Oleg or Luthier, recon in COOPs or FMB?

[Xilon_x]

in addition to reconnaissance photos.
also emergency information to other squadrons of pilots may be useful to update the target map.
also advised to ships or submarines.
a pilot launches with parcadute launches a radio signal of its position.
map and initially 'clean not much information.

[Blackdog_kt]

Well, i'm glad it makes sense without having to whip out my immense MSPaint skills and start drawing ugly pictures

Icefice had some very nice ideas about updating information as well in another thread (i think it was the "give me some holy sh** ideas" thread). He mentioned a very nice example of interactive crew where the player is supposedly patrolling in a Blenheim, the crewmen call out all kinds of contacts including ships, so they call out a friendy destroyer. The ship mistakenly opens fire on the player's Blenheim, player pulls up to show off his underwing roundels, orders the crew to fire a recognition flare and the firing stops. Then the radio operator says that the ship is signalling them in morse code with those "flashlights" they used and he starts translating the message. The ship apologizes for the friendly fire and advises them of a flight of Bf109s in the vicinity. How great is that? I don't know about you, but i think that having the right set of interactions and "rules" between AI entities could make the same mission a different experience each time you fly it. Just thinking about it gets my hands itching

So many things we ask for and so much work to make them, that's why i'm glad they went the modular route with the development of SoW:BoB, it will enable us to do it ourselves and save time for everyone.

I mean, flying FSX on a friend's PC, i've seen some things that are so beyond what the original engine was capable of that the add-on makers had to write their own save/load routines to make the sim save all of the necessary parameters and not have them reset to default values each time the player loads a flight in mid-air.
The reason is that FSX, despite it's shortcomings in other fields, is a sufficiently modular product to allow for that. Even an ordinary user can add pop-up instrument panels of his choice, simply by copying-pasting a few lines of text between aircraft configuration files. For example, if i don't like the default GPS used in the plane i'm flying and i want to use one from another aircraft, i can add it in 2 minutes only by using notepad and i don't even have the game on my PC, i just fly it when i visit my buddy. It's that simple.
If FSX can do that, i'm sure SoW will be able to do equally well at the very least.

Originally Posted by BadAim

+1 I think this will be the beauty of the Modular and modable engine that the "Boyz from Moscow" are building. I think the only limits to SOW will be those built in by Maddox games, and the communities imagination, and I think the latter will be no limit at all. That said, I bet they have something simple and elegant in store for us in this department.

The thing that has impressed me most about Maddox games is their consistent ability to come up with economical (resource wise) solutions to so many problems. The first time that I realized that they had packed twice the sim into half the space as Cfs2 (c700MB v c1.3 Gig) I knew I had stumbled onto something special. I believe my first thought was something like "Damn them Ruskies write some tight code!"

Here's to the Ruskies and their damn fine code!!

You can say that again. So much packed into so little space and running well enough on a wide range of PCs when compared to the prevalent PC specs at the time of release of each sequel, plus it's like it didn't age at all during the first 5-6 years. That's almost insane.

[PeterPanPan]

Yes, I asked this a while back. See my post at http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...&postcount=175 and Luthier's exciting reply at http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...&postcount=182

PPanPan

[Flyby]

Then I'm glad I brought it up again! I was not aware of your post, n or of Luthier's reply.
Flyby out

[nearmiss]

All you have to do in IL2 is fly over the recon area, record a video track and add it into you campaign files. The problem with all the videos is the size of the campaign for download becomes very large.

[Flyby]

So how to overcome the problem?
Flyby out

[TheGrunch]

On the subject of the photos and Blackdog's file-sharing idea, I'm sure it would be easier to just send the position and orientation of the recon aircraft's camera over the map at the moment it took the photo and just generate the "photo" client-side. That's bytes rather than kilobytes for a start, no need for any kind of complicated sharing system there.
I like the collaborative-editing idea for drawing on the recon photos, although it does open the door for lamers and suchlike. Perhaps it could be a server option, or only the recon pilot and leader of the attack squadron could edit it. Probably the most you'd need to do is draw on it with an in-game "red pen" editor anyway. Given that we're trying to conserve bandwidth here just to be neat, the resolution of the annotations made doesn't have to be as high as the photo itself. not much point! Just make it a transparent .tga with the same aspect ratio overlaid onto the recon photo.
It's probably worth pointing out that putting any kind of responsibility in the hands of one person is a dubious idea in a multiplayer game so perhaps a voting system to kick someone out of the leader spot would be wise.
I don't think it's so much necessary for the exchange of .html files, either. Ideally, the leaders of each squadron could simply set their waypoints on the map by simply drawing the lines and typing in altitudes (and maybe naming each waypoint), and these would appear on the briefing map for everyone on the same side, coded by colour for each squadron (with a key at the side), once they were completed. Once again this is simply co-ordinates and a few words so there's no need for any kind of big file-swapping system. No need to make any kind of distinction as to who gets what information and suchlike, may as well just keep recon photos in a separate tab and just make the briefing text specific to the squadron in question. For real awesome-sauce it would be cool to allow the possibility for each squadron leader to write down their own little addendum to the briefing containing advice and "tally-ho, give 'em what for, chaps" and suchlike that would be visible to their squadron once they finished typing it and clicked okay or whatever, for those people who don't use voice-comms or just for the fun of it.
As for the mid-mission chart-editing, it's a cool idea, and it only has to use the same interface as the original briefing map so it's not even like it would be a lot of effort if the above part was already done. Say you got badly shot up, you'd just open up the map, press the edit button, click through a "Are you sure you want to edit the flightplan" dialogue so that you don't start moving stuff around accidentally, and then make your new flightplan from your current location. It would be useful if the navigator actually told you to "come around to <new course>" if you were off-course or got to a waypoint, as well.
Basically, I think they're really really good ideas, but they could use some simplification.

[Blackdog_kt]

Nice one Grunch! I see there's a lot of us interested in this, so as the ideas fly we'll end up with better stuff that's also easier to implement and smoother to run. Keep the brain-storming coming everyone