But we can still live with it, I guess…

[Bullethead]

Originally Posted by brando

To be honest I'm having difficulty in establishing how a "dynamic campaign" would work, given the subject of the release; i.e. the Battle of Britain.

Well, if you've never seen such a thing in operation, I recommend you try OFF.

But simply put, you set up the historical OOBs, including reinforcements and withdrawals happening more or less when they really did. Then you have each squadron do things similar to what each did in real life. Not exactly the same, or you're into canned missions again with no replay value, but definitely giving the flavor of actual events. Every squadron all over the game map is doing this, and whenever opposing units meet each other, there's combat. If the player is in the neighborhood, he can be part of the fights there but otherwise the results are computed, not rendered. The player can join any squadron on the map at any point in time covered by the game. His squadron gets its assigned missions like all the others but he plays out his own. If he wanders off his assigned track, he'll run into whatever else is going on in other areas. The game keeps track of the player's own career and those of his squadronmates. This goes on until either the player dies or the game reaches its end date.

That's just the simple version. You can add all sorts of things to this, but this is the essential core. It's been done many times over the past several decades so there's no great secret, no need to reinvent the wheel. It's just tedious to set up and test.

It might not sound like much, but this sort of thing is a proven immersion-provider and is actually the most popular type of flightsim gameplay in history. Besides giving the player the feeling of being an actual participant in the battle, not knowing what tomorrow will bring, he can get this experience even if he only has time for 1 sortie per day, at a time when none of his online friends are available, due to real life constraints. And because all squadrons are doing semi-random things, the player can pick a favorite squadron and play the same time period over and over, and never see the same thing twice.

[ElAurens]

I've always wondered how in virtually the same breath, someone can talk about the historical accuracy of a sim, and then lament that there is no dynamic campaign.

They are mutually exclusive as far as I can see.

That said I have no real horse in this race. I am almost 100% an online pilot.

Very few, and I mean one or two, offline "campaigns" have ever held my interest. Their downfall is always the AI. The computer controlled elements, either enemy or friend, are just so uber at fighting, and yet totally stupid at taking orders that the campaigns quickly melt down to tedious "goat herding" of your element, who won't obey anyway, or being sniped from low earth orbit by a tail gunner with a pop gun.

Boring.

I'll take human opposition any day.