[Antoninus]

Originally Posted by major_setback

It would be interesting to know though if it is 1c's plan than companies like A2A will be able to release single aircraft add-ons for SoW, in the same way they do now for FSX. Oleg?

This was already confirmed, for example in the last simhq interview, quoted below. I really hope A2A will eventually switch to SOW. There should be a bigger market for WW2 planes than in the FSX community, which will only become smaller in the next years.

http://simhq.com/_air13/air_439b.html

Oleg:
Speaking about things I want for myself, having seen the enormous third-party industry built around MSFS, we had always planned to bite into that pie. Or more accurately, to give these third-parties something more exciting to do. With IL-2 we had an engine not designed for external development, especially with its crucial online component, so we simply could do nothing to open it up to external teams. It was impossible without risking our cheater-free online gameplay.

Today, we found the way to have our cake and eat it too. As initially designed however, our goal wasn’t as much to steal some teams away from MSFS as to create our own satellite industry from scratch, giving an outlet to fans who want to develop and expand the Storm of War universe. So we’ll be giving proprietary tools to external developers which will allow them to insert new aircraft and other objects into the Storm of War engine, and their work will not affect the crucial element of online fairness.

However, with the demise of Aces Studio, I really hope that many of the MSFS external developers will begin to look in our direction and consider switching over to Storm of War.

IIya: I have the deepest respect for the core MSFS team, and for the huge number of flight simulator developers around the world. They keep this industry going. There is tremendous talent out there, and some MSFS products developed by third party developers are easily as good as anything developed by professional flight sim teams. If we can bring some of them round to our side, it has to be great for everyone, for us, for them, and most importantly for the end-users.

Remember that the Storm of War engine is very flexible, and it’s built completely from scratch to next-generation standards. Without third-party support we could hardly begin to explore the possibilities, and they are truly endless. For third parties, there are no limits at all. You could cover the entire history of aviation from WWI to today, both military and civilian, props jets and everything else. Basically anything you could imagine.

There’s only so much one development team can do, and look at how far we’ve taken IL-2 over the years with everything having to go through Oleg. I can’t even imagine the things that we’ll get to see with a powerful next-generation engine that’s opened up to external talent.