What also hurts is the complete lack of variety possible. However creative the mission or dedicated it's creator, it's still just planes sneaking over the front and other planes sneaking up on the sneakers. Without ground forces (and the game's very strict object limitations) most of the creativity is lost to the player, much to the sadness of the mission creator. This means that there is little motivation to spend dozens of hours creating and testing only to get the reaction, "meh". (I'm talking strictly multiplayer here. Vander's "St. Mihiel" shows that in the right hands, RoF mission creation can yield amazing results.)

Maybe FlyingNutcase could come to our rescue! I don't know if he plays RoF, but his Il-2 instructional videos are great.

His site has been down since October.
The last I heard he intended to get the site running again but that was in Novemeber.

The videos can still be seen on YouTube though.
http://www.youtube.com/user/FlyingNutcase


Wheels

Unfortunately, as indicated above, proficiency in the IL2 FMB is neither here nor there when it comes to RoF.

With Il-2 users were encouraged to develop and distribute freeware campaigns, the commercial campaigns were made available somewhat later and many weren't making much of a contribution to the future of the game, though the better of them added a few maps that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Rise of Flight is different in that the developers seem to want to retain control of the release of campaigns, the sale of which make a direct contribution to future expansion of the range of aircraft available.

The Rise of Flight editor is considerably more complex than the Il-2 editor, this is possibly because the Il-2 editor isn't very good. It wasn't very good even by the standards of 1998, it is perhaps the one aspect of the game where CFS2 was the better product. However, Il-2 was basically a ground-attack game when it was being made, and this led to there being a lot more scope for missions. Rise of Flight could be considered to have been very dogfight oriented, until quite recently. It has no AI-only planes.

I wouldn't say that the editor is a problem so much as the limited variation in the existing range of planes, and more importantly the current condition of the game, with development and sales very much still ongoing.

I could accomplish anything I needed to with the IL2 FMB, the only thing I felt I was lacking was random triggers and the ability
to cut and paste things. Air combat missions are not THAT complicated as mentioned above. You need to tell the planes where to go and when, and who is going to show up and when. Objects should be easily accessed through a menu. Same with ground units. All this can be accomplished within a fairly simple and intuitive user interface.

I disagree that the IL2 mission builder "wasn't that good" on the contrary, it was easy to use and powerful enough in most aspects.
I think it was quite excellent, though lacking in some areas compared to Falcon 4.0's mission builder.
The original Falcon 4.0 mission builder is another example of a powerful, easy to use and intuitive piece of software.

It's fine if a piece of software is powerful, but nobody cares if the time needed to learn it makes utilizing it prohibitive.
IL2's mission builder allowed me to concentrate on staging, timing, atmosphere, effect, immersion. There's a lot to be said
for that. The result of IL2's mission builder is that we had a TON of great user made content available. I created a load of
online CoOp missions that I hosted myself quite often. The ease of use that the IL2 FMB offered allowed great, mission oriented CoOp play, and we were able to create at least a few new, high quality, highly detailed missions weekly.

Aside from CoOp missions, I myself created the "Liberation Skies" offline campaign which became quite well known during it's heyday.

I peeked RoF's mission builder, and the word "bloat" doesn't even begin to cover it.
It needs a rewrite if we're ever going to see the kind of user created content that we did with IL2.
In any case, I'm glad at least a few people have time in their lives to crack it. I wish I did.



Cheers
Gambit