Quote:
Originally Posted by furbs
Blackdog i remember about 9 months ago asking you when do you think CLOD would be mostly bug free and the missing features added, you told me you expect it to take about a year.
Its almost a year now...and il ask you again, when do you now expect CLOD to be mostly bug free and the missing features added?
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Just like i said, about a year. The operative word here being "about" which implies a +/- margin. That could translate to anywhere between 8 and 18 months, or 10 and 14 months, or 6 and 13 months.
The thing is, when i'm making predictions and guesses about things i have no inside knowledge of, i won't pretend i'm actually knowing more than i do and i won't make a fool of myself by saying silly stuff like "it will be definitely fixed, by whatever definition of "fixed" any forum member prefers to abide by, at XYZ exact date". I'll just use that +/- margin to indicate i'm equally unsure myself and simply making an educated guess.
Now if people want to take that as a hard and fast commitment on my part, someone who has no direct way to influence the outcome, the problem is on their reasoning and not mine.
Overall, i'd say that things are going just like i expected them to go thus far: about a year for the game to be playable (playable means playable, it doesn't mean 100 FPS maxed out on mid-level hardware) on an acceptable range of PCs, then moving on to gameplay-affecting bugs (what they are doing now) while the part of the team that does non-optimization work sets their sights on future content to ensure a follow-up stream of cash flow down the line.
As you can see, i don't have any illusions about the state of the sim. I just had more realistic expectations about it because of how difficult it is to do what they tried to do. Maybe it's a language barrier thing and that's why many people didn't get it, i don't know, but personally i more or less got what they wanted to do pretty early on and that's why i expected the troubles, it's a complicated undertaking overall.
I'm not one for blind faith either, whichever way it might swing, so i won't make bold claims about eventual success or failure but i'm glad they tried to push some of the limits we had in the previous series. If it doesn't come to fruition we'll get a slightly better series, if it does succeed we'll get a much better one. It's fine by me either way.
They could have simply made "IL-2 remake: better graphics" which would be much simpler and probably would have much less problems, i'd buy it and fly it as well but it would be just that, a remake. I didn't want that, i wanted new stuff and i got new stuff so i'm satisfied. I also got new problems (just like i got them when i first tried out IL2 back in 2001), but that goes with the territory of innovation.
As long as they can remain in business they'll keep improving it and that's all i care about, in the meantime my life doesn't revolve around the lack of simulated 100 octane merlins. I'm in my early 30s, i have enough time left to see where the series is going and if for some reason i didn't, i would have more pressing matters to worry about than the direction of a flight sim series.
What i'm trying to say is, this is supposed to be a hobby, something we do for fun and escapism from real life. If people aren't prepared to spend some time making it work and enjoying the learning process, then it just defeats the whole purpose.
It's like building model kits and going "gah, it has no aerials! outrage!" or "the landing gear struts don't have wiring!". Well, take a lighter, burn the spare plastic framing, stretch it and make yourself an aerial, or take small rubber tubes, paint them and glue them to those landing gear struts and you've got wiring.
I remember when i last made a model kit, it was a 1/48 scale grumman wildcat, i wanted it to have a belt and harness in the cockpit and the kit didn't have one. What i did was borrow a book with some good photos of the cockpit to see the shape and layout of the belts, cut a little strip of cloth mere millimeters wide, cut an even smaller piece of aluminum foil, grab a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass and spend two hours of an evening wrapping that aluminum foil around that piece of cloth, then glued the whole thing on the cockpit seat.
My wildcat cockpit had a seat belt, complete with its locking pin, i had a good feeling of accomplishment and i didn't have to e-mail the folks in Tamiya and complain about the lack of seatbelts on an otherwise excellent kit
I don't know if it's because we've been spoiled, because our lifes get faster, or a combination of both, but it seems like an ever growing amount of people in all kinds of hobbies have lost the basic joy of it all: if it doesn't work the way i want it to i'll get my hands dirty and tinker with it, then share my results with the other fellows instead of just sulking about it.