I'm guessing there must be something I don't get about how these parts interact, but...the emphasis on single-player (SP) vs multi-player (MP) baffles me.

For example - I really don't understand the continued work on DGEN instead of NGEN, or the existence of the 'Dark Blue World' mod (which seems a GREAT addition to UP3...except it can't be used in MP)

Does anyone really just fly single-player anymore? Co-op campaigns are SO much more interesting! Heck, even Microprose appeared to realize that more than a decade ago when Falcon 4.0 came out.

And, even so - and this may be the part I'm missing - even with SP as a focus...why wouldn't it be better to put that effort into the MP campaign rather than SP, anyway? Any MP campaign or mission can always be played SP...just let AI pilots handle the other 'player' slots.

So why wouldn't the most efficient use of work be to just work on the game from an MP-perspective...MP mission focus, co-op campaign focus, online play focus, etc...and then just let the SP players run that with AI players in the other player slots. Rather than focusing on SP, only, that...can only then be used for SP.

What am I missing, here?

I suppose the answer is that there are far more of us single-players than is estimated, which you would see for yourself if you visit the SAS site (and you will be welcome) and we like to do our own thing. Yours is a good point about making MP campaigns which could be adapted for SP use. If this is easily done, it would certainly save a duplication of effort.

Lol, yes I do Exclusively. I did try to fly online but never liked it.

Multiplayers always seem to underestimate the number of single offline players.


Indeed, I believe the ratio is somewhere around 3:1 OFFLINE, believe it or not. There was a post somewhere back from the developers (here or elsewhere) that mentioned the majority were offline players. Multiplayers simply make more noise.

Well I fly only off line and have for a long time. Reason is that I have limited time and when I do fly I want to be able to chouse the campaign, of which I have a lot. Yes Co-op campaigns are interesting and so are many of the off line campaigns.

Xander, I note that you are located in Portland, as I am. This coming week starting Monday to Thursday I will be working and then leaving for the New Year weekend to the coast near Seaside. The following week I will be working and teaching 2 classes in the eveing. So for me off line campaigns are the way to go. I suspect it is the same way for many off liners.

To all MP and SP have a great remaining hoilday season.

There is sometimes a kind of snootiness that comes up from multiplayers to the effect of "pffft... why would you want to play that when you can just come online and play with other people!" In some cases there is a bit of a gulf between the two camps. I go both ways and I play both sides of the game depending on what I want to do and what I'm interested getting myself into.

I think there are many good reasons to play single player missions. The experience is very different and having crafted numerous single player campaigns... I can safely say that a well designed mission can be a very interesting and indeed gratifying experience that you just don't get online. You can also take your time and get into the fiction/history of the scenario more-so than if you're doing a dogfight scenario or even a coop. Coop campaigns are neat but I rarely have the time to play them or organize them.

With the AI upgrade coming for 4.11 I think single player folks will have a lot to enjoy. Multiplayer folks will too with the MDS and coop scenarios also benefiting.

But that's the question - why would that be so?

If the mission/campaign/etc was designed for co-op, you could just play it single-player, and have the exact same experience you are referring to, here. It just gives you another option of playing with some of your friends if you wanted to.

ESPECIALLY when you are looking at small groups (3-4), who would tend to fly as part of a single flight, anyway.

Why wouldn't a mission or campaign designer (or mod creator, or patch author, etc, et al) focus on the multiplayer first, since you lose absolutely nothing in what can be experienced by individuals playing offline, and you also get the bonus of having a great co-op mission/campaign/mod/etc.

Whereas the current method of single-player-only just means that a healthy chunk of the community is ignored.

Which is, I guess, why I've always felt...



...that this is actually the opposite of the truth. That the 'snootiness' you refer to, if it exists at all, is entirely in the other direction. I mean, how many times have I read on these forums things along the lines of 'I don't play MP, it's just air-Quake'...which makes no sense to me at all, as it COULD be the exact same missions as they are advocating single-player, just with other humans in the AI slots.

Boggles the mind. To me, it's the MP-focus that would be the most inclusive. MP-focused work gives those of us who want to play compelling stories with others a chance to do so...and those that want to play compelling stories/campaigns/etc on their own can do so, as well. Nobody loses.

SP-focus, though, is much more exclusive. It's very much "well, I don't like to play with others, so I'm going to do all the mod/mission/campaign work I'm doing the way I want to play, only, and if you don't like that - tough". There is, after all, no such thing as a 'multiplayer-only' mission. The only mission types are either 'singe player' or 'multi-player OR single-player'. So it seems like it's exclusivity for exclusivity's sake focusing on SP, only.

At least, as far as I know - again, that's kind of an open question. There is so much focus in mods and campaigns on single-player vs multi-player + single-player (as noted, NGEN hasn't been updated in forever, while DGEN is frequently), and I don't get why.

Is there just something I'm missing that would be lost in changing direction?

Because there are lots of us that don't give a crap about multiplayer. There used to be a study that Oleg posted over at Ubi (I think) that showed by his own figures that the number of MP versus SP is actually smaller. I don't recall the exact figures, but if I remember correctly it's well less than half. Could be different, now though.

Smart-@ss question from me Xander: Why should anyone bother with MP development when 90% of the onliners do want Air Quake and nothing else?

Simply put I can't be arsed to go online anymore, I get enough kindergarten at work so I don't want to deal with that in my spare time, either. And besides I am interested in historical details - which mostly fall prey to "balance" online. At least the AI won't whine when it doesn't get to fly the latest über-plane.

I agree with csThor I often pursue my offline campaigns (flying an Oscar over New Guinea now).

The people I normally fly online with deliberately avoid the Air Quake scene. However, to agree with Xander , once you have found a group of people who share your own perspectives, then multiplayer can be very rewarding. The problem for me is that the standard MP tools lack so much campaign depth/richness, so you either have to dig deeper to find something better or you just stay offline and build your own world around that experience.

Cheers,
4S

it's because of blind MP jerks like you I don't play MP, and the genre is in such shape as it is

This was an issue I investigated at the time I was making my 'Disaster on the Frontiers' campaign set. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be a simple method of converting what I'd done to NGen so I left it at that. As csThor suggested, there appeared to be no demand for multiplayer co-op vs AI dynamic campaigns. I suppose this might be because the co-op style of play seems to be far better handled by online squadrons rather than by single player campaign makers. From my experience with campaign building I don't consider 'work' to exist in the way you seem to want it to.

One question you might be better off asking is why there is a split between NGen and DGen at all? I couldn't pretend to know the technical issues behind the answer. However, if the difference was as simple as you suggest then you would be able to work it the other way also, just to 'open up slots' in single player campaigns to make them multiplayer ones? If that's what you would like, then what you really want is to ask whoever is still working on DGen whether it is possible to make DGen cover co-op vs AI multiplayer as well.

However, I'm still not sure that random dynamic campaigns are especially suitable for co-op. With co-ops you tend to want to focus on the depth in a few missions and balance is far more of a consideration. The planned triggers system will be a huge boost to mission making and unless far more work is then done on DGen to integrate triggers, I wouldn't see why anyone would fly DGen at all as the missions themselves will be far inferior, especially in the interpretation of the results. Even as it is, if you are in fact a member of a small group of players who want a co-op vs AI campaign then what I would do is decide what sort of planes you want to fly and then to convert an existing single player campaign for multiplayer. When I considered converting Disaster On The Frontiers to NGen I noted that it would be far easier to pre-generate DGen missions using text edits to move the front line around then to convert them to co-op.

I know little about Dark Blue World but the little I do know is that the mod exists expressly because it takes extra work to make everything compatible for online.

+1

Really there's no need to make an issue of it. Playing modes are a matter of preference. You will never convince the other which is better.

-If you like dinamics campaign you should try this:

http://www.ghostskies.com/

-Dead is dead enviorement with a great community.

-Best Regards.

I've flown multiplayer a few times, and it had its own addictive thrill. Unfortunately the 'sound hack' and tools emerged from the underground at about the same time and I could no longer trust the integrity of the multiplayer experience, so I have soured on that aspect.

I used to fly single player all the time, practically every day. At some point the AI's routines and unfairly leveraged behavior became more than I could tolerate so I've fallen away from SP as well. I fire up IL-2 1946 once in a great while for old times' sake and to relieve some stress by shooting down unarmed bombers; otherwise I don't invest much time into it anymore. However, I am intrigued by this new AI behavior and it might renew my interest in playing the sim.

I've never met anyone who wanted "air quake and nothing else". The online community tends to PLAY 'air quake' because that's all the game developers really focused on for online play. NGEN never really got much love, and the need for mods to really bring the game to life...not to mention limited selection of out-of-the-box multiplayer campaigns making managing mission downloads necessary...ended up making it extremely challenging to do anything BUT 'air quake'.



But, again, co-op campaigns. There is no 'balance' challenge any different than single-player campaigns. Instead of just one human in a flight of four, there are four humans.

There would be no other differences at all to the single-player version

So why is there such opposition to the idea?

Yeah, that's definitely a good question.

What is necessary for NGEN to work, that isn't for DGEN, that makes so many updates to DGEN understandable with no corresponding development for NGEN?



Yet, again, my point is that doesn't matter.

IF (and it's an 'if', I know, but I am not following why - see above question), but IF there is really no difference between a dev working on NGEN vs working on DGEN...or working on a single-player mission vs a co-op version of the same mission...then why would the single-player version ever get work?

After all, if the work had been done on NGEN, on co-op, on multiplayer, etc...the single-player-only users lose nothing. They still get the exact same immersion, campaigns, and missions they wanted...single-player...with AI. It just means that pilots who want co-op get that, too.

Whereas focus on SP-only means...we get SP-only, and MP ends up nothing more than 'air quake' for lack of development on it.

I can say from my experience in both vanilla and modded IL-2 that there are some advantages to playing user created missions, one is that you almost never see large formations online or lead and wing fighter combat. Through the mods some of the AI behaviors are more unpredictable and though the situation might be the same the outcome may not be, and with 4.11 on the horizon this old bird still has some life in it. I write missions in IL-2 all the time and it's always rewarding, online multiplayer is often not as much fun so I can always find something challenging in SP.

I've spent several hours looking at DGen and NGen over the years and I have never understood what it took to make an NGen campaign work.
In 6+ years I have yet to find any documentation whatsoever explaining the first thing about how an NGen campaign works either.


Wheels

Yes, except, again, that's exactly true of those same missions written for online play, too.

That's my entire point.

That mission you enjoy so much single-player...could be written (easily, actually - it's a pretty small tweak when looking at just single missions) for multiplayer, instead. Flying it solo, your experience would be literally identical - there would be no difference at all. But gamers who have a few guys from the office who want to go fly a mission together...can ALSO do that using the same mission, just hopping in different aircraft in the same flight - part of the 'large formations' or flying 'lead and wing' combat.



And that's part of my complaint.

WHY is NGEN so much more poorly documented? And supported? Why has so little development been done on it, and why is none being looked at?

What's the deal, there?

I suggest you broaden your horizons. There is more to life than DGEN or NGEN.

It is true that most onliners demand "balance" and "fair" planesets, but that is simply not representative of actual WW2 operations. Instead, that kind of approach is essentially joust-style or tournament-style competition. Indeed many squads use campaign generators in a similar way, to ensure a fair fight between combatants.

If you really want historical flavours in your MP campaigning, you need to embrace the concept that actual combat commanders actively sought out situations of advantage and, equally, avoided disadvantage, i.e. it was all about "unfair" fights. It is this concept that most on-line flying (and many SP campaigns) completely fails to grasp. That is the reason that SEOW was developed.

Cheers,
4Shades

I guess - taking a step back - I'm sure everyone here has flown Falcon 4.0, or Jane's F/A-18, right?

In Falcon 4, the campaign was truly dynamic...a full war going on that pilots could jump into any F-16 and fly missions. And the key was that this could be a 'pilot' OR 'pilots' (if running a server). There was literally no difference at all in the campaign between single-player or multi-player...just a question of how many of the fighter missions were humans or how many were AI.

In Jane's F/A-18, the campaign was totally scripted. But, again, playable multiplayer. Each mission had multiple F/A-18 flights, and any pilot could jump into any of the slots...human...or AI. Again, no real difference in experience between the two. All the campaigns, all the missions...you can play through either single-player or with multiple humans flying the various aircraft.

So...what about IL-2 makes this so much harder? I get that NGEN and DGEN are broken apart, but that's a good first question...why? And why the emphasis, given the choice between SP and SP+MP, on single-player-only? Haven't F4, F/A-18, etc shown that focusing on MP first allows an identically awesome SP experience, with co-op MP riding alongside to add value?

I'm still not sure what it is you feel is missing from Il-2? If there was some specific co-op scenario that you wanted, I'm sure we could help. |Your generalised aimless whining and misguided comparisons are simply unwarranted.

I'm fairly certain that you are wrong about all IL-2 users having flown the modern-era sims you mentioned. From the little I know of Falcon, the campaign environment is completely different from IL-2. An F-16 has an onboard radar that covers vast distances- perhaps further than a Stuka could fly? Also and perhaps more importantly, the Falcon 1 hour = 1 hour single map dynamic campaign is entirely fictionalised and probably extremely unrealistic.. do they really have every SAM in Korea present on the map? Would an equivalent IL-2 campaign have to have every AA gun and artillery piece on that front? It is very much easier to have a drop-in coop campaign when it is entirely made up, and when a 'war' is over in a few weeks at most.

If it is an equivalent to that style of campaign you are after, then all talk of NGen and DGen is irrelevant as they are quite simply not what you are looking for- have you any experience with either program? The dynamic elements are only that the front line changes and that stuff destroyed in one mission remains destroyed for some time. They are not 'living worlds,' which would involve too much materiel, and also require triggers, which no IL-2 campaign has yet.

If what you are looking for is some kind of co-op career style where you and one or more friends can go through the war together, then it hasn't existed up until now because it has been irrelevant. It has been so much a minority interest that no-one has asked for it. Co-ops have been created by the online squadrons- I believe that there have been some AARs posted from one just recently. It seems far easier for squadrons to test co-ops rather than single player campaign makers, who would have no means to. SEOW might also be what you want, if you can be bothered to have a look at it.

Lastly, the supposed community preference for DGen over NGen is a creation entirely of your imagination, possibly based on a few forum posts. DGen is marginally better off but the last update was 2006(?) whereas NGen was abandoned in 2004(?). The real work on updating all kinds of community produced missions is being done by Team Daidalos, who are making a triggers system that will be equally applicable to co-ops and single player missions alike. After this is released everyone's 'work' to date will be somewhat diminished.

I never flew Il-2 online, just European Air War, but what i can say is that online coop mission are a much better experience than single player, after all we are flying among real people interacting and when you see your mate being chase by an enemy plane and you try to save him with all the adrenaline running on your body it´s such a good feeling and immersive. But it's just my opinion.

Cheers

Generally you could take any "Campaign" set from the single player game and drop it in the coop folder and you would be able to fly it online as a co-op, and now in IL-2 you can add a couple spawnable airfields/airstarts and if you get shot down you can rejoin whereas before you would have to wait til the co-op mission was over. IL-2 still has a lot to offer.

I said sometimes it's more fun, the server I write missions for or did, has many missions I wrote as Moving Dogfight or respawnable Co-ops because the AI behaves more like real units up to a point, and ground targets aren't static. As for Ngen/Dgen the guy responsible for that was named Starshoi IIRC and he left the company and took the secrets of his code with him, I have an original copy of the IL-2 Gold pack with a complete manual which details how to assemble missions into campaigns, etc.. and although it's thorough it doesn't tell how it works just how to use it. No-one really can be said to be working on Dgen because they don't know either or at least they have been doing this for many years and still don't know very much, SEOW which I have flown is the best option for this and works with the modded game adding new aircraft and units that have been created and it creates a dynamic environment with units moving the front taking ground and attacking so that even airbases can be lost to enemy movements and aircraft can be lost to attrition or newer aircraft can be "earned" as the battle progresses in your favor

Starshoy is no longer involved with the development of DGen but Asura was able to get him to give him the source code for DGen recently and he has started updating DGen. There was no mention of the NGen code being given to him.

DGEN breakthrough? http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3402338/DGEN_breakthrough.html#Post3402338


Wheels

And, yes, I flew Falcon 4.0 and racked up over 1000 cockpit hours before IL-2 was released. It did have a dynamic campaign inside it that was for SP and MP both, and it was a very good campaign system. Enemy and friendly units appeared/disappeared within the players' moving bubbles (bubble distance was about 40-50 km I seem to remember) and included ground, sea and air units, and they were all mobile/active.

This Falcon 4.0 campaign was so good that I was astounded that IL-2 came to market with virtually nothing to offer in that regard. I still think IL-2 suffers from that decision, in that most pilots still come to this game for dogfighting. That means they focus on one thing and ignore all the truly rich possibilities that IL-2 now offers thanks to the modding community.

In Falcon 4.0, after Microprose went bust the associated modding community took over the code and released several outstanding mod patches to strengthen the netcode and build true realism into the start-up sequence etc. Very similar to what TD and others are doing now for IL-2, but 10 years earlier.

So, Xander, you now have all the information/leads you need to pursue dynamic campaigning with IL-2.

Cheers,
4S

Offline flyer here as well.

hehe, yeah that's one way to view it.

What you are missing is bleeding obvious from reading the thread title.
Just because you can't see the SP POV doesn't mean there isn't any.

I've been flying SP for years and years and years. 99.99% of my flying is SP.

I greatly appreciate all the work going into the SP aspect of the game.

Did you read the post that followed?

Because - yes, yes it does.

Focus on SP means you get ONLY SP, no MP improvement.

Focus on improving MP means the SP players get the exact same thing they would have got with an SP-only focus, but you get MP, too.

So why the focus on SP only? I don't get it.

It's like you are offered ten thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars and a pile of gold and diamonds. And you are saying "Oh, I'm only interested in money, so I'll just take the ten thousand dollars". It's a position I do not understand!

I have always flown 98% offline. When I have gone online I usually had a good time though. The inherent problems with online is it is just as unrealistic as offline is, just in different ways is all. For example they always have a good point about human players being more skilled and challenging than AI ( even with the advent of 4.11 patch ) and that's a valid point. But then online loses points due to the fact that online players fly off with no coordination and do their own thing. They don't exactly fly around in tight formation with other online players and use formation discipline. Score that against online. When I fly offline I fly in formation with the AI and in that sense it's more realistic. And our attacks are more coordinated. I've seen online players fly off in the wrong direction and never even get to take part in the battle because they wanted to wander off on their own and do their own thing. Many of them get completely lost.

Yes - and a lot evidently.

The nice thing is, that you often can adopt offline campaigns also for MP (so called online campaigns).
I prefer doing coops with one to four fellows, that I know and like. For me this is something inbetween offline and online air-quake.
Of course the setting (balance, theatre and such) is more like in offline play.

SEOW is great too.


P.S.: Does anyone know, what game version is to be used on Ghostskies.com?

Yep, sure do. Don't care for multiplayer in this sim at all.

Xander, I guess the question would make more sense if posed specifically to an experienced mission creator. Questions that come to my mind are:

Is a net connection required when playing MP missions?

Can you create cut scenes for MP missions? In some instances, the little "films" that precede missions help create atmosphere. It's a matter of taste, but there it is.

I agree that purely from the perspective of actually flying the MP missions, they seem no different from the SP ones, but I would reserve judgement until experienced mission creators weigh in and point out the differences and let us decide accordingly if SP missions have any advantages.

Precisely...

I got the original Il-2 about 1 week after it was released, and flew exclusively offline single-player for about 7 years. I then started flying online multiplayer (full button) exclusively for about 1 year, and have since then flown both offline and online. Each of them has attractions and features that I like, and each offers something a little different.

For those of you who fly exclusively offline, I'd suggest that you try some online flying with TeamSpeak or similar communications. If you get the right server (sorry, but as an admin., I'll plug the Warbirds of Prey family of full-switch servers here - ha ha), it's a great experience. You can still fly offline, but do online on occasion.

For those of you who fly exclusively online, I'd suggest that you try some offline flying. If you get the right single-player campaigns (here, I'll plug my single-player campaigns on Mission4Today/Downloads4Mods under the name JackStones - ha ha - but, to be honest, there are better ones), it's a great experience. You can still fly online, but do offline on occasion. For instance, there's some times of our lives where we can expect lots of real-life interruptions during a sortie; offline is much better than online in those circumstances.

Il-2 needs both a healthy offline population and a healthy online population. Singleplayer has some great features (and some drawbacks, admittedly), but the same applies for multiplayer, too. More overlap between the only-offline and only-online populations would probably improve both singleplayer and multiplayer.

+1 to MacStones. I've enjoyed IL2 MP in the past. I enjoyed it immensely in fact. Since then I've switched (mostly) to Rise of Flight and DCS--all exclusively multiplayer. This week I have had a blast playing the static MiG-3 career with 4.11. Going online right now would just mean having my arse handed to me over and over. What better way to reacquire an old skill than to enjoy every minute of single player action. Enjoy both as the designers intended. Oh, and to the OP: I strongly disagree that MP has been overlooked with 4.11. MP now has networked head movement, control movement, delayed bomb effects, spawn points, replenishment and much more that I'm either failing to recall or never knew.

Er, no, not exactly. Focus on single player would mean things like more immersive "between missions," in career mode, better career mode in general, AI ships and planes to flesh out the PTO and MTO, etc., things most online-only types don't seem to care about.

Hammer hits the nail on the head!!!!!!!!!! I still fly online for some quick twitch fun, but when I'm serious about flying, I choose to fly offline. This usually meant RoF, but now w/ 4.11, I'll be switching back & forth between the two.

HB

That is nonsense.

Also and even more importantly ... Coops can be run with AI & live pilots .. and with the MDS feature the lines between SP & MP are even further erased. Better AI is good for the sim. Period.