Answers to Community Questions

[csThor]

Originally Posted by luthier

First of all, I disagree with it being “below standard”. Your definition of single-player standard is probably different from mine. If you expect Mass Effect or Skyrim, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Cliffs of Dover was intended to be a sandbox game more than anything, expansive, open, giving complete freedom to the players. If you’ll remember, the original Il-2 owed much of its success to user-made content. We aimed for the same with Cliffs of Dover. Instead of building complex single-player content in-house, we gave the tools to the community. Cliffs of Dover has a much better mission builder with scripting support, supports complex moddable briefings and debriefings, and so on.
Unfortunately 3rd party support never materialized the way we hoped it would, and we ourselves cannot at this point go back and redo single player.
Still, I strongly disagree with your criticism of the single-player. The two campaigns, quick mission builder, and the full mission builder offer a lot in terms of single-player. Standard? I’ve played plenty of AAA games where the entire single-player content is under 20 hours with 0 replay value, and I didn’t even feel like finishing the entire thing. At the same time I’ve logged way more than 20 hours in quick mission builder alone. What does that say about industry standards?

You're joking, right? You aren't really saying that CloD contains any offline and/or gameplay content worth the bits on my HDD?

As for the rest. Building a sandbox for the customers to play in is all fine and dandy if the karking thing had a solid fundament! In the current situation you're essentially saying "You want offline gameplay? Code it yourself." Yep! *shattering round of sarcastic applause* Brilliant. Marvelous. Sorry for the sarcasm overflow. I couldn't help myself at this apparent disregard of an entire slice of your community.

On a more serious note. Yes, the overwhelming majority of good offline content in 1946 came from external sources. But ... you know there was going to be a but ... they had a solid fundament to build their campaigns on. There was a campaign module with rank system and medals (regardless how primitive), but CloD doesn't have any of that. Hence my "Code it yourself" statement. Well ... I can't code, programming languages don't make sense to me. Desastersoft did that, but they have their own style of campaigns and won't (for obvious reasons) release their campaign module for public consumption. Not that this would make much sense given the issues with the AI and the problems with player - AI interaction. Or has there been any addition to the radio menu with ground-attack options? Not? Oops!

So ... bottom line for me is that luthier apparently thinks that gameplay is a luxury and not needed at all. Interesting perspective, especially when you remember that Maddox Games wants to sell computer games. Unless, of course, MMO's are all you're interested in (what a coincidence, isn't it? ). I'll keep an eye on further developments, but I won't expect anything anymore. Have fun with your sandbox in which nothing but the usual clusterf*ck between fighters is possible. Too bad about the possibilities. *shakes head*

[luthier]

Originally Posted by csThor

You're joking, right? You aren't really saying that CloD contains any offline and/or gameplay content worth the bits on my HDD?

As for the rest. Building a sandbox for the customers to play in is all fine and dandy if the karking thing had a solid fundament! In the current situation you're essentially saying "You want offline gameplay? Code it yourself." Yep! *shattering round of sarcastic applause* Brilliant. Marvelous. Sorry for the sarcasm overflow. I couldn't help myself at this apparent disregard of an entire slice of your community.

On a more serious note. Yes, the overwhelming majority of good offline content in 1946 came from external sources. But ... you know there was going to be a but ... they had a solid fundament to build their campaigns on. There was a campaign module with rank system and medals (regardless how primitive), but CloD doesn't have any of that. Hence my "Code it yourself" statement. Well ... I can't code, programming languages don't make sense to me. Desastersoft did that, but they have their own style of campaigns and won't (for obvious reasons) release their campaign module for public consumption. Not that this would make much sense given the issues with the AI and the problems with player - AI interaction. Or has there been any addition to the radio menu with ground-attack options? Not? Oops!

So ... bottom line for me is that luthier apparently thinks that gameplay is a luxury and not needed at all. Interesting perspective, especially when you remember that Maddox Games wants to sell computer games. Unless, of course, MMO's are all you're interested in (what a coincidence, isn't it? ). I'll keep an eye on further developments, but I won't expect anything anymore. Have fun with your sandbox in which nothing but the usual clusterf*ck between fighters is possible. Too bad about the possibilities. *shakes head*

Finally a comment that got to me. Today's a bad day after all.

It goes without saying for me, and that's why it might be hard to gather that from my reply, but it's obviously OUR fault for single-player being what it is and 3rd party support not showing up.

Your general criticism is spot on. We shipped a product that had too many technical issues for us to really focus on finer elements of gameplay. There had never been a point, we're not even there today, where we could sit back, look at the code, and say, hell, what a great foundation, let's build a great game on top of it.

The GUI especially is our Achilles heel. Like I wrote earlier in the thread, somebody somewhere before I ever showed up chose to make it in a horrible clumsy environment called WPF. By the time I showed up it was too late to go back, and going forward proved extremely painful. Each new screen took forever, everything was clunky, tiny changes or bug fixes required insane amounts of effort, and in the end it took a tremendous painful effort to reach the decidedly insufficient GUI that we have today.

It's extremely painful and frustrating for everyone involved. Believe me.

[JG52Krupi]

Hi luthier any chances you guys could look into the lack of 109 radiator drag and the same for spitfire open cockpits, thanks.

Also I heard that ships were still gravitating towards the moon please look in to that.

One last thing is that the RC patch changed the lighting, it's too bright now for example look at the light cast by a gunsight bulb during the day!!!! Please review.

Thanks for your time,

Also one more thing, please look at the spit weathering, it looks like someone dragged it through a few hedges between the assembly line and the airfield

[kristorf]

Originally Posted by luthier

2. Will the terrible weathering on Allied aircraft be fixed?
It’s not terrible.

I'm afraid to say it is, truly terrible.
Something simple like this is for me a game breaker.

In a previous comment you say that you (and others) were fed up of seeing, and I quote

Originally Posted by luthier

We hated seeing horrible flat user-made skins everywhere in the original Il-2,so we settled on the technology that keeps the lower-end of the quality bar firmly set where no user effort can nudge it lower – even if that means also setting the ceiling for great skin makers.

but the 'thing' in this game is worse than anything I have seen in IL2,the effect is like a sandblaster from side on, with no working level of wear, just 100% full on.
I have never seen a photo of either a Spitfire or Hurricane (or for that matter any RAF aircraft) with anything even similar to the effect imposed on Allied aircraft in this game.

A little thing I know, but this along with the broken (with no intention of fixing it) coop channel map (the main reason I and many others bought the game in the first place) really puts me off.

[csThor]

Originally Posted by luthier

Finally a comment that got to me. Today's a bad day after all.

It goes without saying for me, and that's why it might be hard to gather that from my reply, but it's obviously OUR fault for single-player being what it is and 3rd party support not showing up.

Your general criticism is spot on. We shipped a product that had too many technical issues for us to really focus on finer elements of gameplay. There had never been a point, we're not even there today, where we could sit back, look at the code, and say, hell, what a great foundation, let's build a great game on top of it.

The GUI especially is our Achilles heel. Like I wrote earlier in the thread, somebody somewhere before I ever showed up chose to make it in a horrible clumsy environment called WPF. By the time I showed up it was too late to go back, and going forward proved extremely painful. Each new screen took forever, everything was clunky, tiny changes or bug fixes required insane amounts of effort, and in the end it took a tremendous painful effort to reach the decidedly insufficient GUI that we have today.

It's extremely painful and frustrating for everyone involved. Believe me.

Luthier. First thanks for taking the time to answer my reply. However, I can't help but feel some kind of shizophrenic split between the first comment I quoted (where you disagreed with CloD not having any offline content) and what you wrote above. First you implied that offline is of no consequence and then you apologized for not adding stuff there due to resource issues. So what's it going to be?

Secondly I am aware that the services for Clod have been read already. I was talking in general and about future projects and your first reply implied (strongly) that offline gameplay is of no particular, if any, importance in your opinion. This strikes me as extremely strange, especially given the still strong factor of offline players. Yes, a lot of creativity lies within the community, but not paying attention to offliners and their needs and not utilizing a good offline campaign and decent single missions as showcase for what the engine can achieve is strange (to put it mildly). Just my 0,02 €...

[adonys]

Originally Posted by luthier

Finally a comment that got to me. Today's a bad day after all.

It goes without saying for me, and that's why it might be hard to gather that from my reply, but it's obviously OUR fault for single-player being what it is and 3rd party support not showing up.

Your general criticism is spot on. We shipped a product that had too many technical issues for us to really focus on finer elements of gameplay. There had never been a point, we're not even there today, where we could sit back, look at the code, and say, hell, what a great foundation, let's build a great game on top of it.

The GUI especially is our Achilles heel. Like I wrote earlier in the thread, somebody somewhere before I ever showed up chose to make it in a horrible clumsy environment called WPF. By the time I showed up it was too late to go back, and going forward proved extremely painful. Each new screen took forever, everything was clunky, tiny changes or bug fixes required insane amounts of effort, and in the end it took a tremendous painful effort to reach the decidedly insufficient GUI that we have today.

It's extremely painful and frustrating for everyone involved. Believe me.

Luthier, for God's sake. please open your eyes and understand: THERE IS NO OFFLINE PLAY ATM. and that not due to lack of 3rd party content, length of official campaign or horrible GUI.

no matter how good is, or it is not, a campaign/mission made (and Desastersoft's seems quite to actually be good), it has ZERO playability value because of:
- broken AI, which won't play along with you. it's like you are not existent for them, invisible. they won't follow, they won't consider you a part of their flight
- porked combat AI (they will pass each other 300m away without noticing each other, strange combat maneuvers, lack of maneuvers when fired at, etc, etc, etc)
- broken Radio Comms - you can not get them do anything.

do you understand that those are system sooo broken they are almost inexistent? and that, without them, there's no damn single player game at all?!!

that's why the number of community made content fall out to zero. because there's no point to make anything based on systems which are not working. We had two very good dynamic persistent battlefield engines on work, and both stopped dead because of exactly this reason.

come on!!!

[Icebear]

Originally Posted by csThor

You're joking, right? You aren't really saying that CloD contains any offline and/or gameplay content worth the bits on my HDD?

As for the rest. Building a sandbox for the customers to play in is all fine and dandy if the karking thing had a solid fundament! In the current situation you're essentially saying "You want offline gameplay? Code it yourself." Yep! *shattering round of sarcastic applause* Brilliant. Marvelous. Sorry for the sarcasm overflow. I couldn't help myself at this apparent disregard of an entire slice of your community.

On a more serious note. Yes, the overwhelming majority of good offline content in 1946 came from external sources. But ... you know there was going to be a but ... they had a solid fundament to build their campaigns on. There was a campaign module with rank system and medals (regardless how primitive), but CloD doesn't have any of that. Hence my "Code it yourself" statement. Well ... I can't code, programming languages don't make sense to me. Desastersoft did that, but they have their own style of campaigns and won't (for obvious reasons) release their campaign module for public consumption. Not that this would make much sense given the issues with the AI and the problems with player - AI interaction. Or has there been any addition to the radio menu with ground-attack options? Not? Oops!

So ... bottom line for me is that luthier apparently thinks that gameplay is a luxury and not needed at all. Interesting perspective, especially when you remember that Maddox Games wants to sell computer games. Unless, of course, MMO's are all you're interested in (what a coincidence, isn't it? ). I'll keep an eye on further developments, but I won't expect anything anymore. Have fun with your sandbox in which nothing but the usual clusterf*ck between fighters is possible. Too bad about the possibilities. *shakes head*

Well said and the sad truth. In the end IL2 will be one of this usual, boring arcade online clusterf*ck MMO's. The coop mode with all it's capabilities to stay ahead of the mainstream competition died tonight.

Maybe we are just too old and romantic csThor.

[senseispcc]

.
I am happy with COD!
It could be better, yes but it is such a leap forward. Like the original IL2 was in the world of war flight simulations.
What is the difference between IL2 the original and IL2 COD... the subject IL2 original had a original subject that no had tried or touch before and it was therefore a instant hit. But and it is a big "but" COD is a air battle well covered by many games, books and movies so everyone think he is an expert or has is opinion.
Also when the game is more precise the gamer is more demanding. This is a game not reality! And never shall it be all games with ever his format pc or other has is restrictions, do not forget that the real Battle over Britain was a struggle to the 'death' this is not let us hope not!
For me the graphics are great!
The modeling of the planes far from perfect is near enough to make it a battle to prevail faced with mighty opponents!
I am waiting for the last and official fully tested patch and for the next (not sequel) game of the series, thanks.

.
One last remark; for my PC this simulation did work (with very few exceptions) well or very well.