The old IL2 1946, if only....

[Trooper117]

I played the old IL2 to death... still keep it on my hard drive, and still fire it up on occasion. Ah... the good old days of large online wars, dynamic campaigns...

 

If someone said to me, have the old IL2 1946, but with the fidelity and graphics of BoS... I'd rip his arm off!

 

I don't know about the rest of you, but that would keep me enthralled for several more years.

 

Hopefully we will get something similar out of BoS as time goes on... here's hoping

[DD_Crash]

That should have been the aim from the very start. Somehow I feel that the changes necessary wont come easy for the developers.

[Finkeren]

Of course we all hope for something along those lines.

 

The good news is, that the sim itself, which is both the core of the game and by far the biggest part of it, is quite good and stable. That gives me hope for future game modes to come along with an expansion of plane set and maps.

 

BoS could be the next sim to last a decade. It's all on the hands of the devs.

[Elbows]

I agree that would all be ideal.  Unfortunately I don't see that happening.  The engine driving BoS/RoF won't handle huge online games.  It's unfortunate but it simply won't.  I think you may not see more than 30-40 handled unless they do some kind of miraculous overhaul.

 

The campaign likely won't change (perhaps eventually the unlocks will disappear) but we can hope with the FMB that some energized fans create third-party campaign systems, or simply create some campaign mission series.

 

I do suspect we'll see plenty of planes and maps (and I'm hoping third party maps will be encouraged as well).  It's a good sim but I think the engine is a limitation on the grand-scale some people would like to see.

[Finkeren]

I agree that would all be ideal.  Unfortunately I don't see that happening.  The engine driving BoS/RoF won't handle huge online games.  It's unfortunate but it simply won't.  I think you may not see more than 30-40 handled unless they do some kind of miraculous overhaul.

 

The campaign likely won't change (perhaps eventually the unlocks will disappear) but we can hope with the FMB that some energized fans create third-party campaign systems, or simply create some campaign mission series.

 

I do suspect we'll see plenty of planes and maps (and I'm hoping third party maps will be encouraged as well).  It's a good sim but I think the engine is a limitation on the grand-scale some people would like to see.

 

I think you're being entirely too pessimistic.We've had 65 player servers with few issues in Early Access.

 

Also: I don't expect the campaign mode to change that much, but rather be supplemented by a historically based career mode along the way, whether it be done by the devs or a 3rd party.

[SYN_Mike77]

We get 75 in RoF and BoS should end up being at least that well optimized.

[Yakdriver]

I agree that would all be ideal.  Unfortunately I don't see that happening.  The engine driving BoS/RoF won't handle huge online games.  It's unfortunate but it simply won't.  I think you may not see more than 30-40 handled unless they do some kind of miraculous overhaul.

 

The campaign likely won't change (perhaps eventually the unlocks will disappear) but we can hope with the FMB that some energized fans create third-party campaign systems, or simply create some campaign mission series.

 

I do suspect we'll see plenty of planes and maps (and I'm hoping third party maps will be encouraged as well).  It's a good sim but I think the engine is a limitation on the grand-scale some people would like to see.

 

third party maps are already "in there"

40 people online in a mission, and add another 40 AI "targets/transports/recce planes" and a hundred ground targets, anopther 1000 static objects...

I think that's enough to have squads banging their heads together.

haven't i seen a 75 slot server rolling?

and if anything, the unlocks can stay if it's either/or - they are a 40 hour nuisance, and campaigns can add a few thousand hours of fun

check mission4today to get a picture of what campaigns can do to your game...

[Potenz]

well for me 1946 are good memories of gamming and modding, but for me

it a thing of the past, simple FM/DM, outdated graphics, dull scenary.

 

just let it go, it gave us a lot of fun, but it is time to bury it

and move on 

[Dakpilot]

I fail to understand the first post...

 

We already have BoS, to create the amount of aircraft maps etc. from original IL-2 1946 to the same fidelity and graphics of BoS

 

Well just do the maths and time element needed, and the cost simply makes it prohibitive..especially if it were just as a "stopgap"

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[Yakdriver]

nono... it's time to print the best screenshots, and hang them along side FSX and CFS3 screenshots, on the "Flight Sim Wall", right in front off my entrance door.
not burying anything. remembering the good times and keeping those in mind.

[Dakpilot]

 

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[Trooper117]

I fail to understand the first post...

 

We already have BoS, to create the amount of aircraft maps etc. from original IL-2 1946 to the same fidelity and graphics of BoS

 

Well just do the maths and time element needed, and the cost simply makes it prohibitive..especially if it were just as a "stopgap"

 

Cheers Dakpilot

 

What don't you understand?... I'm stating I loved IL2 and if I could have it again but in the graphic quality of BoS I'd keep playing it for years.

Finishing my statement that hopefully we will see something similar in time with BoS...

[Yakdriver]

if you had a decade worth of patience, i wish you the same patience again, and worth combined effort we shall make it happen.
some will bring their talent to get the noobs set up

others will assist with tricky hardware and software problems.

others will moderate the forums.
some will write missions,
others will collect cash to run a website and a skins depository

a few will host dedicated servers

another few will paint.

 

"it's all in the hands of the devs now"
is not true.
a third of the success depends on the communitie's attitude - at least.

 

Not all is in OUR hands... but a damn big lot of it.

Attitude is actually KEY - on the dev side, on the dev/community interfaces, as well as on the user side.

If everyone keeps a Positive attitude to turn this thing in the next breathtaking 1946-alike thing with 500 planes and 80 maps spanning the world over, then we got a good shot at it.

team daidalos, the atag dudes [i think?] sindicate it's possible. but those roads are years from now.

Edited November 7, 2014 by Hawker_Typhoon

[BeastyBaiter]

I remember IL2 v1.03 (initial US release), BoS is in far better shape than that currently. It wasn't a flawless release of course and we're still waiting on some important things (FMB...) but it has been relatively smooth. Compare that to LOMAC where I had to wait a month or two for a patch so I could install the game. The last time I played IL2/FB/PF it was limited to 30 players I think. I've been in 70+ player matches in BoS and it was mostly stable. I've been toying with DCS the past couple weeks instead of BoS, but the I firmly believe that BoS will be the MP CFS of the next 5-10 years. Like the original IL2 and RoF, I anticipate a regular stream of expansions that will really open it up.

[Y-29.Silky]

well for me 1946 are good memories of gamming and modding, but for me

it a thing of the past, simple FM/DM, outdated graphics, dull scenary.

 

just let it go, it gave us a lot of fun, but it is time to bury it

and move on 

Bury it and move on? Never! I still enjoy the campaigns wholly. And especially, not until this game gets its s^^^ together.

[dburne]

Bury it and move on? Never! I still enjoy the campaigns wholly.

 

Agree, I recently re-installed and updated to HSFX7, having a lot of fun with DCG in the Pacific.

[Potenz]

i don't know you, but the outdated graphics (hurt my eyes) and the simple FM/DM 

makes it boring now, even if it has the campaign and 300+ planes.

 

it's more than 10 years old, it's time to move on

 

couldn't resist hehehe

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLQmOA6xV8M

Edited November 7, 2014 by GOAPotenz

[KoN_]

There are still campaigns going on in il-1946 Hsfx 7.3

 

We fly them every weekend Sunday . 80 players you should look into it , people get sweaty palms flying . its that intense....lol

[mondog]

Some of you forget what il2 fb was like at the start. If you could get the game to even start you were lucky. If it didn't randomly break you were lucky. It took a good few years for it to mature. We got allot for free, no other game that I can remember got so much free content.

 

BOS on launch day was more reliable than il2fb 2 years after release.

[Trooper117]

And you forget the lineage of the two dev teams... They know exactly what goes into a dedicated combat flight sim.

[KodiakJac]

I fail to understand the first post...

 

We already have BoS, to create the amount of aircraft maps etc. from original IL-2 1946 to the same fidelity and graphics of BoS

 

Well just do the maths and time element needed, and the cost simply makes it prohibitive..especially if it were just as a "stopgap"

 

Cheers Dakpilot

If the tradeoff is fidelity and graphics for gameplay and breadth, I'll take the latter. And gameplay can still be programmed on modern computers. When VGA first came out there were the WOW eye candy games, but that didn't stop games like EAW and the Falcon series from being developed also. Nothing has changed since then. Same market. Remember "Enter the Game Boy, the death of PC gaming!" Didn't happen, and that was 25 years ago. A "new age" is always being declared, yet nothing really changes at all in the fundamentals of great game design.

 

I'm not seeing anything here that has made me think of uninstalling IL-2 1946 or CFS3/ETO. Sorry.

[=LD=Hethwill]

IL2 46 still boasts great campaign design. Remember graphics are not everything. IIRC both games IL-2 1946 and Mount&Blade both share same degree of graphics but hell they have such appeal and lego-like modability and design openness that they never ever get old.

[dburne]

I'm not seeing anything here that has made me think of uninstalling IL-2 1946 or CFS3/ETO. Sorry.

 

Hmm, just did a search on CFS3/ETO, interesting I may have to check that out - I have  CFS3 laying around here somewhere...

Edited November 7, 2014 by dburnette

[Chuck_Owl]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vaC8WKd6AY

 

(Nostalgic sigh)

[sturmkraehe]

I agree that would all be ideal.  Unfortunately I don't see that happening.  The engine driving BoS/RoF won't handle huge online games.  It's unfortunate but it simply won't.  I think you may not see more than 30-40 handled unless they do some kind of miraculous overhaul.

 

The campaign likely won't change (perhaps eventually the unlocks will disappear) but we can hope with the FMB that some energized fans create third-party campaign systems, or simply create some campaign mission series.

 

I do suspect we'll see plenty of planes and maps (and I'm hoping third party maps will be encouraged as well).  It's a good sim but I think the engine is a limitation on the grand-scale some people would like to see.

 

Do we know the reason for this limitation? Is it a memory issue or cpu or gpu?

 

 

Some of you forget what il2 fb was like at the start. If you could get the game to even start you were lucky. If it didn't randomly break you were lucky. It took a good few years for it to mature. We got allot for free, no other game that I can remember got so much free content.

 

BOS on launch day was more reliable than il2fb 2 years after release.

 

 

 

Oh yes, I remember. I always thought this was very very generous. So many planes and maps and stuff for nothing. I think nobody serious can really complain about the content of il2.

Edited November 7, 2014 by sturmkraehe

[AndyHill]

Do we know the reason for this limitation? Is it a memory issue or cpu or gpu?

At least partially this is about one of the interesting trade offs of the developers' approach to game design. Unlike most other simulators, the AI units actually use the same flight model as player flown aircraft, which makes the game rather heavy on the CPU but also provides a definite upside in the form of a level playing field. Since the AI flies the high-fidelity flight modeling it also provides possibilities for clever AI modeling - like for example making realistic mistakes at the edge of flight envelope. Also I think the physics modeling for all units is quite complex compared to many other simulators, which might make the game more demanding to hardware.

 

This is basically a design decision between modeling large scale conflicts at a less accurate level or small scale battles with a high level of detail and I think both have their places. Also remember that the original Il-2 started relatively small scale as well and only grew into bigger and bigger battles as online bandwidth and increasing computing power allowed it to. CPU development has pretty much stagnated since a few years ago, but at least BoS is pretty good at taking advantage of modern CPUs (calculating accurate flight models for AI units can be done very effectively by multi-core CPUs).

 

I don't really know how much room for actual optimization there is, but basically BoS (RoF) is pretty hard on the hardware and generally not suited for large scale battles, but there's a pretty good reason for it.

[LLv34_Untamo]

There are still campaigns going on in il-1946 Hsfx 7.3

 

We fly them every weekend Sunday . 80 players you should look into it , people get sweaty palms flying . its that intense....lol

 

+1 .. SEOW campaigns, the best fun I've had in flight sims. And still having

[[KWN]T-oddball]

At least partially this is about one of the interesting trade offs of the developers' approach to game design. Unlike most other simulators, the AI units actually use the same flight model as player flown aircraft, which makes the game rather heavy on the CPU but also provides a definite upside in the form of a level playing field. Since the AI flies the high-fidelity flight modeling it also provides possibilities for clever AI modeling - like for example making realistic mistakes at the edge of flight envelope. Also I think the physics modeling for all units is quite complex compared to many other simulators, which might make the game more demanding to hardware.

 

This is basically a design decision between modeling large scale conflicts at a less accurate level or small scale battles with a high level of detail and I think both have their places. Also remember that the original Il-2 started relatively small scale as well and only grew into bigger and bigger battles as online bandwidth and increasing computing power allowed it to. CPU development has pretty much stagnated since a few years ago, but at least BoS is pretty good at taking advantage of modern CPUs (calculating accurate flight models for AI units can be done very effectively by multi-core CPUs).

 

I don't really know how much room for actual optimization there is, but basically BoS (RoF) is pretty hard on the hardware and generally not suited for large scale battles, but there's a pretty good reason for it.

 

back when IL2 came out you had an issue of the code being able to do more than the hardware could deal with and as the hardware advanced the performance and possibilities increased, however we are now in the exact opposite position, the software cannot fully utilize the power available to them in the form of our multi-cores, single thread and IPC performance  are still very much the deciding factor in performance of games.

 

If the BoS engine was in a state of full paralilization, then the performance would be directly related to clock + cores=? take my 2500k @3.3 it would run at an effective speed of 13.2GHz.

 

here is some very dry reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing

 

 

The speedup of a program using multiple processors in parallel computing is limited by the time needed for the sequential fraction of the program. For example, if a program needs 20 hours using a single processor core, and a particular portion of the program which takes one hour to execute cannot be parallelized, while the remaining 19 hours (95%) of execution time can be parallelized, then regardless of how many processors are devoted to a parallelized execution of this program, the minimum execution time cannot be less than that critical one hour. Hence the speedup is limited to at most 20×

Edited November 8, 2014 by T-oddball

[AndyHill]

Well that's one of the benefits of the RoF/BoS approach, actually. What makes these games so heavy on the hardware (calculating advanced flight model for AI) is very suitable work for multi-core CPUs, since there are few dependencies to other things going on in the game at the same time. Of course there will probably be some kind of a bottleneck in the main loop, but at least when I was doing some tests with RoF the game showed remarkable scaling in multi-CPU environments, better than any other game I've tried. 

 

So a state of full parallelization probably doesn't exist, but BoS actually can (at least RoF could) offload a notable portion of its CPU load to the extra CPUs unlike most other games around today. 

[BlitzPig_EL]

 

The old girl still looks pretty good really.  I made this shot earlier today...

[[KWN]T-oddball]

 

The old girl still looks pretty good really.  I made this shot earlier today...

 

May 1940 – Three He-100 reach Japan at Kasumigaura, one to IJN and two the Army. (Type A-0 Section II aircraft)

 

nice screen shot, I still wonder how much the 100D influenced the 61

[Bearcat]

Some of you forget what il2 fb was like at the start. If you could get the game to even start you were lucky. If it didn't randomly break you were lucky. It took a good few years for it to mature. We got allot for free, no other game that I can remember got so much free content.

 

BOS on launch day was more reliable than il2fb 2 years after release.

 

 

+1

[Dakpilot]

I believe IL-2 on launch was 16 max on MP, another thing that RoF/BoS game engine does slightly differently is how it handles tree collision, I have not a clue how this effects CPU loads but every tree/bush on a large map handled in this way must have some effect due to other game engines being unable to produce this feature without massive FPS problems

 

Whether having Realistic AI FM and collidable  Trees is enough of a payoff for smaller sized "battles" is a personal choice, however to me it is better to have these feature in the engine and wait for tech to catch up than remain in the past and simply leave them out

 

The initial test with the 130 person MP server produced some mixed results but showed great promise for what could be possible in the near future with optimisations on current hardware 

 

There is no reason to suppose that DN engine cannot follow the improvements that happened over time with original IL-2 engine, many features that are now available with IL-2 4.12/13 were said to be impossible to incorporate into that engine not so very long ago

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[Bearcat]

I believe IL-2 on launch was 16 max on MP, another thing that RoF/BoS game engine does slightly differently is how it handles tree collision, I have not a clue how this effects CPU loads but every tree/bush on a large map handled in this way must have some effect due to other game engines being unable to produce this feature without massive FPS problems

 

Whether having Realistic AI FM and collidable  Trees is enough of a payoff for smaller sized "battles" is a personal choice, however to me it is better to have these feature in the engine and wait for tech to catch up than remain in the past and simply leave them out

 

The initial test with the 130 person MP server produced some mixed results but showed great promise for what could be possible in the near future with optimisations on current hardware 

 

There is no reason to suppose that DN engine cannot follow the improvements that happened over time with original IL-2 engine, many features that are now available with IL-2 4.12/13 were said to be impossible to incorporate into that engine not so very long ago

 

Cheers Dakpilot

 

 Could not have said it better.. that is why I am in wait and see mode. It isn't like I do not have other options to keep me busy at the moment and even the offline BoS QMs are good for what I want.

 

well for me 1946 are good memories of gamming and modding, but for me

it a thing of the past, simple FM/DM, outdated graphics, dull scenary.

 

just let it go, it gave us a lot of fun, but it is time to bury it

and move on 

 

For you... I also think that the FM DM of IL2 was anything but simple.

[Rolling_Thunder]

Some of you forget what il2 fb was like at the start. If you could get the game to even start you were lucky. If it didn't randomly break you were lucky. It took a good few years for it to mature. We got allot for free, no other game that I can remember got so much free content.

 

BOS on launch day was more reliable than il2fb 2 years after release.

 

 

+1

Yeah and this is now the 21st century. This game has been released without the basic tools. I fail to see what relevance the state of il2 fb at release has to do with this game. I fail to understand the folk who continue to use that argument. il2 fb is over 10 years old. This game was released with the il2 name but has failed to implement some of the basic content that made the original so popular in our niche, which along with the arguments I've quoted, is just bewildering.

[SOLIDKREATE]

I still play. I'm hosting a Battle of Britain dogfight tomorrow at 3:00PM PST (-8GMT). I made 36 skins for the Bf-109E-4. I made all of the Stab III./JG54 (white chevrons), 9./JG54 (gelbe 1 - 16) and 9./JG26 (gelbe 1 - 16). I plan on making JG52 someday. It will be 36 109's about 32 Stukas and 24 He-111's all headed to Ramsgate. Then for the aggressors I will have 12 Spitfire's and 40 Hurricane's defending. It will be glorious!

 

Here's one of the JG26 skins. I just uploaded them all to Mission for Today. The 9./JG54 skins are already there.

 

[CAUTION OPENING: Hakenkruze is visible]

 

 

Edited November 29, 2014 by SPEKTRE76