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Doc
Feb-17-2012, 09:32
Hello everyone,

First of all, lets talk about the upcoming patch.

We havent talked about our flight model for some time. We havent been idle however. Not only are we fine-tuning plane performance, were making some very deep changes to the underlying core of our physics code.

We are completely rewriting collision and landing gear, while also making other elements of the flight model more complete and precise. Control surface behavior and reaction has been significantly improved. Refined transverse velocity calculations in relation to aircraft performance. Made it possible to calculate different transverse velocity at different points along the wing. Improved pylon and loadout FM calculations. Added many new features to allow FM calculation needed in future sequels. Many of these changes have also entailed completely rewriting existing code.

And this is by no means a complete list!

Graphics-wise, were dealing with a last-minute issue as we speak. We rather unexpectedly found a problem with our aircraft decals, i.e. the code that places crosses and roundels and chevrons etc on top of the aircraft paintscheme. The code is being rewritten, the work should be finished in about 2 days. Once its done we can take much more accurate benchmarks. Well post then when we have them.

And now lets talk about new stuff.

Were continuing to introduce you to aircraft from our upcoming sequel. This is once again the Ju-88A-4 shown last week; this time its wearing summer camo and is flying in front of a WIP, oh dear God so very WIP, fall landscape.

Finally, were showing the second part of our three-part video preview of the new ground features in our simulation.
Watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC29KL_wSBo

Please do keep in mind that this is still work in progress, and many of the components shown are not yet final. If you look closely, you may even notice some improvements between last weeks video and this one.
Most importantly, please keep in mind that this is a preview, the feature is actively being worked on, and at this time we do not know ourselves when and in which shape it will make it into the game.

Tune in next week for the final part of the preview. It will focus on the vehicle type briefly shown at the end of this video.

See you next Friday!

Attached Thumbnails

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachment.php?attachmentid=8621&d=1329479897
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachment.php?attachmentid=8622&d=1329479910
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachment.php?attachmentid=8623&d=1329479955
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachment.php?attachmentid=8624&d=1329480001
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachment.php?attachmentid=8625&d=1329480015

Dutch
Feb-17-2012, 10:22
Ok, here's a thought for online play.

Battle of France, scenario a) Red team get AI tanks, Human piloted a/c, Blue get AI a/c Human operated Armour;

Server cycles to scenario b) Blue team get AI tanks, Human piloted a/c, Red get AI a/c Human operated armour;

scenario c) Both sides get Human operated a/c, AI armour;

scenario d) Both sides get AI a/c, Human operated armour.

Each scenario won or lost on specific objectives to suit.

Love the idea, but I still wish the BR.20 and G.50 were a Wellington and a Defiant!

ATAG_Bliss
Feb-17-2012, 10:45
Just imagine the possibilities! As I've always known, this will be the ultimate combat sim. Sadly we've seen many on other forums that have no patience, but I've always known what this will turn into. I'll gladly wait for it :)

Could you imagine 100 people on the ground while another 100 in the sky? Oh my!

When this comes out, you can bet your butts we'll have a full scale on ground war server on this as well. This is very exciting stuff. Once the base game engine is fixed and the SDKs/map editor is released, this is going to completely blow up. We might just get a few of those ARMA folks playing it as well.

What a great update. Good times ahead!!

335th_GRAthos
Feb-17-2012, 11:27
Just imagine the possibilities! As I've always known, this will be the ultimate combat sim. Sadly we've seen many on other forums that have no patience, but I've always known what this will turn into. I'll gladly wait for it :)

Could you imagine 100 people on the ground while another 100 in the sky? Oh my!

When this comes out, you can bet your butts we'll have a full scale on ground war server on this as well. This is very exciting stuff. Once the base game engine is fixed and the SDKs/map editor is released, this is going to completely blow up. We might just get a few of those ARMA folks playing it as well.

What a great update. Good times ahead!!

You fly blue, I remember...

Bliss' new wheels (right)....after converting his 4x4 to 100octane fuel and some minor tune ups :laugh1
http://grathos.de/temp/CoD/T34vsTiger.jpg

~S~

ATAG_Colander
Feb-17-2012, 11:46
Just imagine the possibilities! As I've always known, this will be the ultimate combat sim. Sadly we've seen many on other forums that have no patience, but I've always known what this will turn into. I'll gladly wait for it :)

Could you imagine 100 people on the ground while another 100 in the sky? Oh my!

When this comes out, you can bet your butts we'll have a full scale on ground war server on this as well. This is very exciting stuff. Once the base game engine is fixed and the SDKs/map editor is released, this is going to completely blow up. We might just get a few of those ARMA folks playing it as well.

What a great update. Good times ahead!!

I would gladly pay a few hundred to have that!

ATAG_Bliss
Feb-17-2012, 12:03
You fly blue, I remember...

Bliss' new wheels (right)....after converting his 4x4 to 100octane fuel and some minor tune ups :laugh1
http://grathos.de/temp/CoD/T34vsTiger.jpg

~S~

LOL - I can't wait. One of these days all those neat little controls that we can't use yet will be in use. I might have to get a couple more of those button box thingies by the time this is all said and done. What a key mapping nightmare (in a good way) :Grin:

ChiefRedCloud
Feb-17-2012, 13:39
How do I answer this without angering someone. Anwser, probably no way. :no Yes it would be nice IF we could roll BF 1941, ArmA 2, CloD and perhaps the World of Tanks ALL together and make a fantastic World War 2 simulator. Well it isn't going to happen. Atleast in our life times.

It's in my mind, that you can do one thing really well, or you can do a LOT of things half way. Now it pretty well observed that CloD, like more than a few simulations, has many short falls. You've mentioned many right in these forums and worked around many other on your servers.

So now the dev's, which ARE proffessionals, want to delute this sim with such stuff and ground vehicle control. And yes Bliss, I have seen these controls in the options but hoped they were not for this. I was wrong.

Can this all work out? I suppose it can, but at what price? Is it incorrect to say you bought a flight sim to fly? Or ArmA 2 to ground pound? Or even Subhunter 5 to sink ships?

ArmA 2, as an example has aircraft. But IT is NOT a flight sim and you know it. BF 3 is sort of fun but IT certainly is NOT a Combat Ground Simulator.

It's certain that we obviously can not change the minds over at 1C or even RoF, and else where. Their plans are their plans and all we can do is hope for the best. In many cases folks, like yourself want a comprehensive World War 2 Combat Simulator. I honestly don't think you'll see it from these folks at 1C. But hey, I have been wrong before.

If my comments are taken wrong here, please let me know and I or you can pull the plug on it. After all, it just my opinion. :inq:

ATAG_Colander
Feb-17-2012, 13:50
Chief,

I agree with you, well, sort of...

Yes trying to accomplish many things at the same time can result in all those things being poorly done but...

I think that 70% or more of what makes a game is it's engine. The engine is what allows graphics, physics, sound etc work.
Having an engine with the physics to handle flight aerodynamics is one of the hardest parts.

Now, if the engine is correctly build, adding functionality to the game, like driving a tank, could be fairly simple.

In short, my point is that once the engine is done (and a very important detail is the lack of need to worry about compatibility with consoles), adding the rest of the functionality could be done "cheap" and "fast" hence allowing to have a very good flight simulator with a very decent (at least) ground simulator.

Just my 2 cents.
Colander.

ATAG_Bliss
Feb-17-2012, 14:25
How do I answer this without angering someone. Anwser, probably no way. :no Yes it would be nice IF we could roll BF 1941, ArmA 2, CloD and perhaps the World of Tanks ALL together and make a fantastic World War 2 simulator. Well it isn't going to happen. Atleast in our life times.

It's in my mind, that you can do one thing really well, or you can do a LOT of things half way. Now it pretty well observed that CloD, like more than a few simulations, has many short falls. You've mentioned many right in these forums and worked around many other on your servers.

So now the dev's, which ARE proffessionals, want to delute this sim with such stuff and ground vehicle control. And yes Bliss, I have seen these controls in the options but hoped they were not for this. I was wrong.

Can this all work out? I suppose it can, but at what price? Is it incorrect to say you bought a flight sim to fly? Or ArmA 2 to ground pound? Or even Subhunter 5 to sink ships?

ArmA 2, as an example has aircraft. But IT is NOT a flight sim and you know it. BF 3 is sort of fun but IT certainly is NOT a Combat Ground Simulator.

It's certain that we obviously can not change the minds over at 1C or even RoF, and else where. Their plans are their plans and all we can do is hope for the best. In many cases folks, like yourself want a comprehensive World War 2 Combat Simulator. I honestly don't think you'll see it from these folks at 1C. But hey, I have been wrong before.

If my comments are taken wrong here, please let me know and I or you can pull the plug on it. After all, it just my opinion. :inq:

Well I look at from a different perspective. As Colander said, the basis for any game, let alone a flight sim is the game engine. From that perspective the IL2 series is leaps and bounds above any other game/sim IMO. (Yes, even IL2COD).

I used to be a core tester for ROF. Heck, I started the SYN server and have built more missions for that game than I can think of. Actually diving into the game engines is what made me take on the tester role. I wanted to improve it soo very badly. I stopped playing it when I was told they aren't redoing the game engine. For me, dogfighting is just 1 of the smallest parts of flying in a sim. The ground war is important. The immersion is important. The objectives are important. Without this you simply have a dog fight game that's bland and gets stale fast. For example, there's more objects in a single objective target on our IL2COD server than what you could put into an entire ROF mission before the game wouldn't even load / crash / or the master browser craps out. There's 1000's of objects in our IL2COD missions. What I'm trying to say here is that the game engine for IL2 is phenomenal. I could put 1000 AI planes in the air and have them fly around. Would that hurt people's FPS? Sure. But it could be done and has been done already time and time again. You can't do stuff like this with other sims. And the only other modern one I can think of that has MP is ROF. The game engine for that is flat out crap. No offense here, but as someone that dives into the guts of these games, you can't even compare the 2. If I want to make a bridge go across the english channel (10's of 1000's of bridge pieces), I could do it without breaking a sweat. Old IL246 could do the same sort of thing. I guess my entire point is I honestly believe they can pull it off just because of the foundation upon which they are starting from is rock solid from a what you can and can't do front. Sure there's bugs, problems, bad code, but the basic foundation is the best I've ever seen in any sim by a long shot.

I know you play ROF CRC, and maybe that's where your skepticism comes from as I know just how limited you are to objects, AI, players, or well anything when it comes to mission making. But this game isn't that way. It's almost the complete opposite. So in saying that, I do feel that adding the ground stuff won't take anything away from the air. But I definitely feel it will enhance the whole experience 100x. These guys are flight sim enthusiasts. They aren't going to dumb down anything in the air. If anything, it's going to get that much harder/better/more realistic.

I don't know how advanced the ground stuff will be as far as DM/physics (though seeing that truck roll over from turning too hard was pretty awesome), but I wouldn't expect it to be an all out picture perfect tank sim. It will probably have some cool sights, a few positions to be in the tanks, and some sort of DM, but I don't think any more than that. But even at that, it would be better than WoT which is only 3rd person and has no way to run your own server on, let alone respawn :)

So in all seriousness, I'm not worried about it at all. I've never been worried with this game even though some of the people around me have. In due time, this will really be the ultimate combat sim, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's still going 10 to 15 years from now. The problem is all that time I'm going to waste playing it. So fear not. The ground work for the ability to do all this stuff is already there. You should go back and read some of the old updates from Oleg. His ambition was truly remarkable. And when we can finally use the power of our dedicated server, you're going to see many a great things.

335th_GRAthos
Feb-17-2012, 14:29
OK, I will open my mouth as well, the "conspirancy theory":

It came to my mind while looking at the incredible detail when Tuckie posted his 720p video him landing the Tiger Moth in London and txying through the streets.

I believe all these options were ready from the beginning (which explains why the control keys were already there), they were planned for the next "sequel" as the next revenue generation stream.

The shock came when thy realised at launch that no GPU could handle all these graphics (some may rememebr that we had 8fps when trying to fly near bombers).
They tried to fix it as much as possible (the "lowering of the textures from original to anything lower") but even this was not much help because they had never planned with a "scaling" of the graphics for "flying only" (thus all the amazing ground details are not needed).
So, their only option was to start rewritting the graphics engine & hoping that ATI/NV will bring much more powerful GPUs soon, so that they meet somewhere in the middle (lowering the demands of the game, having more powerful GPU).

In the meantime, they try to keep us happy, showing us bit by bit of the abilities of the game (German expression: Salami-tactic ;) ).

This could explain B6's careful wording kind of "we show them but it is not decided yet whether they will be included".

Since the 1C team is very small (assumption) they have probably spread their ressources very thinly: One person to fix the flight model, one tries to remove the unwanted graphics while keeping the scalability for the future developments, a third is putting new planes together for the next sequel.
This would leave one or even nobody to fix the other kind of bugs (bombsight not working properly, AI commands etc).


What is the less good thing: I see the days ahead of us when our nerves will be thin lines...:uhoh
A lot of bugs which will need ironing out...

What is the good thing about it: Great, they are still working on CoD and its future developments :dthumb:

These are the easy things. What I would like to be able to "guestimate" is what the relation between Ubi and 1C is! Probably Ubi is fuming for the flop of CoD and all the trouble they got into. So how would they react regarding a re-launch of COD with a new sequel while the bugs of the first release have not been fixed yet?
Will they terminate the contract and release 1C from the obligation to sell outside Russia through UBI or will they insist locking 1C to Russia only?


Anyway I said enough that would earn 10000 airmiles (ehem, infraction points I meant) in another forum!

I have no contacts at all with anybody at Ubi, 1C or anything that could have given me any information about the real situation. The basis of the above is pure speculation and a lot of science fiction reading :Grin:

And I still remain optimistic :salute:

And by the way, if we had the PC of 2015 today, we would not be sweating at all with this game...

EDIT: Since it was posted here http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=29812 take a look at this video of the detail of the Wellington (inside the Wellington): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXhG6DFjaDY&feature=player_embedded#!
So 1C has a lot of things ready, the problem is now that they have to spend very precious time toning down the graphics in order ot make it playable with today's GPUs.


~S~

ATAG_WatchMan
Feb-17-2012, 15:37
Oh boy, umm I hope they know what they are doing here. To me this update just brings about more uncertainty of exactly what the final product is going to be. Perhaps I'm being pessimistic here but if they're doing what it looks like they're doing 1946 will be the last hardcore WW2 flightsim we'll see from 1c.

I just keep on thinking of what Luthier had said in previous posts about flight models taking up to a year to do and the complexity of other tasks and wonder with their limited resources exactly what they'll have to trim out to get this game into the market place towards a broader audience.

You can have the deepest passion in the world for flight simming, but at the end of the day the guy holding the purse strings is going to decide what happens and businesses are in the business of making money, not flight sims. I'm just a bit worried here, but as I've said in the past, I'd be more than happy to be wrong about this.

ATAG_Knuckles
Feb-17-2012, 18:21
One thing I am confused on. At $40.00 a pop for this sim, dont know how many they have sold. If its indicated of the amount of people in multiplayer/forums, it hasn't been that many. Where are these people getting their money ??? what even inspires them to improve it ?? Now if we were paying a monthly fee, that would make sense, the more improvements the more monthly fees.

These people need to eat, I would love to help feed them

does this make sense ??

Knuckles

TomcatViP
Feb-17-2012, 19:07
Thx for your insight Bliss. I learn plenty !

Regarding the money they can make out of this game, I am just like you Knuckles I am getting worried days after days. How can they sustain that level of work without cash inflow ? Maybe we all are wrong ant the game sells well (the online community and Forum cruiser is just a pale shade of all the users) ... but what if ?

Regarding the graphics engine limitation vs the FPS, pls keep in mind that all the small routines (lines of codes) that drive the FM, the DM, the EM and all teh small stuff that we adore takes A LOT OF FLOPS ! The problem for them is that a lot of players are running on a PC configured as a high end console wih all teh perfs dedicated to the graphic side.

My game station is also my CAD/Simulation station (:angel:). So it's configured for high end computation with a rather modest graphic card (still a Pro NVdia).

I never had any such low FPS or stutters as many complains despite dating from early 2010. So IMHO it's just a matter of good advise for the hardware ;)

just my 2 cents

~S!

Doc
Feb-17-2012, 19:19
Wait a minute. At the 5:02 mark in the video did someone get their head shot off? LOL

ChiefRedCloud
Feb-17-2012, 20:54
Interesting info Bliss (on the engine and such) but I'm not sold. However, I do respect yours and the others views here. And if it works out, more the better. I do appreciate your explaining things to me though.

My spectore is still that no matter how simple the ground controlled items are to initiate or the observed fact that they obviously meant to do someting of this nature all along this precious time and or resources could be turned towards the aircraft themselves.

No offense seams to be taken by my comment and none was meant. Infact it's nice that we can discuss this subject so level headed. Very nice ....

As far as Ubi and 1C well I can only speculate or guess. But most companies need tax write offs. Is this one? I have no idea. Another idea is that Ubi is giving 1C one more chance with Battle for Moscow to make some money. And juust perhaps 1C is trying to cover both sims with this one ploy. Again, I have no idea.

Thanks for allowing me to express my opnion in the company of mature adults. :dthumb:

ATAG_Bliss
Feb-17-2012, 21:00
We're all adults here CRC - so yeah I'd hope we can discuss things somewhat on a normal level.

As far as the funding (pure speculation mode on!), I would wager a guess that they are expecting the majority of their monies coming quite a while after the sim is released. For instance, old IL2 is over 10 years old, but if you check out youtube videos of it, for instance, there's still people asking about "is this a game? where can I buy it?" type of stuff all the time.

So I'd say it's still being sold very well even today. I'd say the same thing is going to happen to IL2COD. I don't think the majority of their money was made until 46 hit the shelves, and I'd wager a guess they are banking on the same thing for IL2COD as well (pure speculation of course, but it's speculation with a bit of theory and research :) )

Anyhow - I figure it will be ok in the end.. Who knows how long it will take, but I'm looking forward to it! :thumbsup:

ATAG_Knuckles
Feb-18-2012, 09:31
"Wait a minute. At the 5:02 mark in the video did someone get their head shot off? LOL "


Ha yes they did clean shoot too


Knucks

Furious
Feb-20-2012, 10:35
4 flyable planes for the RAF in a $40 game I had to shelf for 8 months, and they're working on making jeeps drivable.

BS has just taken on a whole new level...