But can Oleg's team create a campaign with soul?

[shockandawe]

He must have heard you

Translation: More eye candy. Period.

I read this thing closely. Twice. There is not a word about the immersive elements that they are hard at work on! Oh, don't worry, they will spend a solid week or two on that. Meanwhile, back to cloud modeling! Woopie! Great.

Thanks, SimHQ guys for reenforcing the idea in Oleg's head that the only thing that matters to anyone is even nicer clouds and even more realistic paint scratches. Look, not everyone wants that, OKAY! I want a much MUCH more involving, immersive experience. I like eye candy as much as the next guy but IL2 had plenty for me. I would like to have had a much more full figured experience, though. IL2 looks like it was designed by a bunch of really skilled engineers. They worked VERY hard to make the flight dynamics and the visuals spot on. Then, at the very last minute, someone said, "uh, I guess we have to make some sort of interface 'thing' and campaign, uh, 'thing' for this, don't we?" Then someone else said, "oops. George, could you do that by the end of next week when we ship? Thanks.". They slapped that on and sent it out the door.

I'm sorry but this interview with Oleg says the very same thing to me. These fellows haven't even thought about anything but eye candy and cloud modeling. Oh, sure, they'll get to it one day. I worry that SoW:BoB is going to be a beautiful, near perfect piece of engineering with everything else hastily slapped on at the end. I didn't hear any words otherwise did you? So, they keep ratcheting up all of the graphics and the clouds and what does that answer? Will it be more immersive because of these? Will more people be brought in to our cool hobby? Will there be any way for noobs to get involved rather than just grisled veterans who have simmed every sim since MS FS1? No. It will not. It will just be another step away from that. IL2 was forbidding for noobs or folks who don't have thirty hours a week to pump into it. I don't get the impression that SoW:BoB will be any different. (Wow! You would think that Ubisoft would have a word with these guys at some point.)

Actually, this is a great 'in' for other designers. If Maddox games is solely focused on multiplayer, modeling and eye candy, some other software house can jump in a give "the rest of us" what WE want! Ubisoft really should be thinking more strategically here. They _could_ have a sim where you could shut off every immersive element and go into straight, pure flight simulator mode - which is what some of you guys seem to want - or you could switch on a more immersive environment (a la B17). I sure understand that some of you don't want any of that immersive sissy stuff like having to care whether your wingman gets gibbed or not and only want more beautifully modeled rivits and clouds but there are many of us who want more than that!!

(Ubisoft, are you listening!)

Thanks again, SimHQ! (Maybe we should get someone else to do the interviewing from now on.)

[shockandawe]

Although I have been one of Oleg's staunchest fans and promoters since the beginning (IL2 Sturmovik) and am also an obsessive about historical and aeriel accuracy, flight models and detail, I can sadly only agree.

I am also heartened to hear somebody mention B17 The Mighty Eighth which IMO was one of the most immersive and involving combat flight simulators ever designed. One quickly developed a real sense of involvement and personal responsibility for one's men in that sim and had they ever been able to produce a multiplayer with multi-crewed B-17s it would have become as popular as IL2 Sturmovik did.

Oleg and Luthier have always been brilliant technicians of virtuality with the minds of flight engineers but I fear they have always lacked patience or sufficient real interest in the human and social dimensions of combat simulation.

Yet, in truth it is THAT which involves all but the driest of techno-geeks in their products over time. Maddox Games' true market for their new "Storm of War" generation of combat flight simulators is that of the myriad online virtual squadrons many of whose members are mature and professional people with excellent attention spans, extensive historical knowledge, extraordinary enthusiasm for combat flying, sufficient disposable income to afford FF flight sticks, pedals, track IR, 3D glasses and surround sound and with high standards and demands regarding how they spend their precious liesure time.

A potentially lucrative clientel and almost the same market as that for MS FS9 ACOF and FSX but not quite.

MS FS clients are in the main content to fly simulated passenger and cargo airlines in virtual scheduled flights, after consulting vast in-flight manuals and extensive real-world checklists. Such virtual fliers are happy enough in a sealed and geekish universe. Indeed there is even a whole slew of virtual fliers whose preference is to operate virtual flight control software and provide real-time flight control for all online fliers! (VATSIM or Virtual Air Traffic Control Simulation) while not even flying themselves. Even in virtuality this is a technically demanding and taxing role yet there are plenty happy to spend all their spare time doing it.

Virtual combat flyers however have a very different agenda. Most of them are highly competitive and to this end are prepared to spend many hundreds of hours in flying practise, training and combat lessons from tutorials. Many are history buffs with extensive knowledge of WW2 and an obsessive need for historical accuracy. Not in the sense of being "rivet fanatics" but because they truly want to experience in virtuality those challenges which real-world WW2 pilots and soldiers faced in order to buy with their lives, amongst the many other freedoms we enjoy as a consequence of their sacrifice, our modern freedom to do ANY of this. Accordingly, at least in part, the agenda of such virtual pilots is about "honouring the dead" in all theatres of war. This motivation is shared by many online FPS virtual infantry soldiers too. I can attest to this as I have for a number of years belonged to both an online (WW1/WW2) squadron and an online (WW2/Modern) infantry clan both of whose agendas are precisely this and most of whose members are over 40, some as old as their mid 60's.

Combat is a realm in which humans (male & female) can "prove themselves" and face challenge of the most primal kind and hence there are few more addictive realms in the real-world or in virtuality, where such issues can be addressed in an adrenalating manner without physical risk, moral dilema or injury. There is nothing quite like the cameraderie one feels flying or marching into virtual battle with one's fellow pilots or soldiers, all virtual warriors. This is hugely hightened by the knowledge that one's virtual enemies are also "really" human rather than AI.

So if Oleg REALLY wants to "clean up" in his field and make BoB the new "gold standard" for Combat Flight Sims then Maddox games urgently need to address this.

I agree that B17 II is one of the very best examples of "how to do it" and still occasionally play single player missions in that sim for precisely that reason. Moving around inside the B-17 tending to wounded collegues, manning their guns, then limping home with a damaged bomber, casualties, wounded crew members and a highly challenging landing, followed by "the letters of condolence" and choosing replacement crew from their service records, is amazingly immersive. Flying a single mission in real time in B-17 leaves one feeling shattered, shaken and very moved, with the utmost respect for those amazingly brave young men who were honoured by Joseph Heller in Catch 22 and more recently in the excellent and realistic war movie Mephis Belle.

Combat is not about rivets or serial numbers, however deeply satisfying such levels of detail can be. It is about people and immersion in that historical period's true stresses and challenges. It is about understanding our forefather's sacrifices, heroism and challenges. It is also about keeping ourselves prepared for combat even in peaceful times.

I disagree with one thing said in your post however. Convincing ground detail IS as crucial as realistic flight models and planes. Every flight starts and ends on the ground and in flight navigation in full-real depends just as much on VFR, visual observation and interpretation of ground detail as on instruments and charts. Indeed the presence of the ground is, quite leterally a matter of life and death on every flight, regardless of combat success. Accordingly the realism of the ground is therefor ALWAYS going to be just as important as the realism of the action in the air.

(A good example of the disaster of not attending sufficiently to that aspect of a simulation was Mig Alley which was convincing in the air and totally useless on the ground. So it failed completely.)

This has got to be one of the most well-thought-out posts I've ever read. The message for Maddox games: Man, the sim has to have soul!

[WWSensei]

The basic problem at the end of the day is Oleg and his team know a lot about building an aircraft but very little about how it is used in a war or even how wars are fought. That's why most of the campaigning is straightforward, direct plotting of waypoints, every flight is intercepted etc. Other signs point to it. For example:

1) A knee board which shows only three unrealistic options and misses the one predominatly used by pilots. By that I mean you get either a blank map, a map with a "GPS locator" icon, or the "AWACS view". You don't get the most realistic option of a kneeboard map with waypoints marked (along with key info like TOT and altitudes). They obviously never talked to a true combat pilot--even from WWI or II much less modern--about this aspect.

2) Included missions and even the first version of DGen showed an immense lack of knowledge of how missions were planned and executed. Shoot, the first versions of DGen used flak batteries as waypoints--180 degrees from what bombers tried to do--avoid flak until necessary.

3) DGen's limitation to 9 ships in a flight. It's not a game limitation since DCG can allow 16. Also, 9 shows the Eastern preference for flights of three versus the Western 4 per flight--yes, I know about the Brits but event hey learned their lesson after a couple of years.

4) Lack of persistance of damage from one mission to the next. Dead pilots re-appear, destroyed bridges and factories repaired in a day, lack of triggers in the mission planning to offer anything but strictly scripted events.

There is a slew of other issues that show they didn't really talk to a lot of people about air power was used in fighting wars. To me there is far too much attention paid to whether the fourteenth rivet on the underside wing of the C model widget-flanger has a .00002 mm variance from stated records and not enough attention to the fact that a standard 16 ship schwarm can't be done by the AI. In the scale of errors the former is a bit of mositure compared to the latter being a tidal wave of error.

[shockandawe]

Yeah, that is the rather uncomfortable feeling I'm getting, too. The good news is that IL2 is where they are _starting_ from!! Do any of you remember how bad the original flight simulators were? Just think of what Saint Oleg could do with this working material!! What worries me the most is that he may be vectoring off and focusing way WAY too much attention to CPU hog details and not nearly enough on the immersive elements.


You know, one of the things I really liked about the CFS line is that the manuals were really fun to read. The authors had old WWII aces looking over their shoulder and adding things, too! They had stories mixed in and pointers from these guys. Now _that_ is cool! What better way to honor these veterans? What better way to get your head into the sim than having a real WWII pilot giving you pointers!

I do really hope that Maddox games is listening to us! sowbob can be so good! Just take IL2, ratchet up the graphics a bit, then add great steaming heaps of atmosphere. Listen to real WWII pilots and have them look it over.