Just catching up on the news about Longbow2 in the helicopter forum, Let the modding begin!

Pretty exciting stuff, and I like that a sim a lot, but in my humble opinion, all the best artist and will in the world won’t ever match EECH/AH, or even Gunship, in the graphics dept.

It will be interesting following the progress, though. I just hope it won’t steal too much attention or effort from this side…. lol
jsk

IMHO all simmers... well at least helicopter simmers should be as a one team, cooperating and possibly not competing.

To be honest the challenge is even not fair. Those files, the modders are trying hard to unlock, are double, triple or quadruple locked. The reason I think - to prevent competing programming and developing teams to acquire easy valuable intelectual property in those days when the games were created. But those were proffessional programmers, codders and we are just humble hobbysts. To open it is one thing, to do anything with it later, quite another.

So to sum it up, the EECH has a distinct advantage in form of SC available out on the open. But LB2 is exciting and also fine sim. And so is the Gunship! We all should, I think, to try to participate and contribute to all of those fine sims and in any way we can.

The thing I realy like about LB2 is that you can multicrew a single bird on MP. If you could do that in EECH, this game would be even more awesome.

Let the pilot worry about flying the bird, and the gunner about engaging targets. Just like in real life.

Too bad EA shut down Jane's. I still think that they made the best "serious" sims out there. Jane's F/A-18 is still the best sim in my hard drive IMHO.

I think that too. But to be honest I feel if more such a "serious" sims were produced no one would have the chance to try them and really enjoy. Not to mention all the fun trying to improve/mod some aspects of them.

My consollation in the fact that not much is being produced now is that at least we have a some breating time to enjoy some of the best of them from the past as they really deserved.
Lt's face it. I think we really have been oversaturated in the last years - too many in such a short span of time.

As far as 2 men setup for EECH, I agree totally. In Gunship! that was for me the nicest surprise when I discovered fun in flying in CP/G position.

Oh, I agree completely about oversaturation of sims. The thing, though, is that they've been beating the WWII genre to death, and ignoring the rest.

That's why sims are getting neglected. Everyone is tired of the 109 Vs Spit & Zero Vs Corsair thing. I am so sick of it! that's why I pay my subscription to WW2 online every month, but haven't flown in months.

Nothing in the chopper line since EECH (Comanche 4 doesn't count.) Thank God for the devs keeping EECH fresh. Great job folks!

Nothing on the Jet side of the house since LOMAC (Wings over Vietnam is just an add-on to SFP1.) Luckily, the Flaming Clifs add-on to LOMAC is coming out the 5th. Yay, can't wait.

Ubi, EA, MS, give WW2 a rest already and give us some variety, please

I've never posted on this forum before, but I would like to support and explore the statements made by Polak involving trying to unite efforts of helio sim (and even aircraft sim) modders.

This could be possible by looking at something like a standard file interchange format. Wouldn't it be neat if everyone developed terrain, skins, 3D objects, etc. using some type of standard and then exporters could be written to the different sims? Of course, many times this would only be possible with sims in which the source code has been released, but there may be exceptions. Then, not only could modders' efforts be made collaborative, but it might also take us closer to an "integrated electronic battlefield" which I believe was once the dream of the Jane's Simulations franchise.

At the very least, by adhering to standards we could make use of standard terrain maps available in the Digital Elevation Map (DEM) format which are freely available for much of the world, 3D models developed in 3DS, etc.

I apologize if this is too divergent from the topic of this thread, but I would be interested in discussing this with anyone..I would like to hear the feelings of the modders, too.

Thanks!

KE

I agree, however coop multiplayer, dynamic campaign and just good old all round game play make this one tops in my book.

Now we have our own forum to beat it's drum..