Friday 2010-10-29 Dev. update and Discussion

[undercut]

IL-2 Sturmovik was a technical masterpiece for its time and is still a very fun and exciting game to play despite its age. Rise of Flight is a technical/graphical masterpiece and is an excellent WW1 Flight Sim, much respect to the computer wizards/artists who made this game. Storm of War is a technical/graphical masterpiece and will be a benchmark for other WW2 flight simulators to follow and will be a very fun and exciting game to play...

Let us respect the work of these artists by not pretentiously pointing out flaws or demanding changes or enhancements while having NO clue as to what kind of work would be necessary to achieve these demands and having NO clue how difficult or impossible it may be. Instead be grateful for their efforts and admire their artistic brilliance...

They never promised to build us the Matrix people.. They simply set out to build us the most gorgeous, realistic and fulfilling wwII flight simulator that has been created to date.. and they are well on their way to achieving their goal. Peace.

[AndyJWest]

^ What undercut said. +1.

It seems to me that most of the nit-picking, whinging about colours or the shape of clouds, and complaints about things tha 'must be included but aren't' on this forum come from people who don't have a clue about the complexities of software development. Tedious...

[Blackdog_kt]

Truth be told, i didn't like a lot of RoF's decisions and trying out the demo (on more than one occasions and several months apart from each other) highlighted most of the flaws ElAurens pointed out. However, i'm not going to go on a campaign against it (not saying that ElAurens does by the way) just because i don't like it because frankly, its design choices made it a game that didn't appeal to me enough.

Translation being, i cared a lot when it was close to release and got in a lot of heated arguments trying to tell people they would lose customers with the choices they were making, but i don't actually care about it anymore.

However, there are a few things i liked about RoF and i think it would be cool to see something similar implemented in other sims, SoW included. For example, having the ability to define and save custom views separately for each aircraft is a very nice feature.
Also, while RoF doesn't feature full start-up sequences and uses a single-keypress engine start method, that "engine on" toggle is neither instantaneous nor guaranteed. You can see the appropriate switches turning on in the cockpit and the ease or difficulty with which the engine springs to life is dependent on proper mixture settings by the pilot, maybe even on atmospheric conditions at the time. That would be cool to have in SoW as well, so for example on a cold day even if i pressed the engine on key it would struggle to start compared to starting on a hot day.

Now, having the CFS3 modders that did over flanders fields jump to the SoW engine would be something i'd really like to see, as they have a much more historically accurate approach and completeness of theaters/airframes to cover as much tactical situations as possible in regards to WWI simming, but they are limited by the outdated engine they are using.
I used to have the free phase 2 edition before it went payware and while the base CFS3 engine was terrible compared to IL2, they managed to make wonders out of it. Proper squadron positions and movements, realistic mission objectives, realistic opponents (no Fokker DVIIs when you are flying a DH2, which is what happens in RoF sometimes because they don't have enough planes to cover all the time periods yet), even historical weather from WWI records, it's just a terrible pity that they were forced to use CFS3 as the foundation.

I'd be easily willing to part with 50-60 Euros for a WWI sim made by those guys on the SoW engine.