Friday 2010-10-01 Dev. update and Discussion

[Osprey]

Well, you don't actually have to fly, just google

Surrey


Sussex


Kent

[matsher]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

So why does it look so bad now, in that shot it looks like England, the colours are right, the hedgerows are right, it just needs some trees etc.

Come now TREE,
its the same landscape you've been slating the whole time... 'cept in this top down view there are no weather effects between your eye and the landscape.
And it is now most likely far better than this old screenshot from 2 years ago.

[matsher]

Originally Posted by Richie

No..about 8 months ago.

Okay, I stand corrected, 8 months. Still 8 months of landscape development can produce even better results...

@TREE_UK
Olegs got a photographers eye... And the experience of living in Euro-Russian weather conditions, AND he has been in the sky... So he knows what it should look like... And no matter how hard everyone may feel you are being on Oleg, I can tell you absolutely that he is 10 times as hard on himself and his team to get it just right.

Hasn't this guy demonstated time and time again, to the world (and us) that he is a perfectionist that sticks to his principles of Quality first, profit second... Tree, from the heart... you have not got the qualifications, or the eye, or as it turn out, the memory to make definitive judgements on how the sim should look.

[kedrednael]

Originally Posted by Qpassa

its beautiful in that screen :S

Originally Posted by tree

in that shot it looks like England, the colours are right, the hedgerows are right, it just needs some trees etc.

what the frak? ! you can see 12 repeats in that little texture. The terrain looks way better than that now, BUT I think it is at medium details, because the quality gets less good when the distance increases a bit, in some of the newer screens you can look at the closest patch of ground and that's incredibly detailed, but the ones behind that are less detailed. It's just because of the graphic settings.
And every update I see different textures. In the stuka shot there were square fields, and in the blenheim shots from the week before that the patches were all different shapes. A lot of variaty.

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...4&d=1283522562
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...5&d=1284729362
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...8&d=1276867657

[Richie]

Thanks for those pics Osprey.

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by kedrednael

And every update I see different textures. In the stuka shot there were square fields, and in the blenheim shots from the week before that the patches were all different shapes. A lot of variaty.

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...4&d=1283522562
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...5&d=1284729362
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...8&d=1276867657

It seems Speedtree don't do hedges. In Britain, and parts of Europe, that's a big problem, even if hedges are unusual in the US of A.

[Hoverbug]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

Now what happened to that terrain, thats more like the terrain i thought we would be seeing.

The one with the repeating textures that brought howls of complaint!? [sound of Oleg banging his head against his desk]

[kendo65]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

Now what happened to that terrain, thats more like the terrain i thought we would be seeing.

Similar situation to the flaking paint perhaps?

Interesting to see how this debugging and 'polishing' will turn out...

[nearmiss]

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...&postcount=384

The pictures of translucent instrument faces on the HUD amuse me.

It is beyond me why the instruments are so big, real instrument views and have the mounting screw attachment brackets.

The instruments should be able to be placed anywhere on the screen, resized, with adjustable translucence and colors with no mounting screws. Then of course we could use some ability to create some highlight points on the instruments...i.e., mark for overspeed, mark for low fuel, low ammunition, no oil pressure,etc. or what about programmable idot lights that would come on at certain pre-set or range pre-set.

THe full real players naturally will want the old dull authentic instrument faces...placed on their wonderwoman views. Gotta get that full real feel. LOL

Then of course, it will be done as the developer wants it. LOL

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by nearmiss

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...&postcount=384

The pictures of translucent instrument faces on the HUD amuse me.

It is beyond me why the instruments are so big, real instrument views and have the mounting screw attachment brackets.

The instruments should be able to be placed anywhere on the screen, resized, with adjustable translucence and colors with no mounting screws. Then of course we could use some ability to create some highlight points on the instruments...i.e., mark for overspeed, mark for low fuel, low ammunition, no oil pressure,etc. or what about programmable idot lights that would come on at certain pre-set or range pre-set.

THe full real players naturally will want the old dull authentic instrument faces...placed on their wonderwoman views. Gotta get that full real feel. LOL

Then of course, it will be done as the developer wants it. LOL

I think they just wanted to create a look more suited to the time period in question for the instruments, as the IL2 no-cockpit instruments are too modern-looking.

I'd seen that picture when it was first released but seeing it again now got me thinking. Since it's been said that they will be resizable and able to be repositioned on the screen, it reminds me of the "panel" system in the MS flight sims. I fly FSX on a friend's PC every now and then and while i always use the virtual cockpit, in many cases of flying complex aircraft in MSFS there are either 2d pop-up panels or custom camera angles to assist with keeping everything into view. I don't think full switch servers would use 2d panels as it would permit players to keep an eye on both the instruments and the outside world during combat, which defeats the puprose of properly simulating a pilot's workload with the advanced systems modelling.

However, having the ability to define pre-set camera views in the full cockpit view would be useful and probably be used by full switch players, as it doesn't let you see the gauges while looking outside the cockpit the way 2d pop-up panels do. In fact, these views actually limit situational awareness as they usually consist of views fully zoomed in over a particular console or set of instruments. Their advantage comes from not having to bend your neck all over the place to pan to the right place with TrackIR, or fiddling with all sorts of keyboard controls, while still having the drawback of reduced SA to balance it out.

Of course nobody would fly the plane from such a view, but they are very useful for utility stuff and secondary controls. For example, i'm flying through clouds so i want to turn on my formation lights, check the outside temperature and possibly turn on the de-icing equipment. One way to do it is to pan with TrackIR or keyboard/joystick hats, then zoom in. The other way would be to save a pre-set of custom views for each aircraft (i think RoF does this too), so i could set them up once, map them to the numeric keypad and they'd be aircraft specific.

Cockpits are different and the cockpit side consoles would not be at the same coordinates for each aircraft, but with aircraft specific views (possibly saved as a coordinate set in the aircraft's .ini file or something similar) the problem could be overcome. This way, i could map keypad 4 to a close up of the left cockpit console and keypad 6 to a close up of the right cockpit console for all planes. I'd also add keypad 8 as the zoomed-in gunsight view, keypad 5 as the center/default view and keypad 2 as the zoomed-in instrument panel view. Then maybe they could work like IL2, where we can change from pan to snap views. In this way, you could take a quick look at your instruments by choosing snap views and pressing keypad 2 (the view reverts back to normal when you release the key), or you could choose pan views and press keypad 2 to fly by instruments for extended periods of time (the view doesn't revert back to default after releasing the key), for example when flying in bad weather.

I don't know how the view system will be in SoW, but i trust they've made several improvements. I think the one i described is a good mix of what's possible in RoF, IL2 and FSX and gives a wide range of possibilities without becoming so easy that it would clarify as a separate difficulty option. In fact, 2d pop-up instruments could be tied to wonder woman view in a common difficutly setting, while custom in-cockpit camera angles could function in conjunction with the closed cockpit view and we'd be set.

What do you guys think?