So just a question about the il-2 series in general

[TheJay13]

So there have been a lot of discussion ranging in civility as to the accuracy and OPness or UPness of certain aircraft. I am sure this post will turn into a huge [Edited] storm but I was simply curious. How accurate was the performance of aircraft in the old Il-2? Certainly there were some aircraft that were overperforming as I'm sure there were some that were performing as they should. I seem to remember hearing people complain about aircraft performance in 1946 (I never played it) and obviously no flight sim is going to be perfect. I guess I'm just a little baffled about how people trash this sim for having some problems but talk about the old Il-2 like it was Jesus Christ incarnate even though I remember hearing about its flaws? Further more why not just accept that the sim cant always be perfect and deal with it. If anything flying a disadvantaged airplane and being successful in it demonstrates pilot ability which is more important to air combat than actual aircraft performance.

Edited November 4, 2015 by Bearcat
Profanity

[von_Tom]

Probably best for the Other 1C Studio Games forum though your post strays from a question to a declaration.

 

Anyway, regarding old IL2 FMs a lot were as good as they could be, and some were just plain wrong.  But it holds a special place in my heart because it was, at the end of it all, and expansions, and modding the most enthralling game to play for well over a decade.

 

von Tom

[SvAF/F19_Klunk]

indeed

[TheJay13]

 

 

Probably best for the Other 1C Studio Games forum though your post strays from a question to a declaration.

 

Yeah it started as a question in my mind and then morphed into an observation but this mostly stemmed from the fact that every flight sim I have ever played has had problems but people usually just dealt with it and everyone didn't take turns taking swings at the developers for making a mistake. It kind of bothers me how silly people are becoming about all the FM discussions and is just leaving me with a bad impression of the community.

[von_Tom]

Maybe, but you'd have to back to the CLOD debacle to see the seeds of it.  Personally I don't want to go there.  Too toxic, too historic.

 

von Tom

[Sokol1]

...every flight sim I have ever played has had problems but people usually just dealt with it and everyone didn't take turns taking swings at the developers for making a mistake. It kind of bothers me how silly people are becoming about all the FM discussions and is just leaving me with a bad impression of the community.

 

Since you seen missing the "UbiZ00"  il-2 heydays since 2001 - to not touch the "Bananas'drama" (2011/12) - these endless il-2 "FM" discussions are not new, as are not in any flight game that involve Luftwaffe planes, see on DCS (WWII planes) the  "trim drama". 

 

And considering that the original "il-2 community" shrunk and split, things could be even worse. 

[[CPT]Pike*HarryM]

"Close that book, and never open it again."

[TheJay13]

 

 

Since you seen missing the "UbiZ00" il-2 heydays since 2001 - to not touch the "Bananas'drama" (2011/12) - these endless il-2 "FM" discussions are not new, as are not in any flight game that involve Luftwaffe planes, see on DCS (WWII planes) the "trim drama".

 

I'm now quite curious what UbZOO and the "Bananas" drama were.

 

I also read a post recently that pointed out that until Il-2 Forgotten Battles arrived, the Fw-190 was almost unflyable. Is this true? If so It kinda makes me thankful that BOS has a somewhat decent FW lol.

[BeastyBaiter]

I picked up the original IL2 when it was first released and played it up until shortly before the 1946 expansion. I've also played most serious CFS's since the early 1990's. My experience is flight modeling is always a contentious topic. In the original IL2 series, the Yaks were known to be immune to things like gravity early on. This was later corrected in future updates, but other planes were just as broken. The Fw-190A4 and A5, for example, could out turn just about anything (including Yak-1's) if you simply dropped the flaps. As a rabid Fw fan, I exploited the hell out of that though I was the first to admit it was totally unrealistic. With that said, the drag on the airframe was also outright silly. That plane simply could not dive or zoom climb and the slightest course correction resulted in flopping around at 250km/h no matter how fast you were previously going. Hence the flap trick was the only viable way to fly it.

 

The entire La-5/7 line was also a mess. Their performance wildly exceeded official Russian test documents. The official response from the dev team on it was "top secret documents" that no one could even verify the existence of, never mind the accuracy. So no, the old IL2 line was not the flight sim holy grail. It was the best WW2 sim of its day, but it was also the only WW2 sim of its day. It came out right at the start of the great flight sim crash of the early 2000's when all the flight sim companies went bust or started making more call of duty clones instead. IL2 and LOMAC were the sole survivors and their successors (IL2:BoS/BoM in name only tbh) are what we have today.

 

And in all that time with the IL2 series, I noticed something that persists up to the present on these forums. Those who love German planes and never fly anything else always complain about how they under perform or the others guys stuff over performs. The allied fanboys say the exact same thing, only reversed. Showing them official technical documents and highly structured in game tests that match the methods of those real world tests won't budge their opinions on it either. A fanboy will ignore any evidence placed before them. As said previously, I'm a rabid Fw-190 fan but I'm not a fanboy. I think the Fw here is modeled reasonably well. I will no doubt be flamed by a dozen people (or perhaps the same one a dozen times) for saying that.

 

If you hop over onto the DCS forums and look at the R-27 vs AIM-120 threads, you'll see the same arguments. One of the devs actually commented on it a while back. The Russian forum thinks the AIM-120 is over performing while the English forum thinks it's under performing. Obviously they can't both be right but it's entirely possible for both to be wrong.

[TheJay13]

I'm sure its a bit of a situataion of damned if you do, damned if you dont when it comes to modifying FM's or anything for that matter in a sim. It's probably a situation of someone always being angry no matter how correct it is. I actually am pretty certain that if you somehow made a sim that had 100% perfect flight models, people would still argue and complain that something is wrong.

 

I have basically decided to not care about FM's anymore and just work on becoming a better pilot and finding other good people to fly with. So long as you play smart and have some good wingmen backing you up, Ive found that you can basically be successful in a Stuka if you play your cards right lol. (hyperboly obviously)

[Trident_109]

"Close that book, and never open it again."

Ahhhhh... thank you for that laugh, HarryM.

[DD_Arthur]

"Spitfire made a wood?"

[BMA_FlyingShark]

Since you seen missing the "UbiZ00"  il-2 heydays since 2001 - to not touch the "Bananas'drama" (2011/12) - these endless il-2 "FM" discussions are not new, as are not in any flight game that involve Luftwaffe planes, see on DCS (WWII planes) the  "trim drama". 

 

And considering that the original "il-2 community" shrunk and split, things could be even worse. 

What exaclty is the "trim drama"?

 

[Finkeren]

In answer to the OP: For its time (when it first came out in 2001) IL-2 was pretty accurate for a combat flight sim and certainly no worse than for instance the MSCFS series, though not quite up there with contemporary civilian sims. By todays standards it's rather primitive and the FM certainly have some very peculiar quirks.

 

I think it's unfair to try to judge it by 2015 standards. It was awesome for its time and for many years continued to raise the bar for the genre.

[ShamrockOneFive]

What exaclty is the "trim drama"?

 

 

Early on in the IL-2 series certain pilots were using trim controls mapped to various controls on keyboards or joysticks to increase their turn rate. Trim doesn't work like that but the old IL-2 flight model enabled them to perform turns that were otherwise impossible. Eventually it was "solved". It was a big deal for a while

[Dakpilot]

​

 

Cheers Dakpilot​

​

[BMA_FlyingShark]

Thank you, Shamrock.

 

[Bearcat]

So there have been a lot of discussion ranging in civility as to the accuracy and OPness or UPness of certain aircraft. I am sure this post will turn into a huge [Edited] storm but I was simply curious. How accurate was the performance of aircraft in the old Il-2? Certainly there were some aircraft that were overperforming as I'm sure there were some that were performing as they should. I seem to remember hearing people complain about aircraft performance in 1946 (I never played it) and obviously no flight sim is going to be perfect. I guess I'm just a little baffled about how people trash this sim for having some problems but talk about the old Il-2 like it was Jesus Christ incarnate even though I remember hearing about its flaws? Further more why not just accept that the sim cant always be perfect and deal with it. If anything flying a disadvantaged airplane and being successful in it demonstrates pilot ability which is more important to air combat than actual aircraft performance.

 

I developed that attitude from IL2. I don't think any sim can get all the FMs spot on.. there are too many variables.. so I decided to take each sim as it's own universe.. and as long as the Fms were close ... 109s should not outdive Jugs.. Jugs should not out climb Zeros .. etc...  I was happy. The thuing that made IL2 great and allowed it to get it's firm footing was the fact that is was one of the few sims.. maybe the only one initially.. I don't know for sure.. but it was certainly for a time the main one where the FMs and DMs were not accessible. That meant that the 109 you were flying against on your PC was the same one that your live opponent was flying and the only thing different was the pilot and his awareness (aside from the AI being able to see through clouds) ... The AI flew the pl;anes almost perfectly... which got frustrating... but online you knew that your opponent did not have a modded up superplane...  That was a huge reason why IL2 was so successful... Also the implementation of multiplayer was very simple and very straight forward.. The biggest problem was making sure your router was set up right.. but you could host missions from a dedicated server.. or straight from your PC and configuring it was a matter of a few mouse clicks.... That was another thing that made IL2 what it was... The other thing was the FMB and the QMB... Both were relatively fully featured.. even though they had limitations there was enough there to create enough good user content in terms of missions... skins and such to provide fertile ground for the sim to continue to flourish. The graphics were different as well..not quite as cartoony and you got that sense of physics that in it's day was unequaled. I will never forget the first time I was stuck in my cockpit in a P-39 in a flat spin and could not eject because of the centrifugal force..  or the first time I saw that rolling pencil.. or the first tyime I shredded a planes rudder with my prop.. (that was subsequently removed) .. All that contributed to the success of IL2 and I still fly it to this day.

 

Yeah it started as a question in my mind and then morphed into an observation but this mostly stemmed from the fact that every flight sim I have ever played has had problems but people usually just dealt with it and everyone didn't take turns taking swings at the developers for making a mistake. It kind of bothers me how silly people are becoming about all the FM discussions and is just leaving me with a bad impression of the community.

 

This isn't new though.. Oleg used to come into ORR (Oleg's Ready Room) and sometimes he would get virtual shoes tossed at him..  or worse.. especially toward the end.. before the whole modding thing took off. That turned out a lot better than many thought it would. While there were some jerks.. and cheats.. For the most part the modding community just improved the sim immensely and the thinsg that many of us, myself included at one point worried about never came to pass as far as rampant cheating and FM/DM tweaking.. There was some.. but most were attempts at honest fixes (either real or percieved) and we always had the option to stick to stock...

 

Probably best for the Other 1C Studio Games forum though your post strays from a question to a declaration.

 

Anyway, regarding old IL2 FMs a lot were as good as they could be, and some were just plain wrong.  But it holds a special place in my heart because it was, at the end of it all, and expansions, and modding the most enthralling game to play for well over a decade.

 

von Tom

 

Maybe, but you'd have to back to the CLOD debacle to see the seeds of it.  Personally I don't want to go there.  Too toxic, too historic.

 

von Tom

 

I agree... I think BoS is coming along nicely though .........