Announcement of the game "IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad"

[swiss]

Originally Posted by BlackSix

BoS will have new model

Could we have a tiny bit of additional information on this?

So it turned out that Tree_UK was telling far more truth than Luthier.... who would of thought that?

[Ataros]

Let's discuss the new old engine, guys http://forum.il2sturmovik.net/index.php?showtopic=21
I hope the devs can benefit from your input.

Agrrh... Looks like someone else is using my 1C avatar on that forum

[Borsch]

Originally Posted by Ataros

Agrrh... Looks like someone else is using my 1C avatar on that forum

The "someone" is LOFT, one of the heads of RoF and BoS projects

[SlipBall]

Originally Posted by Cranky

So it turned out that Tree_UK was telling far more truth than Luthier.... who would of thought that?

I think that it was luthier who coined the name "Cranky"...so, don't gloat, you owe him that

[JG52Uther]

Originally Posted by SlipBall

I think that it was luthier who coined the name "Cranky"...so, don't gloat, you owe him that

Most original name yet, although I did quite like 'El Arbol' that had a bit of thought behind it!

Originally Posted by JG52Uther

Most original name yet, although I did quite like 'El Arbol' that had a bit of thought behind it!

lol.

[Lexicon]

Originally Posted by Cranky

So it turned out that Tree_UK was telling far more truth than Luthier.... who would of thought that?

Me ! And from a long time ago Tr...mmm... I mean Cranky

Salute !

[kendo65]

So, an eventful day, and finally the much awaited and speculated upon announcement.

I'm a little taken aback at it all and feel a mix of sadness (though not surprise) at the final confirmation that COD has indeed failed, but also hope and optimism that the future could be brighter.

Speaking for myself COD never ever fulfilled the promise or the hope that I had for it, and it has been evident over the past year that progress was painfully slow verging on non-existent. My faith that COD would be fixed had been wavering for months and I had concluded that significant improvements would have to wait for the sequel even before the final official patch declared work 'complete'.

I've read a lot of the comments on this forum and the new one and feel that some very hasty judgements are being made before we have seen the detail of what is to come.

There are two main arguments that have been made (very vociferously by some) that I want to comment on.

The first is that COD was on the verge of turning the corner and that its engine should have been used in the future.

I think the truth is to be found both from reading between the lines of today's official announcement and from an honest appraisal of what has happened in the 18+ months since COD was released.

In answer to the question:

Why was the Digital Nature engine chosen instead of the CLOD engine?
The answer describes the Digital Nature engine as: "being relatively bug free and well-functioning"

compared to the COD engine presumably, and

"Using the Digital Nature engine will provide users with a well-functioning product at launch that can be brought to market fairly quickly."

We can also conclude from the painfully slow progress made remedying COD's initial faults that the engine was an absolute bugger to fix - remember Luthier confidently stating last year that the patch was 'almost done' and should be out before Christmas (2011 that is...). That is the patch that we got in final form a few months ago! The only way to explain such a massive delay is by concluding that they continually ran into unforeseen and hard to resolve issues deep in the code. I suspect that there were deep design flaws. How else to explain Luthier's admission that the only remedy for the non-collidable trees was to have far fewer of them in the next game!!

It seems clear that the biggest reason for COD's failure was poor management decisions regarding the scope and scale of the project. They tried to do too much, bit off much more than they could handle and unfortunately failed on a lot of the basics. Some examples - why, in a Battle of Britain scenario, was so much effort expended on exquisitely detailed but superfluous vehicles, when NO Royal Navy ships were completed? How much did we really need to be able to change our pilot's outfits?! The effort put into driveable vehicles and mannable AA guns also must have deflected effort and attention from other more important areas.

Because of this so much of what they tried to do was unfinished or implemented in a half-assed manner. Dynamic weather, the original sound engine that had to be redone from scratch, the flawed unfinished AI, the poor quality in-flight chatter (worse than original il-2), the commands system, the appalling GUI, even the fact that a year and a half after release there was no properly functioning AA.

It's clear that the project is now going to be run by the ROF management team and imo that's good news. Some are complaining that this means we will get a project with much tighter scope and with features left out. Probably true, but as I argue above COD's downfall was Luthier/Oleg's apparent inability to leave out any feature at all, no matter how minor.

The second issue is complaints about the perceived capabilities of the ROF/Digital Nature engine

I don't think any of us know exactly what the engine will be capable of with further work and development. It will obviously be changed in a major way from its current capabilities so much of the criticism I've seen is premature and a little childish I think.

It's pretty obvious that a WW2 sim will require more complex modelling of cockpit and engine systems than a WW1 sim. Just because the Digital Nature implementation in ROF does not currently have certain features does not say anything at all about what it will have in 2014.

For example, ROF doesn't have any radio comms at all - none - nothing - zilch, but I think we can all agree that it is highly likely the dev team are aware of the need to provide such a feature for a WW2 sim and will be working on it over the next year. Ditto for almost every other complaint I've seen thrown at ROF so far.

Cut them some slack. Let's be a bit patient and support what could be a very exciting future for the flight-sim community.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now can I claim my prize for longest post ever!?

Up yours Blackdog_KT

[pirke]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uad2xQVMV8I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt1mHCBKQzo

this will be engine of ALL new simulators !!!