Wasn't PF also a Ilya child?

yep, if i remember right Oleg had to bail him out with PF, pity hes not around to sort CLOD.

BOB was first announced by Oleg in 2003 to be released by the end of 2005. Luthier had been working on an aircraft carrier and pacific island maps that continued to grow until I suppose Oleg and Luthier decided to make it a full addon. I remember being very pissed hearing that Olegs crew would be working on the Pacific addon which was going to delay BOB indefinitely. Pacific fighters was released in 2004 and BOB was delayed until 2006 with the UBISOFT announcement.

Having significant problems with the BOB build they probably realized there was still monies to made with the old engine as they continued adding another three paid addons that ended with IL2-1946 in (2008?), while only a skeleton crew working on BOB.

Finally with all of Olegs crew working full time on BOB they still couldn't get the job finished due to personnel, technical, etc etc etc problems and the publishers probably ran out of patience and forced the developers to release what was done. What was done was not insignificant and there was enough sales to warrant further support from the publishers. If sales were low you can be sure that the sim would have died long before now.

An unfinished sim will always have unfinished features, don't even thing about optimizations, and bug fixing. Luthier has stated he fully understands the angst and they are still working on COD and have the continued support of the publishers and managers.

The development could fold tomorrow or last another ten/twenty years, its anyones guess. What the developers have accomplished so far is quite significant, with community and mod communitys support, it could evolve into something we all want.

Back on topic. The CoD reviews were terrible and Il-2's were good. That is a significant difference. CoD is the most unfinished software I have ever purchased and warranted the poor reviews. Sure sims are never finished completely, but this sim is WAY less finished than anything I have ever seen. It does not even allow the videocard to use AA or AF. That is very poor indeed. It is totally fair to compare an unfinished product with a finished product if they are both released products. Thats what you get for throwing messed up software on the market.

It may have the potential to be one of the great sims, but it certainly is not even close right now. I am beginning to think this will take years to fix. I will wait for that and buy a sequel if they do fix it. However, I will not buy another product to get CoD fixed. That would show a blatant disregard for customers and would also be very unethical. In some jurisdictions it would be considered fraudulent. You should not be forced to buy a sequel to get a finished product that you have already bought in good faith. That is a scam. Hope they fix this because it would be nice if they did.

Il-2 was not the first flight sim to have a developer who talked with his customers, not by a long shot.

Boy that brings back memories, I remember many times calling sim companies on my home landline like Sierra (Dynamix A-10, Red Baron I), SSI (Silent Hunter I) and Shrapnel Games (M-4) for support and many times actually talking to one of the game designers for hours on end So I do get a kick out of when some people say PC simulators are a niche product today, If these products are considered niche today then just what the heck was it back then? But RoFfan is definately correct as Oleg or Luthier definately wasn't the first to do this PR via a forum or PM, but maybe one of the more recent crop.

Shows my age!

I only got Internet in '99 ...I do remember people being shocked by the propensity of Oleg to actually talk to people (relative to many other developers).

I guess things were even more open (and smaller) back in the early 90s!? It might explain why some of those sims were so good.

Yes it definately was an interesting time for simulations and games in general. I didn't have internet back then but I do remember seeing it, was nothing like it is today as I think it was all user groups. But the companies back then were awesome in their support. I had some games back then that I just could not get to run no matter what changes I made in my configsys exc or autoexecbat files (remember doing that guys ). After a call to tech support and getting help many times they would send me a free 3.5 boot-up disk with several preconfigured configsys and autoexec files on it for booting up my PC to play their games. While I definately prefer what we have today compared to what it was back then the only thing I do miss was the customer support and like I said being able to sometimes talk directly with a game designer.

Ah... the boot disk. That brings back the memories!
There are several games from that era which I never got working (one of the reasons I tolerate a bit of tweaking on CoD).

Yes, the Internet was different - a handful of cryptozoology pages, almost no qualified information (or information on most subjects), and no matter what you typed in the search engine you were redirected to pornography... those were the days! ...Tedious tedious days! The Internet of 1995 was like the Wikipedia of 2002!

This implies that we were searching for something other than pornography, which is theoretically possible but improbable.