[Th!rdeye]

In my conquests in modding, trying to figure out how certain things work, i have found simple solutions to age old problems.

It troubles me that these fixes are so easy to do, i wonder why they weren't done correctly in the past. i.e a simple patch/update.

Take the P-47 Canopy open i have just discovered. It is simply this. change 0 to 1 in a said file. Copy and edit about 8 lines of short java code. Then edit another set of java code in another file. Take 10-20 mins to check and test values so it looks realistic.

another example is the fuel leak. Before it was a unrealistic flat texture. Within 5mins. I made it into a 3d volumetric effect. Mind you needed some tweaking, but it would be much much much simpler for the people who....i don't know...MADE THE GAME.

I'm sure other modders have found certain age old complaints easy to fix. Too easy at times....

[poncho]

Whoa,

Slow down, are you saying that you have an open canopy for the P47? hock:

[Th!rdeye]

Whoa,

Slow down, are you saying that you have an open canopy for the P47? hock:

check WIP thread for my mods.

[Th!rdeye]

I would like to retract my statement about the canopy, but my point still remains with other fixes.

[vtrelut]

Just my 2 cents here:

Technically you are right. From a user's point of view with knowledge in Java, it seems some bugs could have been corrected long ago, and some enhancements could have been incorporated easily. CONGRATULATIONS FOR YOUR FINDINGS, AND THANK YOU!

Commercially in practice, if you put yourself in the shoes of 1C Maddox Games and their editor UbiSoft, life is different. These are business people. They need to make money, and to make money they need to sell their software to a large crowd. If they are unable to do so, then it is very difficult to dedicate resources for bug fixing and enhancements, even if they would be relatively easy to incorporate.

We are individual users who use our free time to enjoy the sim. But I suppose they cannot afford such free time for the same thing: they need to devote their time to profitable business; this is respectable and necessary.

In my view we got many free patches and should be grateful for the support that this soft has received from their developers over the years, free of charge. I do not expect that they should spend even more time in fixing the numerous things that individually take little time, but which altogether at the end of the day do take a significant amount of resources to implement. Fixing, testing, compiling and distributing patches does cost something. :wink:

But I am concerned that our WWII simming community is rather small and does not generate enough revenue to justify dedicating any more resources to develop, edit, distribute and support such a software.

Microsoft did not have the passion that Oleg and his team have had, and Microsoft exited the WWII sim biz in 2003. We are still waiting for SOW:BOB to be released, and I suspect that delays are related to the limited resources available. :?:

No market, no new sim... :oops:

I do not criticize Oleg and his team for bugs that are not yet fixed. I would rather thank them for still being around, and just hope they will make enough money to carry on. :?

In fact we are lucky that IL2 can now be modded by competent people who accept to spend time and offer their work free of charge, which we should not expect unreasonably from people who make this for a living.

In that regard I admire the efforts of other companies who propose paid add-ons for Il2; I would not expect them to make profit: it does take a lot of time to build campaigns, missions and skins, and it costs money to distribute their work either on the net (site, bandwidth) or by mail (CD). On top of that, they have huge competition from authors of high quality freeware skins and campaigns who offer a lot more choice. Would you venture into that business for a living? :oops:

I also admire the people who devote their time and some of their financial resources to keep sites such as Mission4Today and AAA alive. This does cost money plus other resources, and we should be grateful to their passion, support and efforts.

As a conclusion, I am very happy that we have a basis as good as IL2, which is now adaptable through modding by dedicated and competent people who share with us their free time and even their financial resources, to make it available to all. At the end of the day, this is driven by passion and I cross my fingers that economic value resulting from the WWII sim software developing activity is not too low, otherwise it will be difficult to keep the ball rolling... :roll:

[Rowddy]

AMEN! 8) I wished i had any modding knowledge i'm amazed again and again everytime, how people come up with the most beautifull mods for this game. Please never stop.

[-)-MAILMAN-]

Sorry, but Oleg doesn't get a free pass. Previous sims had free patches and updates when bugs and glitches were found. Aircraft and content got added at no additional charge unless itw as a completely new version not compatible with previous versions. The motto then was to attract new customers. These sims were not as graphically pretty as this one, but the producers did their best to fix all bugs as they were reported. No we are not talking about Microsoft games.

Bugs are bugs and no matter how pretty the product is it is no fun when items don't work. Sliding cockpits are nice but not essential, but if one canopy slides they all should because it gives and unfair advantage to those that can open their canopies and even more so on the three planes that allow the seat to be raised, Zero & Wildcat & Corsair.

Why should a P-51D or P-47D-27 (also P-47D in the game) have a have a worse view the rear than a Zero, P-400 because the sim didn't model in the 6DOF for TrackIr or provide buttons to map leaning left or right within the confines of the cockpit especially on planes without mirrors. Why should modders have to come up with a way to do it?

Working fuel gages are a must and to this date the P-40E & M don't have one, and all we get is an idiot light telling us we are almost out of fuel.

Another bug is that the Altimeters on the control panel stop functioning on all planes when they reach 30,000 feet except for the P-51 and P-38 and possibly some other planes. So with the speedbar turned off on a server you have no idea how high you are after the needle stops. 30,000 feet is where the Thunderbolt achieved its top speed. Prior the P-51 the "Jug" was the high altitude escort. In the Pacific a flight of Corsairs were always high cover at 33,000 feet to make sure they were above the Zekes. If the altimeter works on some planes it should work on all planes.

Differential braking in the ground to help turn should be available. How difficult is that to make. You can assign both toe brakes now on rudder pedals that have them but all wheel brakes are applied regardless of which brake is pushed. How difficult would it be to make this a function. It certainly would make it easier to maneuver on a carrier deck.

There are other items, but I don't want to get this to turn into an Oleg Bashing Thread, but it galls me when people say we should be thanking him for an unfinished sim. He should have gone with less content and more quality assurance making sure bugs were eliminated and promptly fixing them with patches when brought to his attention. People would be a little more forgiving when mistakes were made if a reasonable attempt was made to fix them.

Thank goodness for the modders here that make the game more enjoyable and immersive. Thanks for the slot and italy-africa-greece maps covering time frames measured in years not hours or days and not having to make believe that you are in these locations on some other map.

[Vpmedia]

imho, the answer is very easy : a fresh set of eyes always helps a LOT

if your a dev then its 100% that you already looking at the game since year(s) before release and you didnt notice many thing becase youre concentrating on the FM for example (maybe because your original job is an aviation engineer )

currently AAA acts as a big, virtual game designer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_designer ) , hard to compete with as a single person

so basically limited open source via internet is the way to go for every software in the future, especially games, theres a big movement around this and our il2 mod project could be considered as part of this idea