you started so much. Those restrictions/limitations will always be part of that game. Therefore ROF will never be anything other than a dogfight simulator. To some people that's perfectly fine, to others like me that see it, it's not. I played ROF from the start and harped about the limitations and just like any sim forum was met with the people with the blinders on attacking me for trying to make the sim better.

Now, Cliffs on the hand has more problems than I can list. But the one problem it doesn't, which IMO is the #1 thing any company should look at in making a sim, is the engine itself. Sure the game engine has problems, but that's not my point. My point is, it was made to support massive amounts of players, objects, planes, etc. It might run like absolute dog crap, but I can throw 1000 AI into the air at once and the game won't crash. My GFX card might turn into a blow torch, but it loads. I can throw 10's of thousands of objects into a mission and throw it on a server or load it through the FMB and again, my game won't crash, server won't crash etc. It might take me 45 minutes to join the damn server. But I eventually can. This is what I call the foundation of something great. This is why I will support these guys until they've said the doors are closing. If all these issues get sorted, this will be the best combat flight sim ever made, right next to the old best flight sim ever made (46).

Many things are frustrating - the bugs, communication lines, the amount of time to get some sort of fixes happening. But in the end of the day, there's no other sim that has anywhere near the amount of potential this does. Broken or not, one only needs to open up the mission builder for both games and notice ROF has about as many objects in it's entirety to use for a mission as IL2COD does just in types of fences. They've painstakingly modeled thousands of objects for a reason. I'm hopeful that someday we'll get to see that.

Coming to this forum and preaching about ROF is pointless. It's a fine game for the airquake. But it will never resemble anything else. Even the owner of ROF stated to "fix" the game engine would cost millions and they aren't going to do it. That's the same time I finally said buying scarves, pistols, water, fuel, and temp gauges, gun sights etc., was enough.

The problem is that RoF is simply great fun, offline as well as online, while CloD isn't. Simple as that.

I'm looking forward to many more years with RoF and DCS, while I follow the sad joke that is CloD development half crying, half laughing.

True enough that RoF is working well and it's ok if a bit of enthusiasm for it bubbles over into here. Willfully spamming it like Stigler1 used to do with targetware stuff on Ubi back in the day is not on. It just turns more people away than it attracts.

@ Bliss, thanks for the info. I read that with great interest. Always fascinating to know what goes on under the hood.

I agree....everytime I look into the FMB I'm amazed at all the work put into it. If they ever get the game engine optimized and stable, the missions you will be able to build with the FMB, Triggers, etc will make COD what everyone expected along time ago. Hopefully the development will be able to indure and grow along with our home computer systems. It will harken back to the fun of the original series only with alot more immersion.

Anything with a fixed forward firing gun, it seems, turns into a fighter.

A20
B25
Pe2
Stukas
HS129
Vals
etc etc

I agree to everything Bliss wrote. But the sad fact is that the engine is entirely useless if it is never efficiently worked with to achieve its potential. Or to at least achieve a sim that runs well and meets the high expectations previous flight-sims have laid out.

It's like owning a race-horse which has the potential to be the best in the world, but never training it efficiently to meet its potential. Unless the CloD engine is fixed/manipulated correctly, CloD will never be anything other than a channel scrap, which is why the comparisons to RoF are almost laughable, because in its current state CloD is only a dogfight/intercept-scrap at best.

It can be so much more.

Strange - I can only assume you don't play cliffs online or ROF online for that matter? There's already easily 20x more going on in an online Cliffs mission than you could possible ever have in ROF. And that is taking into account all the stuff that doesn't work. In other words, you're right in saying you can't compare the 2. I think I have more objects as AAA at 3 airfields than you could have in an entire ROF mission, let alone the rest of the 100's of bombers, 1000's of objects that make up targets, ships etc..

I'd much rather have the potential for something, that something that is being worked on, than a game that runs well that is maxed out with absolutely nothing to do. But that's just me.

I should have added, Bliss, that I'm a 100% offliner and that's what my views are based on.

I agree with you completely about potential. But then we haven't considered the plans for RoD: a channel map, updated water effects and physics which highlight the engine isn't completely at it's full potential. It is still being tweaked. I think the issue with RoF is that the game current has a lot of interest, and drastic engine changes can upset this (as I think we may be seeing with CloD).