Brief Room Episode 32: Game Features

[LukeFF]

Hey everyone! What new gameplay features are coming to Korea, IL2 Series? Tune in to find out! 

 

 

[Aapje]

Love to see the teleport function. That's going to be great for those with little time to play or those who just like the action. Hopefully it will also make the game more accessible.

 

And it will allow a lot more flexibility in missions.

[Panzerlang]

Gun cam, yay! 😄

[AtomicP]

I love that there's real innovation going on here, not just a reskin of BoX. Good stuff

[Avimimus]

This type of time-skip is a much more advanced version of the old system in Red Baron I (and Aces over Europe/Pacific)! Marvellous! An ideal solution to an old problem and very useful for the Pacific as well.

 

The gun camera mode is also such a nice surprise! If systems like this could someday be expanded to simulate the performance of photo-reconnaissance cameras it could add a lot of gameplay depth.

 

The addition of artillery spotting and reconnaissance flights is very good - but I've often felt that these game modes could be much more popular with a bit more of the realistic challenges these tasks involved. Things like simulating the challenges of getting good photographs, or allowing the player to start and stop artillery barrages (and even select which unit is being called) or provide more fine tuned corrections (to allow 'walking' artillery onto point targets using 100 metre and 10 metre corrections). Anyway, even if we don't get better reconnaissance gameplay out of camera simulation - it is still really neat to see!

 

[LuftManu]

The time-skip is geat! Specially if we are to have future long-range mission theaters too! 

Also Guncam!

[Aapje]

@Avimimus

 

What I would like to see is a mission where you fly a modified plane with a recon camera, and once you get close to the target, the game automatically creates annotated* pictures of the target using that recon camera. And then after the mission, you get to see how good the images are that you took.

 

* Should be quite doable, since the game knows where the game assets are.

[tvcasualty]

This is very cool, some of the best (imho) flight sims that I can remember playing had this feature!

[BladeMeister]

I have to say this was the best Brief Room yet. Love the game innovations and the twilight zone time warping. I always used to think this was an immersion killer, but the older I get the less time I seem to have to fly whole missions. Anyway I love to dabble with making cinematic videos so the new camera dynamics are also a welcome feature. I think this will be a first day purchase for me if for nothing else the F4u, but I also want to get in the Miggy, also and the Saber and the .... well you get it.

Keep up the good work 1C.

 

S!Blade<><

[[CPT]Crunch]

Hope there's a multiplayer version of a portal for a potent mission tool.  Be cool to have one of those green squares floating at a specific coordinate only visible for your team, fly through it and you come out another end on another part of the map.  The old saying time is money, I'm happy to spend some for high quality of flying & fighting time spent.   

[ST_Catchov]

Viktor stages a coup and pulls it off. Legend! Poor Dan totally outplayed. I'm not sure anything will ever be the same again.

[Heart0ne]

Am I the only one whose alarm bells started to ring upon hearing that single-engined AI aircraft will also get the simplified flight models?

I can understand the practicality for it from a game design perspective, but after fleeing DCS and its braindead AI and alien AI flight models, I get the feeling Il-2: Korea will be a step back even from Il-2: Great Battles, all in the name of eye candy and getting more aircraft on screen.

 

What good is having more aircraft on screen, if the player senses the enemy aircraft are not playing by the same rules?

[Aapje]

They specifically said that it will be for strike aircraft, like the IL-10. In GB, ground attack aircraft already tend to fly in formation by default. When you have big formations, and planes with rear gunners, it is probably better to stay in formation anyway. An IL-10 is not going to shake a fighter anyway.

[Avimimus]

4 hours ago, Heart0ne said:

Am I the only one whose alarm bells started to ring upon hearing that single-engined AI aircraft will also get the simplified flight models?

 

Mission editors will have a choice to use either the full or simplified versions of the AI aircraft. So you can think of it as an option.

 

If the mission maker wants to try to have 50-70 aircraft in a raid, then they can use the simplified models in hopes we'll actually be able to run it. If it is a 9 aircraft raid they can use the complete models.

 

If computers get faster in a few years, well, the mission maker can try for 70 B-29 at maximum fidelity and see if the computer does or does not catch fire. But it is good to have the option. It is basically restoring a feature from the old Il-2 and LOMAC/DCS allowing larger formations, but with the option for having full fidelity as well... and it is optional.

 

It also sounds like one can mix the aircraft in the same mission - so it may be possible for a mission editor to have you diving on a flight of two dozen escort fighters which contains a couple of them with full fidelity that would then seek the player out for a dogfight... I don't see anything preventing such a design.

 

  

3 hours ago, Aapje said:

 An IL-10 is not going to shake a fighter anyway.

 

I'm not so sure about that. The Il-10 should be able to turn inside of a lot of jet fighters and have superior subsonic manoeuvrability... as for the piston types, if the F-51 pilot or F-4U pilot isn't skilled enough, I could see good understanding of geometry allowing an Il-10 pilot to win a fight.

[Aapje]

1 hour ago, Avimimus said:

I'm not so sure about that. The Il-10 should be able to turn inside of a lot of jet fighters and have superior subsonic manoeuvrability... as for the piston types, if the F-51 pilot or F-4U pilot isn't skilled enough, I could see good understanding of geometry allowing an Il-10 pilot to win a fight.

 

That is valid if the plane is on its own, although an F-51 would have to be quite incompetent to get into a stall fight or turn fight. A high yo-yo or boom and zoom would leave the IL-10 no chance other than a tail gunner hit. Even an accidental overshoot would be hard to capitalize on for the IL-10 unless the overshoot speed would be low and the F-51 would just hang out there, rather than go full throttle and enter the vertical.

 

But when in a large swarm, doing aerobatics would just mean that the IL-10 would fall out of formation and would lose the protection of the rear guns of the other aircraft, would risk causing chaos and collisions, and would likely end up as a straggler that is easily picked off. 

[Avimimus]

 

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

But when in a large swarm, doing aerobatics would just mean that the IL-10 would fall out of formation and would lose the protection of the rear guns of the other aircraft, would risk causing chaos and collisions, and would likely end up as a straggler that is easily picked off. 

 

That is assuming that the other Il-10 pilots don't also decide to turn.

 

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

That is valid if the plane is on its own, although an F-51 would have to be quite incompetent to get into a stall fight or turn fight. A high yo-yo or boom and zoom would leave the IL-10 no chance other than a tail gunner hit. Even an accidental overshoot would be hard to capitalize on for the IL-10 unless the overshoot speed would be low and the F-51 would just hang out there, rather than go full throttle and enter the vertical.

 

Not all pilots are that competent! Also, it is worth noting that the F-51 is only 130 km/h faster than the Il-10 and climbing after an overshoot will bleed some of that speed. The Il-10 has 79% of the speed of the F-51, so it might be able to get off a snap shot. That said - the Il-10 will be out of energy at that point.

Edited September 19 by Avimimus
Corrected figures

[Jackfraser24]

Despite the fact that the bombers while in formation have their flight model and damage modeling more simplified bothers me a little, I know and appreciate why the IL-2 dev team had to make a compromise. Computor technologies have not gotten to the point where they can process massive formations of bombers that would behave in real life, right?  

[Art-J]

Keep in mind AI flight models and AI tactics/routines are two separate things:

 

a) In Il-2 '46 series AI planes had simplified FMs and yet, their last revision is still considered better tactics-wise than GB and DCS ever got. Not to mention Rowan's BoB which many say remains the best ever warbird sim as far as AI behaviour is concerned, even though it obviously has stone-age FMs by today's standards.

 

a) GB had the same high FM fidelity for AI and player planes from the get go, but that didn't mean anything if braindead left turns were practically the only tactics AI fighters used in early versions of the sim.

 

If they manage to get Korea closer to a) on release rather than b), we'll be alright.

[FeuerFliegen]

21 hours ago, Heart0ne said:

Am I the only one whose alarm bells started to ring upon hearing that single-engined AI aircraft will also get the simplified flight models?

I can understand the practicality for it from a game design perspective, but after fleeing DCS and its braindead AI and alien AI flight models, I get the feeling Il-2: Korea will be a step back even from Il-2: Great Battles, all in the name of eye candy and getting more aircraft on screen.

 

What good is having more aircraft on screen, if the player senses the enemy aircraft are not playing by the same rules?

 

 

In addition to what the post above says, I think that this does not necessarily mean we won't have good AI.  If you've ever played Cliffs of Dover, you'll know that you can have 70+ AI planes in a small area, and they have good AI for both dogfighting, and bomber turrets.

[Avimimus]

There is a potential added benefit here. It sounds like they are still exploring the possibility - but they did mention having some AI escort fighters using zoom-and-boom manoeuvres (it would appear a simplified manoeuvre set can allow some optimisations in either the AI or the flight model). This is a good thing actually, as this effectively gives us two sets of AI using two sets of tactics (which we can use independently or mixed together in the same mission).

 

It isn't as ideal as a fully modular AI, with mission editors being able to select from a list of maneouvres and assign probabilities to each tactic (which would be ideal for covering how tactics changed between countries and across the course of a war), but it will at least allow us to correctly model flights bouncing opponents and climbing away (without having to make all aircraft of the type prefer that tactic).

 

IMHO, a lack of an ability to disengage, and a lack of modelling realistic disorientation, difficulty spotting enemies, and morale has been a major issue with the realism in almost all flight simulators - and this could at least give us a partial fix to the lack of disengagement issue.

[Mysticpuma]

A much needed feature for movie makers is to have a no cockpit view.

I appreciate that some think this is cheating, but, all I would ask, if this is really seen as a problem, is simply to give us the ability, to be able to turn the cockpit off during replays. This really would make a big difference in being able to get certain footage and if it only was possible it would affect no-one apert from those who need/want the feature.

Just asking,as I don't think gun camera is the same?

[Avimimus]

16 hours ago, Mysticpuma said:

A much needed feature for movie makers is to have a no cockpit view.

I appreciate that some think this is cheating, but, all I would ask, if this is really seen as a problem, is simply to give us the ability, to be able to turn the cockpit off during replays. This really would make a big difference in being able to get certain footage and if it only was possible it would affect no-one apert from those who need/want the feature.

Just asking,as I don't think gun camera is the same?

 

They said the gun-camera mode can have all of the post-processing removed. So, I suppose the only things I can think of which might be different from what you are asking would be that the coordinates would be coming from the camera rather than the pilot position, and maybe the FoV would be different?