Will SoW be boring and superficial?

[Feathered_IV]

Originally Posted by Xiola

No it wont be boring and superficial.

That is a purely emotional response with no evidence to support the assertion. A shame, because I really do hope you are right.

[tater]

Actually, a cool recon idea would be to have a recon plane loadout possible. Then a recon missio type where you are assigned a target. You fly passes, and the "weapon" takes images at the same time it "shoots" targets visible in the swath. The game could then count the number of units "hit" with the invisible camera bullets, and present that information on the next briefing. Useful for online war type play.

[csThor]

IMO a "recon loadout" is not really the way to go as the aircraft assigned to recon units were often specially designed for the job and/or had special equipment on board. IMO creating both close-range (tactical) and long-range (strategical) recon aircraft variants for player use would be much more realisc. Anyone fancy artillery direction while flying a Hs-126 over the front?

[tater]

Yes, obviously purpose modified planes would be prefered where appropriate. I didn't mean putting it on any plane, but for the guys who build the actual planes. They make it look like an F-5 instead of a P-38, then to make it function as a recon plane, they add the "recon weapon" loadout to it.

So I wasn;t trying to imply that any plane would be a recon plane with a mouse click, simply that such a loadout would exist in the toolkit for people building the actual aircraft.

That said, I seem to recall spitfires with cameras behind the cockpit shooting laterally. That would be an easy "loadout" type change, perhaps.

[csThor]

I'm wary of "crutches" like that as they tend to become the end-result. I'd prefer a solid and historical representation.

[tater]

Excuse me?

What is the crutch, exactly? I suppose then having a Hispano-Suiza gun as a unit to be placed into the functionality of a plane is a "crutch." Instead, every plane built for SOW should force the guy making that plane to have to make an entirely unique engine, weapon system, etc., instead of reusing them like IL-2 does.

That's a "loadout."

Everything in the game is just a piece of code, pointed to someplace. A plane looks like a fighter, and functions like one because it has an engine pointed to in the fmd file. Planes with the same engine share the same emd (engine) file. Guess that's a "crutch."

If you want proper recon missions for things like online wars, you need a camera "weapon." The game actually has LOS (trees, buildings, etc have a collider), so you can easily make a weapon that shoots like a shotgun—if the plane used lateral cameras, the "gun" would be pointed in the right direction, with the spread pattern of the "shotgun" matching the FOV of the camera. Any targets (side based) that are hit by the invisible shotgun get marked on a map the game keeps internally. It can then use this to generate follow up missions.

DCG uses road networks and abstracted forces to move the front along, this is a similar tool, but creates the possibility for player interaction in the recon process.

Inability to "think outside the box" is the primary reason we have stale content.

Building a perfect replica plane isn't enough.

People who work on this stuff should take a break from computer games and play old wargames for a while. There is much goodness there to borrow.

[csThor]

You misunderstand me. Most of the aircraft configured for the recon role were permanently equipped as recon. What I mean is not to have a "recon loadout" but dedicated recon aircraft types - so not just a P-38 with cams but a F-5 and no Ju 88 A flying as recon but a Ju 88 D. Doing it "right" would certainly force the developer to think things through - including spending brain time on how to incorporate recon missions into gameplay

[yarbles]

The guys that code this game are smart. I think if great apps like DCG can be designed w/ little or no help from the developers, I have no doubt with minimal resources, 1c could create a more immersive campaign driven environment. Hell, they should just reverse engineer some classic games and just 'borrow' stuff. The problem BOB will face is a far smarter audience that have grown accustomed to tight story/campaign driven games thanks the explosion of consoles like xbox360 and ps3. I could list a ton of games that have awesome campaign based content but like others have said, you have to have creative folks involved in the process and not just lab coat wearing pinheads that know 1s and 0s and code in machine language. Nobody will argue the simple fact that the 1c guys are flight sim geniuses. They are but have zero creativity. Just bring in a few creative gurus and it's game on.