Adding new maps: Which one would be the most useful?

[Marabekm]

I for one would like to see a few more maps that would allow range to come into play. Just to add the challenge of fuel management and navigation. And besides not everything was 5 minutes apart. Personally would like a Philippines map, a map of entire New Guinea, including northern end of Australia, and anything in the Mediterranean and Western Europe. I realize that map making is hard work and would like to thank all of you guys with the patience and technological know how that can make them.

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Marabekm

I for one would like to see a few more maps that would allow range to come into play. Just to add the challenge of fuel management and navigation. And besides not everything was 5 minutes apart. Personally would like a Philippines map, a map of entire New Guinea, including northern end of Australia, and anything in the Mediterranean and Western Europe. I realize that map making is hard work and would like to thank all of you guys with the patience and technological know how that can make them.

Difficult to say the least. I'm not sure what the limit is but the Solomons Map currently in the game I believe is the largest possible size and that benefits from being a chain of islands with mostly open ocean.

I investigated a Philippines map but in order to make that work I'd have to pick a smaller battle space. Part of Luzon or Leyte plus Leyte gulf but that has limited use outside of the first few days of the battle and then you have a map with a large US base on it and nothing else.

A map containing the whole of the Philippines battle area just isn't possible. Unfortunately.

[Lagarto]

Originally Posted by IceFire

A map containing the whole of the Philippines battle area just isn't possible. Unfortunately.

The Philippines is one of my favourite maps. It's been recently upgraded for HSFX 7.0:
http://imageshack.com/a/img812/3203/yzvq.jpg

By the way, you can have a map covering as much terrain as this one (called Mediterranean Airwar over Italy, by So.V-Volperossa/RedFox59):
http://imageshack.com/a/img208/5444/cyee.jpg

I don't know what scale the two maps are, but both are huge. The Strait of Messina seen from 30,000 feet:
http://imageshack.com/a/img543/3629/e5fm.jpg

[majorfailure]

Originally Posted by Lagarto

The Philippines is one of my favourite maps. It's been recently upgraded for HSFX 7.0:
http://imageshack.com/a/img812/3203/yzvq.jpg

Looks like 1:2.

Originally Posted by Lagarto

By the way, you can have a map covering as much terrain as this one (called Mediterranean Airwar over Italy, by So.V-Volperossa/RedFox59)
http://imageshack.com/a/img208/5444/cyee.jpg

That looks like 1:3.

I'm not a grat fan of maps that are vastly undersized, as distances are just way off. I'd rather have a few selected, important to the theatre, full-sized maps.
Full-size maps of areas larger than 400*400km, who's gonna play on them? Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine all but a few players will ever enjoy flying for hours to the objective and then possibly getting shot down. There is a limit to where the simulation should end and the game begin IMHO.

[_1SMV_Gitano]

Originally Posted by majorfailure

Full-size maps of areas larger than 400*400km, who's gonna play on them? Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine all but a few players will ever enjoy flying for hours to the objective and then possibly getting shot down. There is a limit to where the simulation should end and the game begin IMHO.

I agree that 1:1 scale map of maximum 400x400 sounds a reasonable compromise but in some cases I still think that a reduced scale is the way to go. In the picture below you can see for example the main airfields in southern China. The yellow line is 200 km long. the minimum distance between major US and Japanese airfields is around 300 km and in a 400x400 km map area there would be just few of them.

[Lagarto]

Originally Posted by majorfailure

I'm not a great fan of maps that are vastly undersized, as distances are just way off.

I'm not a fan of undersized maps, either. However, if you want to reenact a strategic bombing campaign - and the IL-2 fans have been trying to do that since I remember - the 'tactical size' maps are just too small.
On th MWoI map I linked above you can, for example, fly a campaign for the P-38s of the U.S. 15th Air Force, which were taking off from Algeria and escorting heavy bombers all the way to northern Italy, Yugoslavia or Greece. For some it could be boring (you can always use time compression to speed things up on the way to target), but to experience the mounting tension of such long-range missions is priceless. As fighter pilots used to say: "Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror"

[SPAD-1949]

Originally Posted by Lagarto

I'm not a fan of undersized maps, either. However, if you want to reenact a strategic bombing campaign - and the IL-2 fans have been trying to do that since I remember - the 'tactical size' maps are just too small.
On th MWoI map I linked above you can, for example, fly a campaign for the P-38s of the U.S. 15th Air Force, which were taking off from Algeria and escorting heavy bombers all the way to northern Italy, Yugoslavia or Greece. For some it could be boring (you can always use time compression to speed things up on the way to target), but to experience the mounting tension of such long-range missions is priceless. As fighter pilots used to say: "Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror"

I tried to create airfields far outside the maps borders, but this is a hard task if it is not north or east. But it is some Kind of unsatisfiying.
Maps as large as the solomons mostly create a crash at ending the mission, which makes it rather hard or a matter of luck to fly campaigns, since often you just dump the entire successful mission when trying to quit it and confirm your successs.
Funny that the finland map works, whilst Slovakia and the Iasi-Odessa map tend to crash on a lower rate than the solomons map.

Maps as large as the alps in a modded game allways crash at ending the mission with 100% accuracy.

You must not forget to shut down and restart TrackIR, since evry CTD also affects TIR.

Or is it just me at my 5th computer I'm runining with the game?

[Lagarto]

I've been flying DGen campaigns on many large maps, including the Channel, the Philippines and the MWoI, and while I do remember occasional crashes (or rather freeze-ups) at missions' end, certainly they were not persistent. I had a feeling that such mishaps occurred when after hitting the Escape key I rushed to press the 'quit mission' button - giving the game a few more seconds before quitting the mission seemed to help. Anyway, I always thought that my aging PC was at fault.

[majorfailure]

Originally Posted by Lagarto

I'm not a fan of undersized maps, either. However, if you want to reenact a strategic bombing campaign - and the IL-2 fans have been trying to do that since I remember - the 'tactical size' maps are just too small.
On th MWoI map I linked above you can, for example, fly a campaign for the P-38s of the U.S. 15th Air Force, which were taking off from Algeria and escorting heavy bombers all the way to northern Italy, Yugoslavia or Greece. For some it could be boring (you can always use time compression to speed things up on the way to target), but to experience the mounting tension of such long-range missions is priceless. As fighter pilots used to say: "Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror"

And you could not do this on a full sized map of say Northern Italy (maybe 600*300 or so) that has a least a part of the Med on it - with offboard or included distant airfields (like Normandy has)?
And others like me could use a cutout of that map (150-200*150-200) and play there. And time compression is not an option for coops, and I simply don't have the time to play missions that include the chance of failure and last for hours.

[IceFire]

Confining oneself to a true 1:1 scale map means that some concessions have to be made. For these very large maps, how much care has been taken in objects and placement? I mean... its a huge amount of work required to do all of that. Plus research.

The other thing I want to bring up is the role of the dogfight map. We currently have a few very usable small scale maps that we re-use over and over again on dogfight servers. Some of the new maps work brilliantly for online and others are more challenging or less useful.

Something like Italy Online has been a good addition in my mind. It let us do some fun things online in a short amount of time. How do people feel about these types of maps?