Infantry

[PatrickAWlson]

With FC coming up I am revisiting this topic.  WWI was not a mobile war.  Mechanized transportation was in its infancy and not at all common.  That means one of two things - either we get some non mechanized ground units or we are limited to strictly air to air.  Since WWII was also not nearly as mechanized as modern warfare, any additions made for FC would also be very nice to have for BoX as well.

 

Infantry: Each unit is a 10 man section.  Various damage levels cause men to disappear - no need for bodies on the ground.  Infantry moves and fires rifles at a relatively low rate of fire.  WWII Infantry is modeled with some level of anti tank capability.  Maybe model a couple of panzerfausts or sticky mines or molotov cocktail charges per unit to prevent them from being helpless in the face of tanks.

 

Wagons: Wagons have two damage states, OK and destroyed.  No need to make it too fancy.  A destroyed wagon can show the ruined wagon with a couple of dead horses.  

 

Note that these were already done as mods for RoF.  Limitations made them not ideal, but they were still a very welcome addition.  

 

The above is in the context of the air simulators and not Tanks.  IMHO for Tanks infantry is not only necessary but has to be modeled at a much higher degree of fidelity ... but that is MHO.  For air sims such modeling is IMHO a waste and probably an unnecessary drain on CPU.

 

[Field-Ops]

Since the air sim is in the same environment as the tanks the team may as well go with the more detailed infantry instead of build two different assets. Even though one might be easier its still development time and it seems Jason is all about making things efficient. Now they did mention tank crew animations in the last DD and how the long work for those animations can lead to other projects. I have a feeling some minor infantry is in the pipeline somewhere. They might focus on entrenched infantry rather than infantry that is mobile but at least it will be something for the tank crew environment that directly (or indirectly, depending on how you look at things) feeds into content for the air environment.

[danielprates]

Panzer Elite had a very crude graphic for infantry squads, but it was there and it made all the difference for making the game feel like a true combined arms experience. So did Steel Fury Kharkov (those two games are the best tank sims I've seem so far and I have every hope TC will surpass them).

 

I would think it is better to have infantry squads, even not-too-goodlooking ones, than none.

Edited January 28, 2019 by danielprates

[CrazyDuck]

I remember infantry and horse drawn wagons modeled 20 years ago in the venerable Jane's WW2 Fighters. Wouldn't mind such a solution here at all.

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

Infantry - yes , sure especially for FC but then what with flat trenches ? 

[ShamrockOneFive]

I really like this idea. We've seen infantry in DCS World too and I think, with some time, it can be done. I'm a bit hopeful right now because they seem to have hired an animator and while that person is busy building animations for tank crew now... who knows, maybe it will lead to something like this. I don't think this feature needs to go over the top either and I think what Pat's proposed is a workable option.

2 hours ago, 307_Tomcat said:

Infantry - yes , sure especially for FC but then what with flat trenches ? 

 

How do you know we're getting flat trenches in Flying Circus? I have high hopes for Ugra and 1CGS to pull some pretty cool stuff off this time!

[[CPT]milopugdog]

If we're talking about some ground units we'd like so see, can I ask for some vehicle towed field guns?

[PatrickAWlson]

4 hours ago, Field-Ops said:

Since the air sim is in the same environment as the tanks the team may as well go with the more detailed infantry instead of build two different assets. Even though one might be easier its still development time and it seems Jason is all about making things efficient. Now they did mention tank crew animations in the last DD and how the long work for those animations can lead to other projects. I have a feeling some minor infantry is in the pipeline somewhere. They might focus on entrenched infantry rather than infantry that is mobile but at least it will be something for the tank crew environment that directly (or indirectly, depending on how you look at things) feeds into content for the air environment.

 

I think they are fundamentally different.  From a plane you are looking for groups.  On the ground you are looking for individuals (especially ones with anti tank weapons).  Seeing a massed bunch of ten guys from the air is fine.  Seeing that from a tank at 50 meters would IMHO be sort of butt ugly.   Hey, if they could model individual infantrymen each with independent AI without turning the game into a slide show then great, make detailed infantry for both.  I just question whether that is possible.

[blitze]

Well they have people in game so why not.

 

Then there is Red Orchestra 2 (great for inf fighting WW2 game)  The original one had tanks in it which was fun but no way would they be near the same fidelity of what we will see here.  Still remember fun tank battles though. ??

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

7 hours ago, ShamrockOneFive said:

I really like this idea. We've seen infantry in DCS World too and I think, with some time, it can be done. I'm a bit hopeful right now because they seem to have hired an animator and while that person is busy building animations for tank crew now... who knows, maybe it will lead to something like this. I don't think this feature needs to go over the top either and I think what Pat's proposed is a workable option.

 

How do you know we're getting flat trenches in Flying Circus? I have high hopes for Ugra and 1CGS to pull some pretty cool stuff off this time!

I hope I'm wrong , but if height map mesh is only 16 times more precise in TC and according to my calculations this is not enough to have 1 meter high ground structures. FC map will be not in TC fidelity but Bodenplate so chances are even smaller. This is just my speculation. IMHO flat trenches textures were good in 2009 but ten years letter I would love to have them made in 3D.

6 hours ago, PatrickAWlson said:

 

I think they are fundamentally different.  From a plane you are looking for groups.  On the ground you are looking for individuals (especially ones with anti tank weapons).  Seeing a massed bunch of ten guys from the air is fine.  Seeing that from a tank at 50 meters would IMHO be sort of butt ugly.   Hey, if they could model individual infantrymen each with independent AI without turning the game into a slide show then great, make detailed infantry for both.  I just question whether that is possible.

I don't think group is good idea ,  yesterday I was flying FC  at Jasta5 server,  was circling above aerodrome and  looking at individual soldiers , would be great to have them as real units , group would break immersion IMHO.

Edited January 28, 2019 by 307_Tomcat

[E4GLEyE]

reflecting on DCS infantry, there many times the units just slide without walk animation, and only have the above mentioned either alive or flat on ground dead states. with the combined arms ... It's really is a hit or miss scenario... They are there but not very immersive... In IL2 the runaway soldiers from destroyed stuff is already better modeles, they just can't be mowed down with MG fire (sadly)

[Heckpupper]

Oh man I'd love to see infantry and footmobiles in general properly implemented.

The lack of properly reacting and numeric footmobiles on the ground is the major reason why I find ground attack to be boring and not very immersive.

Having decent amounts of soldiers and civilians scattering and ducking as you come in for a gun run would elevate those type of engagements to another level, both in WWI and WWII scenarios.

 

Oh yeah, and gore. I'd love gore.

[IckyATLAS]

54 minutes ago, 4./JG26_Onebad said:

Oh man I'd love to see infantry and footmobiles in general properly implemented.

The lack of properly reacting and numeric footmobiles on the ground is the major reason why I find ground attack to be boring and not very immersive.

Having decent amounts of soldiers and civilians scattering and ducking as you come in for a gun run would elevate those type of engagements to another level, both in WWI and WWII scenarios.

 

Oh yeah, and gore. I'd love gore.

I do agree in general except about the "gore" side of it. Fundamentally war is gory indeed and I would not be against it, but things like blood splattered around in the cockpit, body parts due to explosions, burning bodies etc. would probably change the classification of the game into something like 16+. Regulations in various countries can make things even more complicated.

I have the feeling that Jason wants the game open to all ages. But already having people running around and just falling flat on the ground should be acceptable without gory details.

There is a fundamental fact nobody can escape, Il2 is a war and combat simulation, and this means also that making it too clean just makes it unrealistic.

Edited January 28, 2019 by IckyATLAS

[Heckpupper]

9 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

 Fundamentally war is gory indeed and I would not be against it, but things like blood splattered around in the cockpit, body parts due to explosions, burning bodies etc. would probably change the classification of the game into something like 16+. Regulations in various countries can make things even more complicated.

I have the feeling that Jason wants the game open to all ages.

 

Cmon bruh 95% of flight simmers are adults anyway. That wouldn't change at all how the game sells because it isn't marketed at teenagers in the first place. And few juvies that play Il-2 buy it from online stores anyway so the game classification doesn't matter.

What is Eastern Front without piles of buring bodies like in "Come and See"?

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

41 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

I do agree in general except about the "gore" side of it. Fundamentally war is gory indeed and I would not be against it, but things like blood splattered around in the cockpit, body parts due to explosions, burning bodies etc. would probably change the classification of the game into something like 16+. Regulations in various countries can make things even more complicated.

I have the feeling that Jason wants the game open to all ages. But already having people running around and just falling flat on the ground should be acceptable without gory details.

There is a fundamental fact nobody can escape, Il2 is a war and combat simulation, and this means also that making it too clean just makes it unrealistic.

 Age restriction is just illusion, who do not remember playing games with blood when in teens. I do remember Mortal Kombat , Cannon Fodder etc . Besides who under 16 plays this game and who will stop kid under 16 to do  it anyway, when there are almost all AAA titles with blood . BTW movies, books about war and  full of true horrors do discouraged ppl to make wars not one which isolates it from it .

[COVIDCowboy]

44 minutes ago, 4./JG26_Onebad said:

What is Eastern Front without piles of buring bodies like in "Come and See"?

 

 

"Come and See" probably isn't a good representation of the air war, even over the eastern front. There was still some civility and sense of chivalry left among pilots that didn't exist for those on the ground. 

[dburne]

9 minutes ago, 307_Tomcat said:

 Age restriction is just illusion, who do not remember playing games with blood when in teens. I do remember Mortal Kombat , Cannon Fodder etc . Besides who under 16 plays this game and who will stop kid under 16 to do  it anyway, when there are almost all AAA titles with blood . BTW movies, books about war and  full of true horrors do discouraged ppl to make wars not one which isolates it from it .

 

Lol when I was in my teens, all games were played outside. Unless it was raining, then we had board games to play inside.

[Ehret]

7 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

There is a fundamental fact nobody can escape, Il2 is a war and combat simulation, and this means also that making it too clean just makes it unrealistic.

 

It's fairly realistic - usually pilots couldn't see details of killing. Canopy, smoke and fire obscured it and once a pilot was incapacitated it ended in fiery fireball on the ground.

 

Strafing pilots in chutes and ground targets like horses, cows and peasants would be graphic, indeed.

[PatrickAWlson]

8 hours ago, 307_Tomcat said:

I don't think group is good idea ,  yesterday I was flying FC  at Jasta5 server,  was circling above aerodrome and  looking at individual soldiers , would be great to have them as real units , group would break immersion IMHO.

 

That is the ideal.  What I am unsure of is that individual soldiers could be modeled that way and introduced in their hundreds on the battlefield without annihilating performance.  That would be a dev call.

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

2 hours ago, dburne said:

 

Lol when I was in my teens, all games were played outside. Unless it was raining, then we had board games to play inside.

 

Feel sorry for you , I had both form two worlds  of entertainment , physical - after hours  of playing soccer with friends we would meet up again and play/compete together in video games  

What's terrifying that our old fields are empty now, today's kids prefer to stay at homes...

Edited January 28, 2019 by 307_Tomcat

[dburne]

1 hour ago, 307_Tomcat said:

 

Feel sorry for you , I had both form two worlds  of entertainment , physical - after hours  of playing soccer with friends we would meet up again and play/compete together in video games  

What's terrifying that our old fields are empty now, today's kids prefer to stay at homes...

 

Yeah that is not good imho, there was nothing like playing outside. When school was out, we were always outside all day.

 

My first video game was Pong, I was an adult and already beginning a career out on my own ugh.

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

1 hour ago, dburne said:

 

Yeah that is not good imho, there was nothing like playing outside. When school was out, we were always outside all day.

 

My first video game was Pong, I was an adult and already beginning a career out on my own ugh.

Good that there is never to late for play ?

[Brano]

Done as a mod for RoF 5+ years ago. Where is a problem to have it with 2019 upgraded game engine?

 

[KG_S_Kalle_Kalutz82]

@ Threadopener

 

Very nice idea indeed!

And you are not the only one, who wants it.

 

As there are vehicles, even with the Tank Crew it would make some difference in the immersion, not only for tank players than, but also for us ground-attackers.

Or anybody who is flying near a combat area.

 

Infantry squads dont have to be modelled absolutly amazing.

A blob like in Wargame Red Dragon or such games would fit.

We even own infantry, manning the AA guns right now.

Such infantry blobs would be amazing to hit with guns and cannons.

 

I hope nobody gets his morale out now, we kill and bomb since release ? ..........digital

[E4GLEyE]

10 hours ago, KG_S_Kalle_Kalutz82 said:

I hope nobody gets his morale out now, we kill and bomb since release ? ..........digital

hehe, as someone who does not shoot at parachutes my first thing was to try to gun down the fleeing gun emplacement soldiers... Just out... Of curiosity of course ? 

[Flashy]

+1 million

We absolutely need some kind of infantry for FC as Pat says, and I would argue that it is as high priority (if not higher) than anything else at this point. It was already a big problem with RoF and that was 10 years ago now. Luckily, Vander stepped up for RoF and made those infantry and wagon models, which helped a lot, and we definitely need something at least as good as that if FC is going to be any kind of meaningful evolution or improvement over RoF. Its not as much of an issue with BoX because your speeds are so much higher and there is no static front line, so you dont really notice the lack of ground troops as much as you do in WW1, but the front in WW1 was often about massed infantry (and later tanks) charges over a relatively small area with the air forces of both sides supporting the troops. I know we'll never be able to simulate anything close to the reality of what it was like, but we should at least have SOME representation of these kinds of events in game:

 

 

 

In terms of how to do it, the men who roam around airfields in BoX is a new feature and a pretty interesting one. They dont seem to be AI objects themselves and seem to be much more performance friendly than traditional objects, but its impossible to test right now because they only spawn around aerodrome structures that are "active"(linked entity with a coalition), and having many of these aerodrome structures seems to slow the game down a lot due to the engine having to render masses of fuel tanks or bunkers or whatever. If we could get an invisible aerodrome structure that just spawns the little soldiers but doesnt actually have a 3d model itself, then we could test just how performance heavy the actual soldiers are.  But maybe they could be a good solution - speed them up to running speed, give them the right animation and guns(not functional, just aesthetic), add some more randomness to their movements (which they seem to have already) and put like 100 of them in one "object" . Just like vander did with his soldiers mod, but on a much larger scale:

 

 

 

[sniperton]

On 1/28/2019 at 4:20 AM, PatrickAWlson said:

Hey, if they could model individual infantrymen each with independent AI without turning the game into a slide show then great, make detailed infantry for both.  I just question whether that is possible.

No need for an individual AI IMO. Look at this one, Medieval 2: Total War from 2007.

Infantrymen are organized into larger or smaller groups having a formation which can be set to anything between square or "horde", tight or loose. Each type of soldiers have a few animation sequences (idle, walk, run, shoot, fight, fall). Individuality is created by applying these sequences asynchronously. In WWI or WWII we don't need soldiers to physically interact with the enemy, we only need idle, walk, run, crawl, fire, fall, with the group proceeding from one set waypoint to another. Used on open terrain, such a group would take less CPU resources than a vehicle column in a village.

Edited January 30, 2019 by sniperton

[Flashy]

1 hour ago, sniperton said:

No need for an individual AI IMO. Look at this one, Medieval 2: Total War from 2007

 

 

As awesome as that is Sniperton, I dont think we will ever get anything as "advanced" as that for infantry. BoX has very complicated physics for aircraft FM's, and I just dont think there is much CPU processing power left for advanced infantry behaviour like that. I mean, Medieval Total war is solely dedicated to simulating massed infantry battles and doesnt have to do much else, but trying to lump that kind of thing on top of all the stuff that BoX is doing with physics and FM's will probably be impossible IMO. Dont get me wrong, having infantry behaviour (and numbers!) like that would be amazing, but just dont think its possible

Edited January 30, 2019 by Flashy

[PatrickAWlson]

@sniperton Nice.,  If somebody else has already figured it out, nothing wrong with a bit of borrowing  

 

[sniperton]

1 hour ago, Flashy said:

Dont get me wrong, having infantry behaviour (and numbers!) like that would be amazing, but just dont think its possible

I used to run large M2TW battles on a laptop with 2 Gigs of RAM and an 1.25 GHz CPU. I don't think we need thousands of soldiers in such complexity in BoX, we only need two or three different types of infantry platoons with very simple animations for the individual soldiers. My point with M2TW was that one and the same animation sequence can be used to the effect that soldiers in the platoon seem individual, while they are programmed (and in fact behave) as a single group. Now that the devs have a dedicated animation artist, they can give it a try and test how resource-heavy an infantry platoon would be when just marching and laying down when attacked.

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

I believe I saw infantry in DCS , which has advanced FM , correct ?

Besides group would be fine if you can kill separate soldier in it. That was not the case in ROF soldiers mods.

 

[Veteran66]

On 1/28/2019 at 10:41 PM, Brano said:

Done as a mod for RoF 5+ years ago. Where is a problem to have it with 2019 upgraded game engine?

 

 

Yes i realy like this Horse and soldier mod

[354thFG_Leifr]

It's a shame that BoX is too complex for such simple things. ?

Edited January 30, 2019 by Leifr

[BRADYS555]

I just read the latest news and I might be reading to much into it but, it would seam to me that they could add a first person shorter element to the game (sort of like Post Scriptum), so then you would have Tanks Planes and individual Players as well as infantry, How Cool would that be!

 

[E4GLEyE]

On ‎1‎/‎30‎/‎2019 at 4:45 PM, 307_Tomcat said:

I believe I saw infantry in DCS , which has advanced FM , correct ?

Besides group would be fine if you can kill separate soldier in it. That was not the case in ROF soldiers mods.

 

Yes DCS has them and they are fun to bomb or shoot up from a Huey... But not so much when on the ground with their (ED).... Tank mod the soldiers often jusd slide around ignoring incoming fire... That is no concern when you drop a GBU from Angels 20 but is immersion breaking close up. 

[Brano]

?

[E4GLEyE]

3 hours ago, Brano said:

?

WOW that looks good! The last time I saw them was a few patches back (got an old video as well somewhere) that is not really compareable to these ? II stand corrected

[Gambit21]

Clone Wars?