Friday Update, February 17, 2012

[Tigertooo]

Originally Posted by Osprey

2. How many have actually tried? I mean, with respect, I don't remember ever seeing any TP online, and since you are admitting that 40+ of your guys haven't bought it yet anyway then you can't have tried it.

just counted us on Steam and we have so far 20 Pilots who bought the Simulator.

Together all flew 1481 hours (counted our hours on Steam as well)

So a bit unfair to insinuate that we didn't actually tried.
I think we rather tried hard to fly together, would'nt you agree?

No43_Tigertooo
Tangmere Pilots

[Rjel]

I like the idea of cruising around the landscape, mostly to sight see. Even if its a dumbed down version of ground vehicles. Playing around in armor shooting at buildings and such appeals in a limited way too. But I really can't see this developing into a situation where some players decide it would be a great idea to re-create the evacuation of Dunkirk or later the Red Ball Express during an online war scenario. I can't imagine many guys who are into armor "investing" in CoD with the idea it might someday feature fully functional tanks either. I hope not too many resources get dumped into what looks like a novel feature in a flight sim.

The video looks good. Hope the patch does what so many are hoping for.

I think the ground vehicles are fun and obviously a lot of work as gone into them, but for me it as zero value, i just want to drop onto a formation of enemy bombers without stutter and ground flickers and Crashes to desktop. Other than that a lot of time well spent, thank you.

[BigC208]

Great update. I remember playing Aces High years ago and enjoyed jumping in a flak position to defend a base from paratroopers. The ground enviroment in Clod is so nice it would be a shame not to be able to roam around in it.

Tree's right though when he expects/wants the flying side of the game to be stutter free and optimized before any ground expansions arrive. I personally think the ground stuff won't show up before the game's optimized. It's slow and stuttery enough as it is now on anything but the fastest hardware.

It (ground vehicle sim) may be a good move to get a wider audience onboard if they make it as realistic and detailed as the flying part is right now.

I still see people asking for a realistic weather system every now and then. Weather killed more pilots than enemy action so if it's realistically bad you won't be able to fly a lot of the time on the Eastern front. Make it realistic looking but without killing the framerates. I thought the nasty weater in Il2 makes it hard enough to accomplish a ground attack mission as it is. Not sure if it's worth all the recources to make realistic weather. Maybe 4 or 5 years down the road the hardware can do it all, right now it can't.

[bongodriver]

Perfectly reasonable to want the 'stutters' fixed etc... but why do people keep repeating that all the time as if to suggest that's not being worked on?

I thought thats exactly what the patch is supposed to be adressing, in the mean time they are just showing other goodies we can expect.

[badaboom]

Tank You.......Really,T-A-N-K-S Alot!!

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

Perfectly reasonable to want the 'stutters' fixed etc... but why do people keep repeating that all the time as if to suggest that's not being worked on?

I thought thats exactly what the patch is supposed to be adressing, in the mean time they are just showing other goodies we can expect.

Surely they would have to know the guys working on the stutters, CTD's, graphics, fm, dm, ai, etc etc didn't all stop work to watch the vehicle guy work, but it suits their constant, unrelentling agenda to suggest no work is being done on the more important aspects of the sim.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by No145_Bunny

Well,

this is a worry. I applaud the ability to make CLoD more appealing to more people who want to use vehicles and flak positions in such a way.
However,
The success of the original IL2 series was built on multiplayer Squadrons and on-line play using coops. The developers MUST fix/improve the multiplayer aspect of CLoD so that the VERY MANY SQUADRONS out there can invest their money and time into the product that should be the "next" IL2.

I am a member of a Squadron of 40+ players that all fly the original IL2, we want to purchase CLoD and use it BUT WE CANT BECAUSE MULTIPLAYER IS UNUSABLE!! Please work out how much money IC is losing in just this circumstance!

And yet we are presented with new features so we are able to drive vehicles, brilliant, but we still cant fly in the flight simulator that we want to.

Your best stream of revenue must surely come from on-line Squadrons ? Shouldnt this take priority instead of vehicles I can drive around in whilst what I really want to do is fly a coop with 20+ Squadron members over the channel in the Battle of Britain ?

Sorry to sound full of despair......... but I am

No145_Bunny
Tangmere Pilots

www.tangmerepilots.co.uk

In all honesty, the previous series showed that about 80% of the end users were offliners (there's still a quote in one of Oleg's interview lying around, should be possible to find with a google search).

Organized squads are a part of the remaining 20% that flies online and i don't know how much of that 20% it constitutes: while organized online wars and coops were a big part of the community scene, so were the objective based DF servers and the free-for-all ahistorical, pure dogfight servers.

I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade here, but combining stats straight from the horses mouth with the distribution and make-up of online hosts (easy to see for all, just fire up hypperlobby), it doesn't look like organized squads being the main source of income.

I think we are all jumping to conclusions a bit here, some to what they wish for and others to what they fear

The way i see it working out long term is something like this:

Originally Posted by Krt_Bong

Well, I like it and I understand and somewhat agree with most of the posts concerning ground vehicles but I really don't need full interior models and complex operation on them to enjoy them, though I would like to see more physics modeling, momentum, roll and tumble on destruction, relative speed and maneuvering; tanks are slow, trucks and cars are faster etc.. This could start a RTS aspect to the sim, moving equipment to the front and giving more participation to the different forces in the battle, Artillery and Tanks. Base Protection and Resupply and of course Attacking those things. But we needn't start worrying about having these things complete in full bloom yet they're just thinking of ways to implement them. BF 1942 was and still is a cool concept and it wasn't modeled to simulator standards but it was still fun and on a huge battlefield where I could move forces, raid supply lines and take part in different battles that will be awesome, now if we could somehow merge Red Orchestra into it....

Vehicle physics are already present in the sim. Depending on the kind of audience expected to draw, they could stand up to scrutiny with few if any tweaks/improvements: if we are looking to get the people who play steel beasts into CoD we'll need better vehicles, if we want to get the ArmA guys we'll need infantry, if the aim is for the the BF crowd then we're probably fine with the current state of the models.

The good things here are that

a) These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Depending on difficulty settings, VAC approved mods and missions, each server can cater to specific audiences, from a BF style small map ground scenario to a full blown online combined arms campaign.

b) The people in the development team who would be left with nothing to do are given something to do in the meantime, something that has the potential to draw more buyers and most of all, buyers from genres that will be somewhat easier to cater to. The people who play CoD or BF won't be so demanding in what they expect, because let's face it, modelling a foot soldier is many orders of magnitude simpler than modelling a tank or an aircraft and (surprise) it usually sells more as well.

This constitutes a very good return of investment, especially since the physics and ballistics to support all kinds of combat are already in the sim: make infantry models 5% of the time and potentially gain many more buyers, which in turn lets them spend that remaining 95% of the time and money gained to model the expensive but hard selling aircraft to us.

I think it's a clever scheme and if they can manage their balancing act well (priorities, etc), it will be good for all of us. Heck, if this goes well we might not even have this discussion again because maybe they'll have enough cash to hire a dedicated tank team or FPS team, or simply outsource it to 3rd party studios or modders.

The bottom line is that they can spend a bit of time to create something that can potentially fund a stream of extra flyables for us, while giving us a richer gameplay environment as well.

Best thing of all, this doesn't cost us anything, it would be idle time anyway if they didn't do it: like it or not, different people do different jobs in game development. The guy who is doing vehicles probably only did the suspension in the aircraft, explained it to the aircraft guy and moved back to making vehicles (code resuability and so on: "change this parameter here in the code for shock absorber travel, change this for stiffness", etc)

In other words, the fact that he's working on a truck dashboard (with a minimal amount of gauges, less controls and systems than an aircraft and an already working graphics engine to cast shadows over it and already working combustion engine model) doesn't detract one bit from having a flyable Wellington. The fact that they need more aircraft guys detracts from it, but if the ground combat portion can "steal" buyers from other games they'll be able to hire more and do not only a Wellington, but a Hampden too and maybe even add a few ship guys to model a couple RN destroyers as well.


To cut a long story short, the sim needs funding to get fixed. The options here are:

1) Start a micro-transaction model, which most of us don't like.

2) Send them money through a paypal account or something, which i guess most will object to because "i still didn't get the game i paid for initially".

3) Subscription based model which most of us again don't like.

4) Do it like the previous series, with sequels being used to fund the development of the core engine. Most of us like this, but some can't overcome the fact that for reasons beyond their control (and in some cases beyond the developers' control too), things didn't turn out as planned.

The choice is simple: either spend our time on whatever works in the sim and play another game too from time to time while they fix the remaining issues, or cut our nose to spite our face by choosing option 5: "none of the above, i've been wronged so i won't contribute a thing, but i'll still complain if the sim fails".

And best of all, this contribution thing doesn't even have to be financial.

Instead of complaining that "i've been a beta tester for years and couldn't get it to run well up until recently," just tell the rest of the forum how you eventually got it to run decently.

Instead of complaining that "i couldn't bomb because the bombsights are wrong, you need to do some crazy conversions to hit the target", submit a bug report in the relevant threads and tell the rest of the forum how you managed to get a workaround going.

Identifying a problem, reporting it and explaining to others how to avoid it or move around it is a contribution: it keeps people playing and enjoying the game.

Identifying a problem and a solution, but only harping on about how it annoys us without sharing anything of value is just being selfish.

It's not about positive or negative opinions about the sim. It's all about a positive, proactive attitude because if some people are committed in their minds to not enjoy the sim, whatever parts of it work well, they never will enjoy it no matter what.

Originally Posted by bw_wolverine

I think a lot of people here are failing to define 'basics' and 'priority' properly.

Do some people here consider 100octane fuel Spitfires a 'basic priority'? Yes.

Is it breaking my game? No. I can say with pretty good confidence that the speed of the Spitfire in the game has not caused a crash to desktop.

Do some people consider british naval vessels a 'basic priority'? Sure.

Is it breaking my game? No. I can say with pretty good confidence that I have never needed to call for the H.M.S. Ridiculous to clear my six.

Every time I play the game it is clear that things need to be worked on (the aforementioned fuel, the ships, the whatever). But it is also very clear that none of those required changes are causing me to stop playing the game. It's absolutely enjoyable for me and for many others.

So complaining about additional content in the game really just amounts to "I WANT MY THING FIRST!!!!11", at least that's how all these 'don't work on that, work on this' posts come off. They've likely been working on the drivable vehicles since the game was released considering it was already obviously supposed to be part of the program.

So if you want those ships, or that fuel, or whatever it is you want, I would take the news that this is almost ready as "Yes, we're completing work on this and now we'll be able to get to the next thing in the list which just might be new boats."

Exactly.