Here you have an incredible flight sim, yet when WOP has 8 viewers and Storm of War, which isn't even out, has 38 viewers, you know something has gone wrong with this operation.

I'm not sure that means that anyone is screwing up. I mean, IL2 has been out for years and had time to develop a strong following. Also, it's more fun to speculate than to talk about a game you actually have. Plus you have more time to post in a forum and read about it when you're not playing it.

yeah - inconclusive...despite the fact that they did do a couple of things wrong...

they got some things right

they made a beautifully smooth flight sim with breathtaking environs

Im starting to wonder if we now know the reason its so beautifully smooth.. ie.. it doesnt actually have to do much else, and as they have said, they cant add anything to this and will have to release a sequel developed the ground up to do so.. Be interesting to see if they can keep the engine so optimized when they add everything that should be in a sim..

I understand what you're saying, Ighten, but at least if you're right and the engine in the sequel will be more demanding because of the extra modelling, at least it will be a game with a wonderful graphics system, and I'd still wager it will need less powerful hardware than RoF or SoW.

If not having much else to do ensures smooth playability then you'd think RoF would run like a dream. It doesn't have to do much else either yet looks like crap compared to WoP and runs worse. Not only is it graphically inferior, its landscape resembles neither France nor Belgium and lags far behind WoP's superior geographic representations.

I said it a thousand times.. If this sim had first and foremost a decent powerful but easy to use mission builder and customizations in the form of skins.. those two things alone would give this sim legs. As it is now.. while it is a nice piece of kit and certainly much better than many give it credit for.. even with it's faults, it is still fighting an uphill fight against a 10 year old sim that is soon to be incarnated in it's next generation.

Bearcat99,

Agreed.

J. P. Kelly

With SoW that's all you can do--read about it. LOL
WoP you can actually play instead of searching a forum for a release date. 38 frustrated people feeding on speculation.

You people do realize that you can buy more than one right? If you really want to support developers putting out what we want, then you shouldn't hold out for just one sim.

...and if you want one that's good for 10 years of use through modding so you don't have to buy another one, then you're killing the market. No wonder these things rarely come out, and when they do they're with 10 year old tech, other than WoP.

Only until you hit the retarded time limit...

I'd imagine that in a battle they don't want you to take your own sweet time to do your part or the battle's lost or won without you. Sounds realistic to me.

"We need you to help take out some tanks on the northern front that are about to assault the town. They're about 20 minutes out, if they reach the town they'll wreak destruction on our light defenses, not to mention the remaining civilians."

"Sure, but not until I've flown around for an hour to get the feel of my P-47 again after it's recent maintenance. I'm sure the enemy will wait on me to begin moving."

---------

"We spotted an enemy reconnaissance plane that likely has photos with the locations of our radar stations. He's about to cross the Channel to deliver the information to the Germans we know are there watching our every move. This could be a prelude to invasion. There's no time to lose, he's running to safe territory. Shoot that plane down!"

"I'll take care of it. While I'm up there, I'm going to do some sight seeing at Dover, snap some pictures and head North. I'll land at another air strip to top off my tanks and have my windows washed. I'll then cut back South and take him out. He'll probably be circling around trying to figure out where East is by looking at his shadow, so it's highly unlikely he'll head straight to safety immediately, that would just be retarded."

See? Doesn't really work, does it? LOL
However, there is the training area if you want to fly around without the urgency that comes with a battle.

Justify it however you like, it's not realistic to have everything go black and be told timeup in any way shape or form, simple mission failure after the time limit is reached yes, dumping you out no.

I agree with Dano's point about realism, but it's also not realistic to start an engine with a single keystroke--the most "arcade" feature, ever--or be lined up on the runway with the engines off, or have the engines keep running at speed with the throttle idle, or have pilots who bail out go through spinning props without injury, yadda.

With every flight sim it's all about how much realism the individual is willing to suspend, because all of them require realism suspension. All of them.

Unless you have one of these there's no such thing as a true simulator in a home environment.
I'll trade a startup sequence for graphics that actually seem realistic outside of just the cockpit. Most "sims" are very good at giving you a cockpit, but they fail miserably outside of that area, ruining the experience with disjointed graphics seemingly from 2 generations of pc gaming. Want arcade? Look beyond the cockpit in almost any simulator represented on these forums. They ALL have trade off's.

Of course not, you were the one who stated that the screen going back and timing you out sounded realistic so what's your point?



Of course they do, no home computer has the power to truely represent flight, but graphics are only a small part of the whole and getting dumped to a black screen just because you failed to achive the mission requirements in the requisite time is one of the biggest immersion killers I've ever come across in a modern sim and in my mind is a terrible mechanic that is there for no good reason, it's not even a trade off for anything relevant that I can see.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but my *guess* as to why there's a fixed time limit might be because the after-action replays would take up too much hard drive space or not work properly if the player was allowed to fly around for hours until the fuel ran out. I haven't had chance or time to test this for myself yet, so can anyone confirm how much approximate disk space is taken up by say, ten minutes of flight? If it's over 1GB for every ten minutes of "gun camera footage", I think we have our answer why the devs put in a fixed time limit.

I can remember back in the days when we used to have thick manuals with our flight sims and had to press a seperate key to record our replays in games, like Rowan's 'Overlord' (1994), and LucasFilm's 'Their Finest Hour:The Battle of Britain' (1989) but of course that was in the days before western society was relentlessly dumbed-down as it is today. Asking or expecting the average gamer nowadays to have to think to press another button or check how much "film" is remaining may be asking a little too much?

That's my guess anyway. If one of you guys can confirm the replay data is actually a small file though, I'm out of ideas as to why there's a time limit.

How many people actually do the whole engine start thing once you've done it and the novelty wears off? I agree that it's either your cup of tea or not. I don't mind air starts. I don't mind not landing. I don't like the idea of an ingame timer, though.

I agree with you Dave63. Everyone has personal bookends regarding what defines "arcade." Like the "refly" option in WoP. Some call it arcade, I call it convenient, and one doesn't have to click it, after all. I very much agree with you and everyone else about the time limit; I couldn't stand it in RoF, either.

I understand your point about the timer and it bugs me also but even if there was not a timer of ending your gameplay, and you could continue to fly and shoot down a plane or two, You should not pass the mission if you could not complete it in the time frame of your mission objective.

Example : if your attacking enemy bombers and you as one pilot don't take out a required number of bombers before the bombs are droped on their target, the mission has failed. You should still be able to fly on and even continue your attack but you shouldn't pass the mission.

Wop screwed up making the mission gamplay end after the mission success time table failed. They were correct in making a Mission time table but the gameplay should continue even if the mission is failed.

I would like the ability to continue on also but I still think in some mission situations there needs to be a time requirement for mission success based on real life mission time tables.

Desode

That, I can agree with.
And without a "mission failed" staying on the screen. Sometimes you could use the time to find your way around the map, especially if playing without any indicators.

I played the demo and was underwhelmed, to be honest. Hitting He-111's at 1000 meters with a tap of the trigger and watching them blow up Micheal Bay style was fun, but not really simulation territory.

The reticule in the Spitfire is the wrong size. It's a 105 mil ring, which means that an He-111 should be wingtips on the circle at 220 meters distance, but according to the icons it was much farther away. Or, possibly, they've got the bomber the wrong size and the sight is right.

Airstarts and no landings. Sigh.

I'd recommend this game for people who have never flown a flight sim (other than complete arcade games) before as a familiarization and a gateway to proper ones, but otherwise it's not really up to grade.

The graphics are ruined by the color pallette. Everything is just a variation of one color and washed out. The world is a vibrant place, particularly below five thousand feet.

Did you set it to sim? I think you have to do the first 3 training scenarios, then the realistic and then sim training to unlock those settings.
There are take off's and landings.

It's funny you should mention this because I was messing about with the settings.ini in RoF just yesterday and RoF looks quite comparably to WoP now that I have enabled all the pixel shaders and set HDR to 1 from 0. Performance is not as good as WoP but they both look similar in looks on my PC. With HDR at 1 I now notice dynamic shadows in the cockpit which I never noticed before.

In fact, I notice so many similarities now that I am wondering if the developers of these two sims have some kind of relation to each other. Even the default joystick config uses the same odd button on my Saitek X52 for zooming the cockpit.

LOL, I didn't realize the training missions were in arcade mode - they should make that an option right off the bat.

The weird thing is that I destroyed all the bombers but two in the tutorial and everything went black and it booted me before I could go back for them.

I've owned WoP for a week or so now and love the graphics engine but even on the realistic setting the plane feels like it is on rails and the gameplay is far too easy. Ho-hum.

I think there is a mod that makes it better but can't remember the name of it or where to get it. Anyone here know where this mod is for download?

Hey, Bastido,

That's great that you got RoF looking that good on your machine. Sincerely. I had the settings cranked on mine and it didn't compare to WoP; elsewhere I've posted side-by-side screens of the sims and it wasn't even close. Although, I enjoy many sims and don't fly one because it isn't as good as another in some regard or other; I haven't any sim allegiance that demands I only fly one. What's really the shame to me is RoF's landscape doesn't resemble France or Belgium.

LOL !!!!! Dude if you can beat WOP on full sim settings with Limited Fuel,, Limited Ammo and No retrys,,, Both the entire Campaign and Missions.
Then you are a God !
I have yet to see anyone on the entire World Wide Web pull this off !
I have posted this on just about every Sim forum I know of and No one has been been able to pull it off.
I would pay money ,,, GOOD Money to see it done.

I don't mean to jump on you about this, its just that when you said:

"I've owned WoP for a week or so now and love the graphics engine but even on the realistic setting the plane feels like it is on rails and the gameplay is far too easy"

I fell out of my chair in tears because when WOP is on full sim settings with Limited Fuel,, Limited Ammo and No retrys, I personally thing it is one of the Hardest games I have ever played,and I have played every sim that I know of.

Yes it is easy on Realistic, but you can't call a game easy when you are not playing it on the best setting of the game (Sim).. That makes no sense at all..
Realistic is a not much better then arcade. You can't call a game easy when you are not playing the game on the setting that makes it not easy.
Arcade and even realistic are there to make the game easy.
Now I hope you understand what I'm saying. I just think you didn't realize what you said. I mean even Il2 1946 is easy on realistic.
Desode

JFM, we're going to have to disagree on graphics as a matter of taste.

The overwhelming single color palette sucks all sense of immersion out of WoP for me. While one can say that RoF doesn't depict France very well, WoP doesn't represent England, either. They have roads and more than just a flat pea green that makes up the color of the countryside.

It's a fun game, but not a serious simulation. More generously, it's somewhere in between - a gamulation, if you will. In the tutorials I was half expecting a health or ammo upgrade to float in the air with instructions to fly through it and get a power up.

I'll bow out of the thread and go silent in the forum. Just because this one isn't my cup of tea doesn't mean I should pee in the one you're drinking.

Hey, Dart,

I don't think you are peeing in anything of mine. I appreciate counterpoints and don't get upset by them, although your respect for others is refreshing.

I agree with you about the pea-green; I wish WOP would do away with that and although it doesn't drive me nuts I can see how people couldn't get past it. Somebody somewhere altered some screenshots of WoP to remove that green and they looked amazing. Beneath that green, though, certainly WOP does a better job with their geographic representation of England than RoF does with France or Belgium; one glance via Google Earth verifies that. But I don't like to compare the sims and I enjoy sims for what they are and not what they have over others.

Again, I believe what we call "sims" are all games, and all of them have arcadish features. We all just pick and choose which arcade features we'll accept and which we won't.

Would that because WOP has to render a pretty tiny and highly restrictive for mission creation area compared to the french map in ROF.. And lets not get started on the haze view distance..





Both look amazing but do totally different things, WOP needs pretty much a major re write as without moving ground vehicles which can be instructed and mission placed its just an empty but beautiful canvas. If they can add all the required basic elements (weather, time, mission editor air and ground , proper sized map, roads-rivers-railways with traffic that can be mission based, destructable objects,skinnable aircraft a working multiplayer with dedis to scratch the surface) and not effect the optimized 3d performance they have now then they will have a winner.. But here's the dillema wont BoB SoW be doing that and more anyway for this era..

From the devs comments consoles seem to be priority even for the sequel so Im guessing more of the same with a rather simplified mission editor.

The adage "never judge a book buy its cover" is the simple truth if your looking for anything beyond the gloss of the superb gfx engine.. And mores the pity..

The haze looks natural to me, but I live in a high humidity region that's a lot more hazy than that. The ground in the top picture looks pretty rough in comparison, a flat image with some sparse, simple trees stuck in it. Both planes look incredible though.

Where do I set limited fuel and ammo? I have it set to unlimited retries too because I don't want to have to go back to the beginning for missions that play exactly the same every time. What I mean by too easy is the flight model and getting a kill. A few bullets and they fall to the ground. Also, arrows point to enemy and they also show on map. This game requires very little skill and for someone who has been playing PC flights sims since 1993 it is Ho-hum.

OK, I will make some screen shots of both and post side by side photos in the screenshot sub forum when I get the time. I will let you know when they are up.

The image of RoF doesn't actually show it at its best cpability so I will show you what RoF can really look like and even without using highest settings because frame rate is still king so don't want to display unplayable settings. The landscape in RoF actually has lots of trees and the towns have lots of detailed buildings just like in WoP.

Yes, Bastido, love to see how it looks on your machine. Seems with every patch it looked worse and worse on mine and I never got rid of the "shimmers." Many graphic glitches, too, and catastrophic hangs. With all other sims I have settings cranked and look/run fine. I suspect RoF doesn't like my computer and my computer doesn't like RoF.

I agree that WoP could use traffic, etc., but RoF certainly isn't the gold standard. Its airfields and landscapes are barren, too, save for a few barges, trucks and the odd train. It has more than WoP, to be sure, I concede. BTW, I wish combat sims had moving clouds. Static clouds are just so fake. As far as looks, RoF's clouds look good to me when you get close to them.

Hey Bastido, It's when you start the single missions.
If you play wop on reaslistic the plane is on rails.
On realistic it turns of air physics and your plan always flys level and straight,, there is no setting the flaps or any manual engine control or anything. Realistic mode is arcade mode with some spins added in.

I'm in Nashville on a business trip right now, so I can't check and tell you where the settings are on the campaign. I beat the campaign when the game was BOP, and that was a good while ago.

Just play some of the single missions on Full sim mode, and you'll notice a big difference.
I'm 36 years old and have been playing Sims since the C64 days and Amiga.

Wop does not have Il2's full depth (Full QMB, FMB), but on full sim mode using engine management and all those aspects, it is not easy by any means.
Thats all I'm saying.

And


Yes ROF can look pretty Darn Good, I play it maxed out on my system and it looks sweet.
Its still not Wop visuals, but a very good looking game.

Wop's maps are damn near identical recreations from the actual time frame.

They spent a long time makeing them.
They used thousands of aerial photos and city photos and WWII maps to recreate each city to almost perfect layout. Every street Block and building position and tree is right where is was in that mission's time frame.
Have a good evening, Desode

JFM, what kind of card are you using? If your using a Nvidia card you need to turn off the HDR effects and you can only do that manually in the Coinfig ,since the New patch.
Then once you have that turned off in there, use combined for AA.
Mess with the combined settings to tweak your frame rate.
I also recommend getting Nhancer to tweak your Nividia card settings.


The ROF forums has lots of posts on the matter and you can get rid of the simmering.
Go over there and Search Simmering.
When I get home to ohio sunday , I'll Pm you a list of how I have everything set up. If you still are having shimmering problems.
Desode

Desode,

First, Ohio, eh? Columbus is my hometown.

Second, I look forward to any help with shimmering; thanks for the offer. I have Nvidia--bear with me, as I know airplanes, not computers--an "ASUS EN9800GX2/G/2DI/1G GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB (512MB per GPU) 512-bit (256-bit per GPU) GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0," if that informs you of anything. The strange graphics are the worst aspect (I posted them in the ROF forum, just search). I reformatted a few weeks ago and haven't even reinstalled RoF.

Re: suggestions you have. I'm open to them only if they do not affect any other sim or program adversely. I don't want to have to twiddle a bunch of knobs to get RoF looking good at the sacrifice of anything else. I searched RoF forums for help but after enduring the usual "you are overheating" comments (I wasn't) I tried a few suggested fixes but nothing worked. Most maddeningly was every patch made things worse, not better. Once they added the gamma settings it looked/ran so poorly that I just gave up on it. I started off very excited about RoF because WW1 holds my extreme interest but each patch just eroded enjoyability.

Anyway, look forward to your PM. Thanks again.

Yep combined will remove all shimmers from ROF in nvidia cards with nhancer.. This will only apply to the exe for ROF so it wont effect anything else..

In the config for rof turn post off.. I think the HDR and post settings look fine from the cockpit but pretty poor in other situations probably because of the interactions of the sunglare (though they have now added three other variants of HDR. It looks fine with it off)..





I think Bastido is correct though, the landscapes only on medium in these shots and trees are turned down to near..

I'd like to see some landscape shots of ROF at a couple hundred feet. Max settings, lower than that doesn't say much. The interesting thing around here is that most screenshots for any sim are taken thousands of feet up, where landscapes don't show up as quite as badly, like a car that looks great at 50' but up close you see how bad the paint is. A brown square representing a farm is almost acceptable if you get enough altitude. Wings of Prey shots frequently get down low to show the detail that people are enjoying so much. Tilled soil looks like tilled soil, not just streaks of brown. In WoP, you actually WANT to get low since you don't lose the suspension of disbelief like you do in most other sims. People enjoy seeing that they have a full environment that looks right.
WoP isn't a trainer that has a goal of teaching you to actually fly a Spitfire. It's entertainment. They do a bang up job of offering a sim and actually including graphics that add to the experience rather than taking away from it like most sims do.

HDR and bloom off - I don't like the looks of either; probably why I don't care for WoP's graphics as well.

I don't get how you even compare the two. It's like comparing the Jet Fighter series to Falcon 4 or Lock On or ArmA Choppers to Black Shark.

What's better, an elephant or a grand slam breakfast from Denny's?

Grand Slam, no contest

Pfffff

I'd like to see your grand slam tow a rice cart out of the mud.

Hey, Dart,

Those are some of the better shots of RoF that I've seen; thanks for posting. I especially like how the trees actually go to the horizon in the first one instead of melting away into vapor.

Reims in the rain:





HDR and bloom require too much tweaking to make it decent looking for me. The HDR oversaturates in an odd way - a sort of WoP effect where things get looking like they're from the same pallette and then too dark, forcing one to bump up the gamma. When bloom is applied, the increased gamma makes everything look like it has a halo to me!

I've something of a monster rig, so I can run with just about everything maxed out (I put grass at medium since I spend so little time that low). The biggie is getting that forest draw distance all the way out - RoF does a good job on minimizing the pop-up effect (it's actually more of a gradual draw, which is cool), but I likes me some trees!

OK, that explains it. What I thought was the sim level was actually just a bit more advanced arcade level. I haven't played any single missions and jumped right into the campaign and never noticed a sim level option, just selected realistic.

Btw, that grass on RoF does look good.

The main problem with this game is the time limit and the small number of missions included and the lack of propher QMB & FMB. Graphics are OK especially the terrain & building textures.
For example on my pc (core2duo, 9800GT) the Rise Of Flight demo was unplayable , however WOP is much better optimized, runs great with everything on max setting.

Okay I gotta try this grand slam breakfast from dennys, who's dennys