P-38 fuel transfer

[flukesofhazard]

I’m not sure if I’m posting this in the right spot, so let me know if I need to move the thread. It’s been a long time since I posted on the forum. 
 

I’m having two distinct issues that I can’t seem to figure out. The first is how to select fuel tanks and transfer fuel after taking damage and developing a fuel leak. I don’t get any indications in techno chat that the default key bindings for this are doing anything and I’ve had it bite me in the butt trying to return across the channel after taking damage and running out of fuel because I couldn’t isolate the leak. Nothing in the cockpit moves when trying to switch tanks and select pumps using the default key binds. Is this a bug or is fuel transfer just not modeled? Or am I simply missing another manual mode I need to be in to do this?

 

The other issue I am encountering is my wingmen don’t follow me when we are on patrol in the patrol area. They wont descent through cloud cover or reform on me if I’m a couple thousand feet below them, even when the range is such that they should be able to see me. They sometimes also choose to fly home without orders, leaving me to try to fight 4v1 the hard way sometimes. I don’t recall this ever having been an issue before. I do have the follow me command bound to my stick but not the rejoin formation command. 
 

last but not least, and not terribly important is my f2 external camera doesn’t work anymore and I have no idea why or how to fix it. It just randomly stopped working one day, along with all the other view buttons except f12 and f1. Techno chat also sometimes switches off and wont come back on if I play the game for too long in one sitting without rebooting, usually about 2 campaign missions. 
 

thanks for any tips you guys have!

[Chief_Mouser]

Selecting fuel tanks and transfer - no, you can't do it. This was something that had been promised for a long time with the introduction of drop tanks, but now appears to be abandoned, certainly for the foreseeable future, if not for good. The controls appear in the Key bindings but have never worked; it's never been implemented, even in a very basic form. It was in the beta-test version for a short while, maybe six months or more since it vanished.

[flukesofhazard]

44 minutes ago, Chief_Mouser said:

Selecting fuel tanks and transfer - no, you can't do it. This was something that had been promised for a long time with the introduction of drop tanks, but now appears to be abandoned, certainly for the foreseeable future, if not for good. The controls appear in the Key bindings but have never worked; it's never been implemented, even in a very basic form. It was in the beta-test version for a short while, maybe six months or more since it vanished.

That blows. Fuel transfer is such a critical part of damage control for any aircraft. Guess they didn’t like planes being able to contain fuel leaks and make it home. 

[LukeFF]

2 hours ago, flukesofhazard said:

Guess they didn’t like planes being able to contain fuel leaks and make it home. 

 

LOL no, it was because there were issues at the time it was tested that were going to take far more time to fix than was originally planned. It happens.

[flukesofhazard]

On 12/31/2022 at 2:13 PM, LukeFF said:

 

LOL no, it was because there were issues at the time it was tested that were going to take far more time to fix than was originally planned. It happens.

Still seems like a cop out from the devs to me. Dcs can do it. They took the time to completely rewrite the game engine code and the ai behavior code. Seems to me like the il2 devs just looked at it and went “nope we don’t want to do that much work”

[CountZero]

1 hour ago, flukesofhazard said:

Still seems like a cop out from the devs to me. Dcs can do it. They took the time to completely rewrite the game engine code and the ai behavior code. Seems to me like the il2 devs just looked at it and went “nope we don’t want to do that much work”

Gota focus on next project, just buy that im sure it will have detail fuel system from the start, why play this old version of game ?

 

[354thFG_Drewm3i-VR]

IL2 isn't DCS and most IL2 players don't want to manage complex fuel systems, even if they get implemented. What we want is to feel immersed in an authentic combat environment context with proper planesets and lots to do.

[BlitzPig_EL]

DCS can do it because they charge as much for ONE aircraft as we pay for an entire game module, and their development times are glacial, at best.

 

Great Battles and DCS are completely different animals, that play to different audiences. 

[354thFG_Drewm3i-VR]

The solution to the OP's problem are simple, but automated complex fuel systems that include drop tanks.

[flukesofhazard]

On 1/1/2023 at 9:27 PM, drewm3i-VR said:

The solution to the OP's problem are simple, but automated complex fuel systems that include drop tanks.

Sort of but not really. Like if they won’t allow manual fuel transfer, then how would you seal off a leak if you take damage? I can see automated fuel management for use most of the time, but in an emergency situation where you are leaking fuel, being able to transfer the remaining fuel to a tank that isn’t leaking can mean the difference between life and death.

[343KKT_Kintaro]

  

On 12/31/2022 at 5:18 PM, flukesofhazard said:

That blows. Fuel transfer is such a critical part of damage control for any aircraft.

 

 

Yes, even in 1914-1918, but at the time, during WWI, fuel pumps and fuel transfer from one inner tank to another inner tank weren't a thing yet... and Great Battles, originally, was developed out of a WWI flight sim... so please understand that its basic game engine hasn't been originally conceived for pumping fuel, nor for droping external fuel tanks.

 

 

On 12/31/2022 at 5:18 PM, flukesofhazard said:

Guess they didn’t like planes being able to contain fuel leaks and make it home.

 

 

Believe me, you assume too much. As I just said, this game was developed out of a WWI flight sim ("Rise of Flight", RoF for short). When one compares both games, RoF and IL2GB... one immediately realises that Great Battles is... a miracle. The developers didn't manage to implement external fuel tanks, nor fuel pumps, nor fuel management in general, nor they managed to satisfy some other requests that the community made for years, but they managed to develop plenty of other things that are specific to WWII. That's not that bad. Could have been worse, really. So you cannot say "they didn’t like planes being able to contain fuel leaks and make it home". It's unfair.

 

 

[RossMarBow]

On 1/2/2023 at 2:56 PM, drewm3i-VR said:

IL2 isn't DCS and most IL2 players don't want to manage complex fuel systems, even if they get implemented. What we want is to feel immersed in an authentic combat environment context with proper planesets and lots to do.

wait until you are flying the a20beta in multiplayer and someone looks at your wing funny
next thing you know you have lost all 1200L

[Dragon1-1]

Abandoning the fuel system improvements was a mistake, if they did so. If it's going to take time, fine, but drop tanks, fuel management and so on are important parts of flying WWII era aircraft. Right now, we have no way of doing any damage control except for feathering propellers on twins. Fuel transfer is a fairly basic thing. 

[343KKT_Kintaro]

Please guys stop posting as if modelling aircraft systems in an ambitious & serious flight simulator like "Great Battles" was something like giving one pound of Play-Doh to an adolescent and telling him: "go ahead my boy, model me a humpback whale". The devs already explained what goes on with the fuel systems management in "Great Battles". So please do the job and get some information by yourselves. Or, at least, stop reading "The DD for Today Herald" and try to follow what the devs (they themselves) are trying to tell to the community.

 

If out of the bellow videos, one or two are in Russian, simply approriately set the English subtitles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[343KKT_Kintaro]

Sorry fellas, in connection with that latter video, I forgot the version that was especillay recorded for English-speaking audiences (watch from 41'39'' to 46'23''):

 

 

[flukesofhazard]

On 1/1/2023 at 9:23 PM, BlitzPig_EL said:

DCS can do it because they charge as much for ONE aircraft as we pay for an entire game module, and their development times are glacial, at best.

 

Great Battles and DCS are completely different animals, that play to different audiences. 

I beg to differ with you there. Eagle Dynamics doesn’t develop most of the aircraft modules, they use third party developers to build most of the aircraft in dcs, such as heatblur, razbam, etc. by doing so, it pushed the price of each module up, but for what you pay you get a ton of features, clickable cockpits and a flight model that mimicks the real thing very closely in my opinion. 
 

it’s also worth pointing out that there is quite a bit of back and forth cross pollination of players that play both sims. So I don’t see it as being so much of an issue of playing to a specific audience so much as a difference in priorities between the two companies. The il2 devs prioritize maps, planes and campaigns while the dcs devs focus on maps, graphics, ai logic and damage models, leaving the rest to be filled in by the community as they see fit and leaving the door open for more campaign creativity. 
 

I mean how many times have you flown the same mission to the same city in a campaign in il2 and not seen a change in the ground situation? It’s vastly different when you are the person creating the campaign, but I digress. My original point was more towards the idea of, if they were to reimplement fuel transfer and update the ai logic along with fixing some of the ai bugs, it would go a long way towards making il2 more immersive.

[flukesofhazard]

On 1/22/2023 at 6:36 AM, 343KKT_Kintaro said:

Please guys stop posting as if modelling aircraft systems in an ambitious & serious flight simulator like "Great Battles" was something like giving one pound of Play-Doh to an adolescent and telling him: "go ahead my boy, model me a humpback whale". The devs already explained what goes on with the fuel systems management in "Great Battles". So please do the job and get some information by yourselves. Or, at least, stop reading "The DD for Today Herald" and try to follow what the devs (they themselves) are trying to tell to the community.

 

If out of the bellow videos, one or two are in Russian, simply approriately set the English subtitles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You may have misunderstood what I said. The control bindings are there and they don’t work. And somebody else mentioned it was implemented and then removed later during a period when I wasn’t playing il2. I personally don’t keep up with dev blogs. I am not so invested into any one game that I need to know every little thing the devs are working on and I don’t see the programming as be as simple as handing a kid a lump of playdoh. My perspective is, they implemented it so the bulk of the work must have been done for the bindings to appear and from what I’ve seen it did work for a time. Now, if by implementing it, it broke something else, fine, fix it. But the indications are that it’s been broken for a long time- long enough that the devs should have fixed it by now- which leads me to the conclusion that the devs either don’t consider it a priority, or, a very vocal portion of the community complained that they didn’t like it so the devs removed it and came up with a pr story to prevent alienating any portion of the community and quietly decided not to continue working on it. In an age of cancel culture, I don’t put anything past any company. The devs can say whatever they want in a dev blog, it doesn’t make all of it true. 

[343KKT_Kintaro]

2 hours ago, flukesofhazard said:

You may have misunderstood what I said. The control bindings are there and they don’t work.

 

 

I know that, no misunderstanding then.

 

 

2 hours ago, flukesofhazard said:

And somebody else mentioned it was implemented and then removed later during a period when I wasn’t playing il2.

 

 

Fuel management never has been implemented in the game, nor when you were playing the game neither when you were absent from it. Opening/closing fuel cocks, pumping fuel from one inner tank to another inner tank, dropping external fuel tanks... none of these features has been available in the game ever.

 

 

2 hours ago, flukesofhazard said:

My perspective is, they implemented it so the bulk of the work must have been done for the bindings to appear and from what I’ve seen it did work for a time. Now, if by implementing it, it broke something else, fine, fix it. But the indications are that it’s been broken for a long time- long enough that the devs should have fixed it by now- which leads me to the conclusion that the devs either don’t consider it a priority, or, a very vocal portion of the community complained that they didn’t like it so the devs removed it and came up with a pr story to prevent alienating any portion of the community and quietly decided not to continue working on it.

 

 

Not to be rude but I think your perspective is wrong and that, in this instance at least, the devs are simply saying the truth. In this video (click here and reach 44'), Han says something like part of the fuel management coding has not been completed and, thus (that's my understanding), that it never was implemented in any of the available versions of the game. My reading, so, is that the fuel management features remained an internal experimental coding, not finished and never implemented in the publicly available game. Two minustes later in the video, the big boss (Loft) says at 46' that the fuel management is ready, but he means it's ready in the new project, not in "Great Battles". What the "new project" is? I assume it's a new game, completely different from the "Great Battles" series, thus incompatible with that latter.

 

 

2 hours ago, flukesofhazard said:

In an age of cancel culture, I don’t put anything past any company. The devs can say whatever they want in a dev blog, it doesn’t make all of it true. 

 

 

It doesn't make it false neither...

 

But the devs are feeding the hype for sure:

 

1) They don't say what the new project is.

 

2) They don't say if whether or not the new project is compatible with the "Great Battles" series.

 

3) They don't remove the fuel management controls from the "Great Battles" list of controls, thus they increase our levels of uncertainty and confusion.

 

Nevertheless, my reading of the situation remains the same: I believe we won't have fuel management in the "Great Battles" series.

 

 

[Deicide]

On 12/31/2022 at 2:13 PM, LukeFF said:

 

LOL no, it was because there were issues at the time it was tested that were going to take far more time to fix than was originally planned. It happens.

laziness sounds like to me.

[343KKT_Kintaro]

1 hour ago, Deicide said:

laziness sounds like to me.

 

 

Please listen to what Loft says in the following video. Wardog5711 relays that question from the community (in the video you'll jump to at 41'39''), and then Loft responds:

 

 

[Lusekofte]

On 1/2/2023 at 3:23 AM, BlitzPig_EL said:

 

Great Battles and DCS are completely different animals, that play to different audiences. 

It play very well to same audiences, they are so different that it’s almost two different genres. You can focus on tactics entirely in GB while being a pilot and try to be tactical at the same time in DCs. 
They complete each other more than compete. I never invested so much in hardware just for one of them. 
That said I wish for a simplified usage of fuel transfers. Like a button click saying transfer fuel from leaking tank over to a non leaking tank. All the software really need to do is stop the leak and simulate the fuel is transferred. 
I bet that can be done. I really really hope for other improvements. Like ai mates in your plane interact with you and do their job. Not just sitting there like dummies. 

Edited February 1, 2023 by Lusekofte

[BlitzPig_EL]

I can't argue with that Lusekofte.  A simplified fuel handling system would be very welcome.  Micromanaging the fuel system, however, should be avoided. I don't want an aircraft procedure study sim.  If I did DCS already exists to fill that niche.  I like the balance here in this sim between pure aircraft operations and air combat.

[flukesofhazard]

1 hour ago, Lusekofte said:

It play very well to same audiences, they are so different that it’s almost two different genres. You can focus on tactics entirely in GB while being a pilot and try to be tactical at the same time in DCs. 
They complete each other more than compete. I never invested so much in hardware just for one of them. 
That said I wish for a simplified usage of fuel transfers. Like a button click saying transfer fuel from leaking tank over to a non leaking tank. All the software really need to do is stop the leak and simulate the fuel is transferred. 
I bet that can be done. I really really hope for other improvements. Like ai mates in your plane interact with you and do their job. Not just sitting there like dummies. 

I would absolutely be down with a simplified transfer system. In the meta of il2 as it currently exists, I don’t think a simplified fuel transfer system would be particularly immersion breaking. It’s kind of what I was getting at in one of my earlier posts where I mentioned that there is the automatic and manual engine control options, so why not do the same for fuel transfer. I think it is important to remember how players play this game: those that get the most out of their planes tend to use manual engine controls to maximize performance. When I play il2, I don’t necessarily want to manage fuel tanks individually for balance (although at some point I probably would if the controls were that sophisticated) but at the same time, if I’m leaking fuel, I definitely want to try to seal that leak off and save as much fuel as I can, even if that means limping back to a friendly frontline base to make an emergency landing. 

[LukeFF]

On 2/1/2023 at 3:48 AM, Deicide said:

laziness sounds like to me.

 

Yeah...no. We tested it for a while in beta with one of the 109s, and no, it was never ready to be pushed out to a public build.

Edited February 2, 2023 by LukeFF
grammar

[Jaegermeister]

On 2/1/2023 at 12:53 AM, flukesofhazard said:

You may have misunderstood what I said. The control bindings are there and they don’t work. And somebody else mentioned it was implemented and then removed later during a period when I wasn’t playing il2. I personally don’t keep up with dev blogs. I am not so invested into any one game that I need to know every little thing the devs are working on and I don’t see the programming as be as simple as handing a kid a lump of playdoh. My perspective is, they implemented it so the bulk of the work must have been done for the bindings to appear and from what I’ve seen it did work for a time. Now, if by implementing it, it broke something else, fine, fix it. But the indications are that it’s been broken for a long time- long enough that the devs should have fixed it by now- which leads me to the conclusion that the devs either don’t consider it a priority, or, a very vocal portion of the community complained that they didn’t like it so the devs removed it and came up with a pr story to prevent alienating any portion of the community and quietly decided not to continue working on it. In an age of cancel culture, I don’t put anything past any company. The devs can say whatever they want in a dev blog, it doesn’t make all of it true. 

 

Your perspective is incorrect.

 

It was implemented in a Beta release and tested. The key bindings are left over from that. It was never released, no one ever complained about it and there never was a PR story about it. It was not complete when the programmer working on it moved on to other things. That's all there is to that.

[[CPT]Crunch]

With simplified systems you'll never acquire a complex damage model, nothing there to damage.

[Lusekofte]

17 hours ago, [CPT]Crunch said:

With simplified systems you'll never acquire a complex damage model, nothing there to damage.

That is correct. There is always something when coding a game. To call it lazyness is unfair 

[flukesofhazard]

On 2/2/2023 at 7:48 AM, Jaegermeister said:

 

Your perspective is incorrect.

 

It was implemented in a Beta release and tested. The key bindings are left over from that. It was never released, no one ever complained about it and there never was a PR story about it. It was not complete when the programmer working on it moved on to other things. That's all there is to that.

not trying to be a jerk here, but if that's the case, then are there any plans to complete it and release it? if it was started and the programmer moved on to other things, do you have anyone to continue working on it? I know i  may be coming off as a bit needy but with my limited knowledge, it seems like in the grand scheme of things, if you guys started the work on it, i would think that you'd want to finish it and release it into the game.

[Jaegermeister]

2 hours ago, flukesofhazard said:

not trying to be a jerk here, but if that's the case, then are there any plans to complete it and release it? if it was started and the programmer moved on to other things, do you have anyone to continue working on it? I know i  may be coming off as a bit needy but with my limited knowledge, it seems like in the grand scheme of things, if you guys started the work on it, i would think that you'd want to finish it and release it into the game.

 

It is the case...

I don't know what the plans are in the future for drop tanks. I'm just a part time mission builder, tester and VR sim pilot

I don't have anyone to work on anything but my own missions.

You are not the only needy IL2 fan here, I think we all are.

"you guys" would be the 1CGS dev team, and if they decide to finish it that's up to them. 

 

I hope that helps clarify things from my perspective

 

Edited February 5, 2023 by Jaegermeister
added quote