Acid test

There is, as Ian says, a lot to like about BoS, even in these early stages of development and it is clear to see it's RoF lineage. However the acid test, ultimately, will not be how the aircraft perform in isolation but how they compare, one to another. The feeling of flight in the Lagg is great and it performs in a believable manner. It will be interesting to see, and possibly the bit of the sim that the Developers will be most nervous about next week, how the lagg compares to the F4. With no shooting there will, inevitably, be lots of testing, one aircraft against the other, performance wise. Ultimately if there are found to be deficiencies in the FM's it will matter less if all the aircraft suffer to the same degree for the same reason than if they are isolated problems. To put it another way, it matters not if one aircraft rolls 2-3 seconds faster than it should,if they all roll 2-3 seconds faster than they should. The problems arise when errors in calculating FM's give a performance that negates the benefits, deficits of different aircraft. There was, rightly or wrongly a lot of griping about this in RoF, hopefully with far more fulsome data on the subject aircraft and far less guesswork we will be able to see the true nature of the digital nature engine and how well it performs given that there is far less guess work involved in creating the FM's. It would be interesting to hear from their creator, I'm sorry I forget his name, about how it compares producing the FM's for BoS as opposed to those for RoF. Presumably it's far, far easier.

Even if they create perfectly historical FM's for each aircraft, there will be a large portion of the community that believes it doesn't suit their version of reality. That said they don't have to make it perfect, because nobody can accurately say what perfect was. It just needs to be believable enough, within reason, for the majority on both sides of the conflict to enjoy the contest.

What Chivas said should be put in as a pop-up on all flightsim forums.
Amen.

^^This and ...THIS

Agreed 100%.

Amazing ... well said!

Well said.

Agree with the above posts.

I also hope the devs don't succumb to the 'make it fair' camp either, so that they avoid nerfing particular aspects of an aircraft type to make it more of an 'even' playing field for the online crowd.

WB.

What Pat Wilson said about Rise of Flight is that no one expects the FMs to be perfect, they just can't be obviously wrong. But in Rise of Flight there are some FMs that are obviously wrong, and nothing was done to fix them before 777 moved on to BoS. I think that's what Damocles is getting at. It looks like some here have never played RoF, so maybe you wouldn't know.


Still a lot of fun though.

This too.

They have specifically said in one of the videos that they are not interested in that kind of balance and that to kill an F4 in a LaGG you might need to get a pair of LaGGs above him.

Yes, no play balancing please. But I'm sure the dev's aren't interested in that.

I agree that the relative performance of the planes is the most important factor. Hopefully the dev's have learned from their ROF experience.....

I think that what he was saying though is that no matter how good you get it someone will think something is nerfed. I don't know anything about WWI aircraft performance so I can't comment on it .. but the WWII stuff has more documentation and from what I have seen over the years folks have brought up charts to verify even conflicting opinions on what a particular aircraft should or shouldn't do.. I think it will be easier to get it closer to reality in the WWII birds.

That has nothing to do with Damocles' concern, sorry. You need to know about WW1 aviation and to have played Rise of Flight to understand.

What I'm saying is that, to a certain extent the accuracy of the FM's is irrelevant.

The DCS P51 (until the 190 comes out)and Accusim aircraft in FSX can be as brilliant as you like and the developers can wax lyrical about the accuracy of the depiction, simmers can rave about this feature and that. However it isn't until you compare one aircraft to another, head to head, that the true accuracy of the depiction becomes clear.

For example, you might have a developer put out an aircraft that they claim is within plus or minus 10% of the performance of the actual aircraft. In other words it's 90% or more correct. That sounds impressive, and everyone may be thrilled with the aircraft and how it behaves (I know, I exaggerate, you can't please everyone all of the time, that would be foolish). Let's call this aircraft(a), unfortunately instead of having a top speed of 360 mph it can only fly at 330 mph, a deficit of about 8%, within the developers margin of error. This state of affairs presents no problems and everyone enjoys the feeling of flight, sounds, visuals, indeed the whole package is a roaring success. However the developers, a few months later, come out with aircraft(b), it also has the same high fidelity flight model and the package is produced to the same standard as the former. However aircraft(b) just happens to be 10% faster than it should, flying at 330 mph instead of 300, still within the developers 90% accuracy claim, but faster, none the less. Aircraft (a) and (b) are arch rivals and matched up very well, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Aircraft(a)'s only real strength however lay in the fact that it was faster than aircraft(b), that in every other respect, beat it hands down. Neither aircraft is significantly wrong and both lie within the developers claims of 90% accuracy however aircraft(a) now has no historical strengths and cannot compete in a manner that might have been the norm during the events depicted.
Of course if both aircraft were out by the same margin, in the same direction then, despite arguments as to the real figures, both aircraft could still play to their historical strengths.

Obviously the figures and percentages given here are purely notional, and exaggerated, but never the less, even with claims of high fidelity FM accuracy(90% or more, they can be seen to very quickly distort the whole historical balance of the events trying to be depicted.

This was unfortunately, possibly because of the limited source data for the developers to work with, a real bone of contention in RoF and the tinder for many an argument within the community.

It is all well and good producing a brilliant depiction of an aircraft in it's own right, but if how it fits into a wider canvas, such as a combat flight sim, is ignored then it will inevitably shine that little less brilliantly.

Just don't give me AI that does a right-hand spiral down to the deck every time like RoF still does.
PULEASSE!!

Of course forums "moaning" dont justify they make "balanced" FM's.



Is unreal expect perfect FM in simulators - although some believe possible... what should be expected is that reported performance differences between different planes are maintained, independent if the type A is capable of flying at 704.99 KM/H just as some factory test graph shows...

20 KM/H more or less dont make one ACE.

Sokol1

I certainly don't want balanced FM's. I was just saying that even supposedly perfect FM's, will still generate dissatisfaction in the forums, because there are more than a few different "official versions" published by different countries with their built in propaganda agenda's, and enthusiasts "imagined versions" of each aircrafts capabilities.

Loft is a very straight-talking developer, and he's emphatically stated that the aircraft will be modeled to how they actually performed - no tweaks to make a plane more "balanced" or "fair."

Is the construction of FM's for a "Combat flight sim" as much an art as a science ? In a stand alone product maybe the science can take centre stage because it's only quality standard is itself. Do numbers alone do justice however when one aircraft is pitted against another, numbers that might suggest aircraft performance testing is an exact science and that building an aircraft is simply an addition of those numbers ?

I wonder if possibly Loft (the RoF FM creator) was too systematic in his creations in RoF. He gathered all the available data, plugged it into his dynamic model and Hey Presto !!! Maybe a tweak here, a tweak there to make up for incomplete or questionable data, but essentially that is how they were defined. Maybe, as an engineer, not enough thought was given to the Art ?

Balance is an interesting word, thought, notion, possibly with negative connotations. Using RoF again as an example a couple of points stand out for me. Apart from one or possibly two aspects, that I can think of, balance didn't seem to come into play in the creation of RoF, the cards fell, scientifically, were they fell. The exceptions are the rates of fire, after the weapons revision, both sides were given belt fed guns that fired at approximately the same rate. However specialist books on the subject and indeed the person who did all the creating and testing for them used a rate of fire for the German Maxim as about 400rpm, as opposed to the Allied Vickers that fired between 5-600rpm, even higher when fitted with a muzzle booster ( the whole rate of fire reasoning is complex, technical and not worth going into detail about here). The second possible balancing was within the damage model rather than the FM. For no obvious reason some aircraft were far more fragile and prone to battle damage than others. Again, with regard to the last point, an art or a science ? Balance doesn't have to be all on the part of the developers though, flight simmers are just as prone to balancing things out. You were as likely to meet a DR1 in RoF as a Camel, it was rare, if ever, to find a situation in which the Camel was included but not the DR1. The Pup was often disregarded because it was (rightly) considered to be too Uber. You could find yourself in situations where the opposing plane sets included a majority of late war German aircraft against a majority of Allied mid war aircraft and not including a numerous Allied type i.e the Camel. The Fokker D7 was also generally ignored because it didn't fit everyone's perceptions and the D7f was used by default in it's stead complete with its WEP, sorry I mean altitude throttle. So balance is not exclusively developer driven, but it does highlight the point that if the balance of power seems to be at fault in a non-historical manner between opposing sides then the community will make their own rules.

You're giving this way too much thought.

What I want to know is, can I run away from all German planes in an La-5 if it gets too hot? The ability to bug out is vastly under-rated

Well don't forget that the specifications you see for the aircraft are approximate specifications when compared with real life.

Aircrafts can perform as much as (good) fuel, quality spare parts, good mechanic and unpredictable circumstances allow them. So having a plane in +/-10% margin is perfectly acceptable.

You fly the plane in GENERAL way it was designed for Doesn't mean it will perform as advertised (as in real life :-) )

Still, 90% of kills were surprise kills. Poor fellow didn't even saw what hit him.. No matter was it with 330 or 360kph dive..

^^ Great post!

....and even if everything was science, folks would still swear it was wrong because it turned out they couldn't get the same results as Yeager, Safanov, Rudel, Bong, or any number of pilots that actually did the flying in WWII.

Note that I listed Aces; the smart guys never point out the pilot that slugged through the war and came away with half a kill as an example on why the sim is wrong.

Let's look at the I-15bis and the I-16 for illumination. Both were woefully obsolete at the start of WWII, and really had no business squaring off against 109's in 1941. On paper they should have been decimated - and in large measure they were. Until we get to Murmansk, where Safanov and his merry band made an incredible showing in both, due to training and the nature of the tactical environment. Their record improved, of course, when they ditched their obsolete aircraft in favor of the much more superior Hurricane IIb and P-40 in 1942.

The P-39 was castigated as nearly worthless in the Pacific and on the Western front by the Allies, but the Soviets loved them. The conventional wisdom was that they used them primarily in ground attack, but that was a false premise. All Soviet aircraft had a ground attack role, but the P-39 was used to great effect as an air superiority fighter by the Soviets. The difference was strategic altitude and tactical considerations. The P-39 suffered above 10,000 feet, which is why the USA and the Commonwealth couldn't make them fit into the template of useful aircraft - but on the Soviet front, everything was driven down below 10K thanks to the focus on close air support. The IL-2's were low, so the escorts were low and the 109's and 190's had to come low with them.....not to mention the JU-87's and Ju-88's, which weren't high altitude.

Ten percent either side is okay, because most players are so far away from getting even 70% efficiency out of their aircraft that it doesn't matter.

Boy ... it just gets better and better. Well said Troll ... maybe some cant suspend disbelief, the rest of us thrive on the visual feast offered to us.

1. Loft doesn´t do the FMs. ( Andrey «Petrovich» Solomykin does the FM - the SU25T was his first "new generation" FM. DCS is still based on this. ROF was his next step ahead (compare spins and ground model !)

2. The FMs came out very close to the data they had. The problem was to find the "correct" data.
(the argumentation of one community member, that the Camel got "prototype values" and the Albies test data from allied tests was quite believable - they just didn´t have other data).

The test data they have from WW2 aircraft are much better. I don´t expect any of the WW1 data problems.
The FM is outstanding and far ahead of others in the market. BOS will proof this.

There are some people that will never be satisfied with the FM of any plane and blame the apparent short-comings on this spurious nerf instead of looking in the mirror and accepting their own limitations.
A good example of this is Planetside 2 a game I've been dabbling in for the past year; Three factions with uniquely balanced weapons and still some people whine that this or that faction has the 'best' weaponry.
What is hilarious is when the same people still end up getting waxed when they try a different faction with their perceived advantageous weapons.
Of course it doesn't occur to them that they are the common denominator in all this, so then they start to whine about hackers and so it goes on...

+1

However, we can't be too quick to castigate the fellow with corrections and a list of .pdf's worth of evidence to show when something isn't right - the rest of us need them to make sims better.

There is a point where it becomes perfidious - if one is relying on 30 kph difference in top speed as the margin for victory or survival, one is already dead. Bullets and cannon shells go much faster than that. That's where we throw the flag and gently remind that it's just a simulation made for entertainment.

I have no idea what color the throttle handle on a 109/F4 should be. But I'm grateful that there's a guy out there that does and points it out to the developers.

If my 0,02 € are allowed. I think the underlying issue is the duel menthality, the absolute drive for competitive gaming. And if the output isn't as expected (read: the player got shot down) it has to be the FM/system that's faulty, not the input. The FM is both scientific enough to allow for hard facts but also etheric enough to allow any kind of personal interpretation - which usually results in the nastinesses we've all seen over the years.

Which is why I have gotten out of online flying and focused on trying to emulate believable air ops offline. At least I won't have to deal with self-poclaimed aces who can't think beyond the next dogfight and fostering their "throatache" (urge to gain medals in WW2 Luftwaffe slang).

I like "throatache" guys.

They let me appreciate the damage model built into my aircraft!

Plus there is no higher praise in a server than to be accused of cheating; it lets me know that I'm finally at the level of skill that I'm capable of pulling a few surprises. It took me three years in RB3D to be accused of it, four in IL-2, and two in RoF.

The key is to ignore the chat window and only work on private TeamSpeak channels where an adult has admin control and a willingness to ban.