Where are the new maps?

[BadAim]

Originally Posted by horseback

Speaking of maps, how about a method of 'jumping' from one map to another in a single mission format? If you're taking off from the Kuban to patrol over Crimea for instance, from 'England' to Normandy, or from 'Rabaul' to Guadalcanal it would be quite useful. Some way of linking the maps together (and they wouldn't have to be adjacent to each other) with way of assigning fuel burned + altitude gained/lost and time gone on the cockpit clock in a single mission would be very cool.

cheers

horseback

That is a great idea, though I'm not sure that there are a lot of maps that would be usable in that way in the stock game. I wonder how difficult a feature like that would be to retrofit into the game? I doubt it would be a cakewalk.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by BadAim

That is a great idea, though I'm not sure that there are a lot of maps that would be usable in that way in the stock game. I wonder how difficult a feature like that would be to retrofit into the game? I doubt it would be a cakewalk.

Maps that just cover a limited area and don't "scroll" as you fly are the trade-off you make for having actual populated towns, trees and woods. It worked well when IL2 was a low-altitude, tactical "mud moving" sim, not so well now that there are player flyable strategic bombers planes.

I think that it would be a lot of work to allow jumps to new maps, especially if you have missions where planes are scattered across two or more maps. Online it would be a nightmare, especially if people on different maps couldn't interact with each other. Also, how do you handle sighting across two different maps? And, what happens when you have people fighting at the conjunction of four different maps!

About the only way it could possibly work is to rework the existing maps in the game so that they are all standardized "tiles" designed to allow smooth transition from one map to the next. Then, you'd have to rework the game engine so that it could keep track of everything happening on or above each tile. For online, you'd need to make it so that the server could handle dozens of combats over each tile!

I think it could be done with the computer power available these days, but it would be a whole new sim. I sure don't think that it would be fair to ask TD to do that.