Limitations of the game/engine

[=RS=Funkie]

Hi all, 

I want to explain the reasoning for my post, because I don't want it to sound like I'm trying to cause trouble.

 

I'm still relatively new to BoX, but I'm thoroughly addicted. I think about it very often while I'm working, and can't wait to put the kids to bed so I can put on my HMD and jump into a cockpit.

Playing in VR is great for my desire to role play, and get into the character of a pilot in WW2. So I'm somewhat driven by pseudo-realism, authenticity and immersion.

 

Through other bits I've been researching, I understand that there are some limitations to what this game engine is capable of, even compared to some of the older Il2 titles, particularly in regards to the amount of aircraft able to be simulated at once.

 

I do understand that the fidelity of the aircraft and quality of the graphics engine may be the limiting factor for this. But I have a few questions.

 

1) is there a hard limit on the amount of aircraft you can simulate simultaneously. Will that cause the game to crash, or just go sluggish? If the latter, will future PC technological advances increase this limit?

I'd love to one day be able to experience a historically accurate mass of bombers flying to their targets.

 

2) Obviously the emphasis in this game in on the air combat, and though there are many ground targets they don't seem to have the feel of a full scale Warzone (or do they? I don't know). How accurate are the ground defences? For example, do the flak crews simulate the various methods of coordinated flak defence, (computer controlled, barrage and hand targeted? Apologies, I don't know the terminology) and do they change depending on the technology available in the simulated years? 

 

3) My overall comprehension of the WW2 and it's air battles is definitely lacking, so I'm sure there are other things that have had to be cut from the game design for various time priority or performance reasons.

 

4) I was keen to fly over no man's land in Flying Circus. And it was quite an experience and certainly told the story about the sheer scale of the battlefront. But I did find that it felt a little flat, and lacking in depth and detail. Perhaps that's just what it looked like from an aerial perspective... I don't know...

 

It's there anything else I should be mindful of that can't be as reflective of the pilots actual WW2 experience?

 

Besides, you know, the pilot mindset, psychological scarring, cold, lack of sleep, plane maintenance etc.

 

Reading back over this post, I find it hard to see what my actual point or specific question is.

 

So I guess, to summarise; 

TLDR;

I noticed some limitations in the game, curious about why the limitations are there, are there active plans to overcome them? Is there anything else I should know about that is common knowledge which is not historically authentic.

 

Thanks,

 

 

[SJ_Butcher]

Every game has limitations, this one isn't the exception. You have finite resources and you should carefully picking on what you spend those resources. If we have hardware 100 times better than today then maybe you could achieve massive planes formations, etc. But that isn't the case, the humans haven't achieve a technological jump to allow that just yet, maybe in 20 years more you would be able to have massive planes formations fighting.

Edited April 21, 2020 by SJ_Butcher

[=RS=Funkie]

Thank you, yeah I do understand that. 

I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining, I'm not.

 

I'm just curious. And want to temper my expectations for future expansions and engine updates. 

 

 

[Nolly]

The game can handle formations of up to 20 bombers without imploding. Seeing as you can only shoot at one at a time, thats enough in my book.☺️

 

Re flak: they don't coordinate with each other, but they shoot at you pretty good on their own. Its up to the mission creator how good they are. Heavy flak at high setting can take down a 262 at 4k no problem, whereas at low he won't even notice. Again - more than good enough I think.

 

When you read on here you only see the negatives. But the game is clearly a pretty solid experience with a lot of flexibility. And the improvements keep coming.?

 

[Beazil]

To answer one point regarding the number of planes; this was something that came up at the beginning of this project and comes up from time to time every now and then.

This is not IL2 1946.  Completely different.  Much higher fidelity.  Much more demanding standards in development are needed for this project.  

[41Sqn_Skipper]

36 minutes ago, PhunkaeG said:

 

1) is there a hard limit on the amount of aircraft you can simulate simultaneously. Will that cause the game to crash, or just go sluggish? If the latter, will future PC technological advances increase this limit?

I'd love to one day be able to experience a historically accurate mass of bombers flying to their targets.

 

In theory there's a hard limit for sure ... I'd guess Int32.MaxValue (= 2,147,483,647) or when your PC runs OutOfMemory (which you could increase until you reach the limit of 64 Bit adressing or most likely a artificial limit of your OS).

 

In practice your CPU will be the bottleneck much earlier and will cause a slow down of your game up to the point where you will not accept it anymore and you quit. In this case 1 sec in game will take longer in real life, like slow motion. This is what happens on my 10 year old PC in large engagements.

But in 10 years CPUs will be faster and more planes will be possible without slow down.

 

[=RS=Funkie]

1 minute ago, 41Sqn_Banks said:

In practice your CPU will be the bottleneck much earlier and will cause a slow down of your game up to the point where you will not accept it anymore and you quit. In this case 1 sec in game will take longer in real life, like slow motion. This is what happens on my 10 year old PC in large engagements.

But in 10 years CPUs will be faster and more planes will be possible without slow down.

This is what I assumed to be the case.

Thanks for the reply

2 minutes ago, JG51_Beazil said:

This is not IL2 1946.  Completely different.  Much higher fidelity.  Much more demanding standards in development are needed for this project.  

 

Yep, that's understandable.

 

As you say, this must come up from time to time. And I guess the main reason is that people like me see the Il-2 series, and just assume that each iteration will improve on all aspects of the previous. Almost like BoX is more of a Il-2:1947 Redux.

 

I know that's not the case, but it's not easy to see from outside that there are those design choices and compromises made between the series iterations

24 minutes ago, -RS-Nolly said:

The game can handle formations of up to 20 bombers without imploding. Seeing as you can only shoot at one at a time, thats enough in my book.☺️

 

Re flak: they don't coordinate with each other, but they shoot at you pretty good on their own. Its up to the mission creator how good they are. Heavy flak at high setting can take down a 262 at 4k no problem, whereas at low he won't even notice. Again - more than good enough I think.

 

When you read on here you only see the negatives. But the game is clearly a pretty solid experience with a lot of flexibility. And the improvements keep coming.?

 

These are all good points, thanks for taking the time to respond!

 

[41Sqn_Skipper]

 

[Beazil]

I had typed all this out the first time explaining it all lol.

Cliffs of Dover is not IL 2 1946, part deux but in some ways it is closer than Great Battles is/was.

I know I'm doing a piss poor job explaining which is why I shut up the first time.  1946 in all its iterations was a major milestone for computer simmers.  And of course we want more more more but bigger better newer faster.  It encouraged development of higher fidelity sims such as Cliffs of Dover.  But Cliffs required a new engine for the same reasons as this simulation.  

This product evolved from Rise of Flight.  The developer had an opportunity to "pick up the ball" in the series by developing IL2 Battle of Stalingrad, and has run with it ever since.   I don't think any reasonable person would say they have done a bad job of it.   Quite the opposite I think.

 

 

Edited April 21, 2020 by JG51_Beazil

[=RS=Funkie]

4 minutes ago, JG51_Beazil said:

I had typed all this out the first time explaining it all lol.

Cliffs of Dover is not IL 2 1946, part deux but in some ways it is closer than Great Battles is/was.

I know I'm doing a piss poor job explaining which is why I shut up the first time.  1946 in all its iterations was a major milestone for computer simmers.  And of course we want more more more but bigger better newer faster.  It encouraged development of higher fidelity sims such as Cliffs of Dover.  But Cliffs required a new engine for the same reasons as this simulation.  

This product evolved from Wings of Flight.  The developer had an opportunity to "pick up the ball" in the series by developing IL2 Battle of Stalingrad, and has run with it ever since.   I don't think any reasonable person would say they have done a bad job of it.   Quite the opposite I think.

Oh! I also agree with you entirely! They've done an amazing job. Thus my current obsession with it, and I appreciate the massive amount of work put into it.
Which is why i was being so careful not to be critical of the game. Moreso, just wanting to discuss the currently known limitations, as there really isn't any single repository of knowledge about that (that I can easily find)
 

 

17 minutes ago, 41Sqn_Banks said:

 

Aha! I'm going to have to give this a go! 
 

[Beazil]

No worries Banks.  You expressed yourself well.  It was a legit question.  Think of great battles as being a bit further down the rabbit hole of simulation than '46.  

Edited April 21, 2020 by JG51_Beazil

[Lusekofte]

5 hours ago, PhunkaeG said:

Playing in VR is great for my desire to role play, and get into the character of a pilot in WW2. So I'm somewhat driven by pseudo-realism, authenticity and immersion.

You had me on this. This is important to me. Flying in a environment I can feel a part of and believe. 
This is difficult with current ai and harder to achieve online. 
what I understand about number limitation concerning ai  is that they are taking a slot the same way as a human. The ai fly a plane with same limitation as we do and take recourses like we do. If it is multicrew well then they take more of it.

old IL 2 could take a lot of planes, when all dropped bombs you could get slow motion because of all the new things happening but ai fid not take resources in the same way 

[blitze]

AI in Il2 Great Battles series uses the same flight and damage models human pilots do.  It is more computational heavy than Il2 46 was where AI used a simplified model.  The current engine can put up a reasonable number of planes in career mode with Frontline Density set to Dense.

 

The Engine is showing it's age in today's computing environment with multi core CPU's with hyper threading/SMT enabled.  The average new gaming CPU is 8core with 16 threads which is quite good and this will be the standard going forward with consoles in the near future.  I am sure this Il2 series will be worked to take advantage of such down the track especially with the engine move to DX Ultimate or Vulcan.

 

In its current guise, in career I have had flights with 5 or so flights joining the fray and for me, that is more than enough to be overwhelmed.  Imagine double the size, it would be a circus of chaos. ?

 

VR is great btw.

[SharpeXB]

11 hours ago, PhunkaeG said:

 

It's there anything else I should be mindful of that can't be as reflective of the pilots actual WW2 experience?

 

Besides, you know, the pilot mindset, psychological scarring, cold, lack of sleep, plane maintenance etc.

Yes this aspect is easy to simulate. Just stay up for days on end without sleep playing IL-2. ?

 

Actually if you notice the physiology effect your pilot will get tired and black out easier with continued stress and maneuvering. 

[=RS=Funkie]

11 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Actually if you notice the physiology effect your pilot will get tired and black out easier with continued stress and maneuvering. 

Wait, really? 
Per mission the pilot is worn down when flown in a more stressful way? Thats really cool.

 

[ShamrockOneFive]

2 hours ago, PhunkaeG said:

Wait, really? 
Per mission the pilot is worn down when flown in a more stressful way? Thats really cool.

 

 

It's not persistent across missions but it is within the mission. Do some really hard maneuvering and the next maneuver might have more blackout happening more quickly as they get tired. The team used actual physiological data studies on the effects of G forces on humans to build their model for this which I think is super cool.

[=RS=Funkie]

3 minutes ago, ShamrockOneFive said:

 

It's not persistent across missions but it is within the mission. Do some really hard maneuvering and the next maneuver might have more blackout happening more quickly as they get tired. The team used actual physiological data studies on the effects of G forces on humans to build their model for this which I think is super cool.

That explains a lot, I had just assumed the physiological effects were reset once the obvious symptoms went away. 

 

I agree, that is super cool.

[Gretsch_Man]

5 hours ago, PhunkaeG said:

That explains a lot, I had just assumed the physiological effects were reset once the obvious symptoms went away. 

 

I agree, that is super cool.

Not to mention that the AI pilots can blackout just as you as the player can. You can even achieve kills this way by forcing an enemy AI pilot to take such hard manoeuvres that he will actually pass out. At low altitudes he might then hit the ground. I've seen this happening.

 

Oh, and welcome to the (indeed very addictive) VR club! 

[Lusekofte]

I had a Hs 129 to blackout in qmb just by missing. He violently tried to get away and stalled fainted and went 2 k inverted to the ground. 
If you use pursuit instead of face to face I find ai behave more realistic in qmb for some reason. 
before a couple of patches you easily got the ai to blackout. It is not that common anymore

[PatrickAWlson]

@PhunkaeG IL2 is very CPU bound, much more so than many games that are more GPU bound.  I just bought a pretty top end machine 9900k processor, 2000ti GPU) and I can get 15-20 AI driven planes flying without a problem.  It is, however, highly variable.

 

Bombers: the more gunners the higher the CPU load

AI pilots consume much more CPU than human pilots

Ground units: Also consume some CPU but not nearly as much as planes

 

So the limit depends on how many bombers, how many ground units, how many human vs AI, and the equipment it's running on.

[Gambit21]

On 4/23/2020 at 6:38 AM, PatrickAWlson said:

@PhunkaeG IL2 is very CPU bound, much more so than many games that are more GPU bound.  I just bought a pretty top end machine 9900k processor, 2000ti GPU) and I can get 15-20 AI driven planes flying without a problem.  It is, however, highly variable.

 

That’s what I get with my Ryzen 1700 btw - more than that even.

 

In certain circumstances there's a mission entity/AI “wall” and beyond it CPU/GPU makes little if any difference. 

Edit: Where that "wall" is, is variable like you say  and 'seems' somewhat map dependent. For instance I'm seemingly getting away with much less on the Rhineland map than I was on the Kuban map. Seemingly that is, I have't done any straight across logic cut and paste tests.

 

20+ aircraft however was no problem for me even 18 months ago on the Kuban with the Rhyzen, and even before that on the Moscow map with my i5 2500k.

This is a big reason why I'm not spending money on a new system at this juncture. 

 

Also depends on what those AI aircraft are doing I can have 16 P-47's vs 16 German Fighters at altitude no problem. 32 aircraft no sweat on my Ryzen 1700.

On the other hand just a few aircraft activating guns/searchlights down low or engaging ground attack logic we start to see the game engine slow down with the Rhineland map. So highly variable and dependent on type of AI units present/active, and seemingly which map. 

 

 

Edited April 25, 2020 by Gambit21