Friday Update, February 17, 2012

[Sutts]

I've tried hard to get my sons interested in flying but no luck so far. With the addition of vehicle modelling this could change as they love things like BF 1942.

Can only be good for the sim to inject some new blood I reckon. And there will be folk who cross over to aircraft in this way.

Originally Posted by Sutts

I've tried hard to get my sons interested in flying but no luck so far. With the addition of vehicle modelling this could change as they love things like BF 1942.

Can only be good for the sim to inject some new blood I reckon. And there will be folk who cross over to aircraft in this way.

Very wrong for most folks. Ppl who love planes are "born with that love". If you "infect" 2 out of 1000 bf2 guys with sims like CLOD or ROF I will applaud you.

[Sutts]

Originally Posted by Tvrdi

Very wrong for most folks. Ppl who love planes are "born with that love". If you "infect" 2 out of 1000 bf2 guys with sims like CLOD or ROF I will applaud you.

Could be right there Tvrdi, we're a strange and rare breed for sure. Worth a try though.

[Jumo211]

He he , it is reminding of the first version of drivable Volkswagen Kubelwagen
still with the first early alpha unfinished interior
Good old days , be sure .......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKSFRANHnLc

[150GCT_Veltro]

Don't forget about this feature, we need them for training:

[Blackdog_kt]

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?

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.

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

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.

+ 100%
Very well said, Cheers.

[Force10]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

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.

The problem is, a lot of us have been waiting to escape from real life with this title and can't because it's still not functioning properly 8 months later. Something has to be at a certain level of functionality to be able to "enjoy the learning process" so it's just been a long waiting game which isn't enjoyable for most.

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

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.

Inspirational story, unfortunately it doesn't have much bearing on whats going on here. Last time I checked, 1C didn't release the source code for anyone to attempt to fix the AI,FM,DM, etc. themselves, so the analagy is somewhat rediculous. If your model kit advertised it had a state of the art belt and harness in the box and you didn't get one, you would have been on the phone expecting the issue to be resolved.

[furbs]

Blackdog, i guess your idea of a functioning sim is different to mine.

Dont get me wrong Blackdog i like reading your posts, but to me they are a fantasy rose tinted version of CLOD that i dont see when i fire up CLOD.
I hope your right and CLOD turns into the greatest sim of all time, i just see a sim that is still a mess after a year of patches.

[150GCT_Veltro]

Originally Posted by Insuber

I always hated country bashers telling silly jokes about the citizens of a whole nation. Are you happy now?

The problem is not about the offensive posts, (who cares about id1ots?). Problem is this kinde of update about Cliffs of Dover and the incredible level of "fanboyism" on this forum.

We still don't have the Royal Navy, for ex., but people is happy for the cars........pathetic. Would be better a video about an improved (debugged) CEM for ex.. This is still a flight sim about The Battle of Britain.

The show must go on.

Considering this, please give us (italians) the Balilla, so we could have a trip by car.