Pacific Fighters Bombed - inadequate maps

[Chivas]

I think the problem was more "People's Expectations" than the development. The developers kept adding maps and aircraft as time allowed, much of the it at the request of the community. It would have taken atleast a couple of more years of development to create more of the Pacific theater. All to the tune of "Vaporware" coming from the community.

It started as a small project that wasn't intended to eat away resources required for the development of their new SOW engine.

[nearmiss]

I mentioned the problem with maps in IL2 couple years back on the UBI boards, but it never changed.

The maps are pristine and pretty.

The water that runs from the oceans inland ends in a nice soft arc.

There are no trees growing along the waters edge of any body of water.

There are large open spaces of land bordering the edges of all rivers and streams.

There are large open spaces on both sides of all roads and tracks.

The battlefield is just laid out in perfect view for attacking aircraft to find and destroy.

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Alternatively:

The Pacific Islands were covered in Jungle.

Roads and tracks were barely seeable from the air.

Trees often extended very close to beaches, often overhanging waters edge.

Trees and greenery was everywhere... jungle.

Rivers and Streams would have jungle all along the waters edge borders.

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I just loaded up the old MSFT CFS2 flight sim and flew the Guadalcanal and the Milne Bay New Guinea. The old CFS2 stock map textures are 100 fold better renderings of what those locations looked like.

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I'm not knocking the IL2, because I've always enjoyed it for many reasons. There are certainly good and bad things. Comparing IL2 with CFS2 is just not apples and apples for comparison.

The CFS2 never got a single friggin patch. There are a multitude of problem things with the CFS2 that have to be corrected for you to use it competently. Things that should have been handled with a patch. Many are workarounds, because the source is closed to development. Now if you think users should be put out/angry. The CFS2 users should definitely be among those very angry ones. The sad part, if you love CFS it's just the way of it to deal with the shortcomings of all the stuff offered up as CFS.

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THere is a very vibrant user base for Falcon 4.0. This may be the way to go for some CFS enthusiasts. The old Warbirds from WW2 has always tweaked my interest. Flying and shooting stuff at Mach 1, that I cannot physically see doesn't interest me. Flying all the complications of actual flight, well I've had enough of that as well. My interest is to fly, fight and have a good time without it being StarWars.

Basically, the historical re-enactment of WW2 air war is my principal interest.

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Haven't installed the 4.09m Beta, because Beta has always had negative vibes for me.

There is supposed to be much better map rendering than we've had in the past in the 4.09. Some of you that have the beta installed might be able to affirm that.

[*Buzzsaw*]

Salute

PACIFIC FIGHTERS was a valiant attempt, but in my opinion it suffered from two central mistakes:

1) The maps should have been drawn at 1/2 scale. That is, 1/2 real size. The Pacific is too big to map in real scale. Look at the New Guinea map as an example. It is huge, but it still does not include all of the critical areas which were fought over during this campaign. No Rabaul, no Guadalcanal, no slot.

The game could have had a code mod to double the rate of gas consumption to make ranges realistic in these 1/2 scale maps.

2) The designers tried to cover too large a set of campaigns and ended up covering none of them well enough. Either more design time, (and money) was required, or the designers needed to be realistic and focus on fewer campaigns. For my money, they should have dropped Pearl Harbour, which was is a one shot deal, one mission map for a campaign. Too much work for no return. Narrow the game down to five campaigns: Solomons/New Guinea, Saipan, Phillipines, Burma and Okinawa. (with southern Japan included in the Okinawa map) With the extra time they saved, they should have built more ship models. Not having ships like Yamato, or the American Battleships was a big ommission.

But this discussion is so much hot air anyway, we'll have to live with PF for a LONG time. I don't think we'll see another Pacific Flight Sim for a while.

[KG26_Alpha]

Well it was voted for.

I voted for North Africa

[nearmiss]

Originally Posted by *Buzzsaw*

Salute

PACIFIC FIGHTERS was a valiant attempt, but in my opinion it suffered from two central mistakes:

1) The maps should have been drawn at 1/2 scale. That is, 1/2 real size. The Pacific is too big to map in real scale. Look at the New Guinea map as an example. It is huge, but it still does not include all of the critical areas which were fought over during this campaign. No Rabaul, no Guadalcanal, no slot.

The game could have had a code mod to double the rate of gas consumption to make ranges realistic in these 1/2 scale maps.

2) The designers tried to cover too large a set of campaigns and ended up covering none of them well enough. Either more design time, (and money) was required, or the designers needed to be realistic and focus on fewer campaigns. For my money, they should have dropped Pearl Harbour, which was is a one shot deal, one mission map for a campaign. Too much work for no return. Narrow the game down to five campaigns: Solomons/New Guinea, Saipan, Phillipines, Burma and Okinawa. (with southern Japan included in the Okinawa map) With the extra time they saved, they should have built more ship models. Not having ships like Yamato, or the American Battleships was a big ommission.

But this discussion is so much hot air anyway, we'll have to live with PF for a LONG time. I don't think we'll see another Pacific Flight Sim for a while.

Good post

[ElAurens]

Two years ago called and wants it's thread back.

[6S.Maraz]

About map size, the modding community has shown that big maps (up to 800 km large) are possible in IL-2, if only there are not many ground objects. So a map with few islands and hundreds of km of sea could have been done, and Oleg surely knew that.

I believe that if such maps weren't done, it was for playability reasons. Except for few die-hard simmers, few players would have liked a 3 hours flight to their target. Look, for some players even a 20 minute flight is "boring" if they cannot shoot at someone!

So I don't think that Oleg should be criticized about map size in PF. Sure, some important places like Rabaul, Philippines, were left out. But I think we could have had that as add-on maps, if only the greed of some US companies (that still wanted to make money from 60-70 years old projects) had not killed PF.

Maraz

[Friendly_flyer]

It's possible to fly a decent bomber mission over water on the Gulf of Finland map.

[tater]

Greed? How about for lack of a copy editor or competent lawyer.

[robtek]

@tater
its all about to satisfy the shareholder in our capitalism.
the companys would have lost nothing if they had said: "ok, we allow you to use the names for this game only! next time ask beforehand."