Could someone ask Damon Slye if they are doing a version for the Amiga 500 too? I remember those heady days I passed hours of time when I was stationed in Korea in 91
playing RB, the steady green light as the floppy drive constantly accessed the floppy disk, the 4-5 frames per second action. But I still loved it. Anyway I will drag the amiga out of the shed and dust it off, and the old 1084S monitor. Hope they still work after 18 years.

RoF isn't based on IL-2 code. It's not got even a line of the IL-2 engine in it.

Early days yet, but I'll be eagerly awaiting screenshots as well. The impression I've gotten from Damon and the folks at Mad Otters is that the intent is for a serious sim rather than an arcade game. Here's hoping they pull it off! Lets face it... for a lot of us old simmers (that's SIMMERS, not SINNERS, Ming...) a modernized and updated Red Baron has been the holy grail of WWI flight simming.

Cheers m8!

WvB

If they plan on making a realistic detailed flight sim with a new gfx engine and dynamic campaign then its going to take some time, lots of time in fact.

I wouldn't be happy with less than ROF's physics and aircraft modelling, for WW1 aircraft Neoqb have set the bar for those aspects now.

And this is what I believe makes Russian developers the kings of flight sim development. JMO, but at this point, if the sim isn't being developed by a Russian development house, I wouldn't waste any time wondering what it's going to be like. I don't think the development cycle required for a (good) flight sim is possible anywhere else.

Eighty flyable aircraft types would take some time to model, and then there's the question if these planes would have 3D cockpits with them also. This to me is just one of those threshold questions, and just has me wondering what a sim of this ambitious intent could actually produce?

Perhaps something like a WWI IL-2:Birds Of Prey development, but utilizing old RB code, with either a modern graphics engine, or by licensing a complete (modern) game engine altogether, just sounds like a lot of backwards engineering involved.

Not gonna risk holding my breath, here. So many good ideas have fallen by the wayside. When I hear it's approaching beta I'll start following it's progress.

You know looking back now, and how the Gennadich Team (the original design house behind Knights Of The Sky/ROF) arrived at doing a WWI sim, was certainly influenced by the fact that WWI hadn't been done on the IL-2 engine yet. As it was, the IL-2 engine idea was dropped, and the KOTS/ROF team decided to design its own flight sim engine, which after a few years exhausted the Gennadich support, and the team/project had to find a new sponsor, or cease development.

In retrospect, and in my opinion, if not for the fact that the IL-2 series had never ventured back to simulate WWI, I truely believe that the team behind ROF would never had chosen to build a WWI era sim.

This is my belief as well. This is another reason why I tread very carefully when I find things about this sim that I don't like. I love the hobby too much and as far as I'm concerned, RoF is our Alamo.

IMO you all should just come back to flying FS-WWI...



A Red Baron 4 would be super sweet though, if done in the same spirit as Red Baron 2/3d... Maybe they can license the OpenPlane engine?!?! Wishful thinking there...

RoF is our Alamo

It's my Gettysburg in which I play Abraham Lincoln most of the time but not all of the time

Ming

LOL Jason!

Would almost be like going to some bird sanctuary in comparison.

Gustang, I'm inclined to think that the Digital Nature engine and thereby Neoqb are lke the Alamo, but I respect your observation in direct reference to ROF. I doubt Neoqb is going to make money on ROF, but if they can pay the bills and stay in business, then the ND engine and the company's development opportunities might continue. With more retrospective contemplation, and as much as I love WWI, it's not a period that anyone designing a sim-grade game should contemplate as a first choice by far. I just hope Neoqb survives, and can maintain some standing in the sim world for it to be able to go forward from here.

That's probably a much better analogy, Ming. I don't mean to imply that I believe RoF is our last bastion of hope, yet doomed.


FR,

I hope they constructed the sim engine in such a way that will allow them to license it out to third parties. Sure seems like a lot of effort to not do so.

Gustang, if they have or can, I would imagine the instructions would read like Russian.

I'm not quite getting that one mate...

Minor correction for clarity's sake. RoF doesn't use IL2 code, they said they would when they initially announced the project but decided to use a new engine later.

Similarly, when i referred to Oleg's new engine i meant the one that is going to be used in Storm of War:Battle of Britain, his next line of flight sims. According to him, the game was 80% complete as of his last SimHQ interview (during the summer or spring i think?) and what they have left is to model the ships and various other secondary things. So, if this is true the SoW engine is complete and maybe it would be possible for another developer to license it for use in a sim of his own.

Anyway, it would be awesome to have a new Red Baron title running on an up to date engine.

I also like the idea proposed by Catfish about a "wind tunnel" utility and i've been advocating it from time to time on Oleg's official forums.
Every FM out there is an approximation of the real thing, because our PCs are simply not powerful enough to run everything at 100% realism. I bet we could simulate true to life dynamics, but not with the graphics, sound and other things happening around you that we are used to seeing in a flight sim. Maybe if we relegated the horizon to a single line and our flyable to a cross-shaped vector graphic it would work, but it would be 21st century flight dynamics modelling with 1980s graphics. So, there need to be some shortcuts taken.

Now, let's imagine we have a new plane creation software suite. First, the 3D modellers design a new flyable whichever way they want (3D studio and so on). Then, the FM guys import it into this software suite, run the wind tunnel tool and let it crunch numbers for a few hours or even days. Heck, if it can run in network mode and use 10 PCs instead of just one then it would be even better (think distributed computing a la Seti@home for flight sims).

This utility would be as close as it gets to real aerodynamic modelling, basing it's computations on the shape, size, wheight, wheight distribution and horsepower for a given airframe, based on the imported 3D model and maybe even other properties of the materials used. For example, you could have a materials toolset, a database of properties for materials commonly used in aircraft construction, from wood and linen to aluminum and steel. This could be used to calculate the DM as well as wheight and wheight distribution for the FM. Marking different areas and objects in the 3D model with different flags, you could assign those preset properties to them and tell your software that for example, these spars on your Hurricane are made of metal, but the covering is fabric and so on, letting it calculate the important bits.

So, after a week of having a dozen i7 based PCs working on an network crunching numbers, we would now have an almost true to life virtual copy of the airframe in question. One that we can't use in any flight sim because it will grind everything to a halt that is. This is the really nifty bit, our little software suite would come equiped with one more final function, one to approximate and extract the final simulated FM and DM from the real one. Then, you could import those parameters into the sim and have an aircraft that flies as close as possible to the real thing, limited only by the engine's capabilities.

It would be a lot of work to code something like this and i guess we won't see this for years to come, but with the longevity that comes from modding flight sims, some developers have started talking about such prospects in the future. Instead of doing manual calculations, approximations and coding the FM/DM, they would have to code such a tool once and let it do the dirty work. From that point on, people could create a flyable plane per week if they knew the materials used in its construction, engine rated power and had an accurate 3D model of it. Well, we can dream, can't we?

Anyone else's heart sink? In software the first 90% of any project takes 50% of the time, and the last 10% takes 50% of the time. Always. If he's only at 80% we've got a good few years to wait yet.

Yep, that's right!

And that's the engines, not the stuff that plugs into it.

When we look at Rise of Flight, we see an engine that's 100% done, from netcode to FM/DM/AI.

Indeed, what's missing is probably 3% of the sim - Settings/user interface, campaign improvements, DF map capability, etc. It's also really the only part of the sim users really see.

I used to build statistical models that tracked trends and helped in making projections. I would spend almost as much time in the presentation of the data and conclusions as I would putting together the analysis itself! Not a single decision maker cared one whit about how the sausage was made (other than casually), only that they could understand and apply the end points within ten to twenty minutes, from slide to policy decision.

X-plane builds it's own flight model from the design of the plane. It has a plane maker utility and after you design the plane, it will determine the flight model from the design.

Does anyone else here have any experience with X-plane?