Well, word on the street is that Ubi had nothing to do with financing the project. It was 1C that got fed up after 7 years of development with 1-2 restarts... There is no such thing as a free lunch - if you have been developing a game for that long time and you still have a year of fixing until you are ready for release - heads will roll. At least that's how it works in the rest of the market economy.
A 3D engine is not something you can spend 7 years developing until the first release to market. Technology moves too fast these days so things that where not on the original design like 64-bit systems being the norm and 4+ cores in every modern gaming rig was just a dream in 2004 when they started developing CoD.
agreed ! but it is a bit hard to understand where it went wrong in those earlier days. oleg project managed his first endavour himself, and did so very well (producing a great project in a relatively time effective way). i would have expected him to be able to similarly manage the 2e project, even if more complex and advanced.
in the delays, i know of at least 3 different phases:
1) the original build was going to be an expansion/revamp of the old il2-1946 engine, which was abandoned 2 years after development. doing this was a good thing for all of us.
2) a group of programmers were fired from oleg's project because of unprofessional conduct and breach of confidentiality (not incompetency). shortly after that the RoF project seemed to make massive leaps forward in very short time. are the 2 related ? another rebuild of gfx and game engine was started following this period. dont think oleg can be blamed here, and this was probably the crucial time loss factor.
3) another 2 or 3 years into that next phase we start getting regular weekly updates again from oleg. this build dragged on for another 2 years and was then suddenly forced into release while incomplete and unfinished (the biggest problem being an under performing gfx engine). at this point there were obviously majo project management issues, and some incompetence in gfx engine programmers (or to few of them, or a lack of oversight and quality control on their work ?)
Having said this I really enjoy CoD as it is now, a bit more polish and fixing of memory leaks etc and we are close to what I was dreaming of back in the days when we heard the first rumors about Storm of War...
i suspect that means you have a high end cpu and gfx card with 2 gb ram, on medium level pc's (dual core i5's and 1 gb recent gfx cards) there are still significant performance issues (hopefully to be resolved in luthier's upcoming gfx engine rebuilt)
I hope the 3D engine refresh will get it good enough to release a sequel that gets a better reception that CoD (not that hard ;)) so they get the funding to continue expanding and enhancing the product.
agreed ! its our only hope for a decent ww2 flightsim at the moment
