Hi,
It appears that the lC team have folded ?

Could the following be done, it could be the break we have all waited for:-

Rowan washed their hands of their flight sim Battle of Britain, released the source code and the BDG improved the sim massively, so much so that Shockwave Productions picked it up and ran with it as Wings Of Victory. If UBI/1C are not interested in developing and fixing the mistakes then could they please do this and let the modders make it into what it should have been. Then maybe do a Shockwave and take it forward after all that free effort is poured into it by enthusiasts.

Why I wish something can happen is because I had been wondering if one and a half years on from release, its now ok to buy CloD as at the time it was unplayable for some and having just bought a winXP PC I found it needed DirectX10 which is not compatible with XP ! I followed for a while the issues and had hoped function and historical mistakes were to be fixed.

Obviously it was important to sort out the functionality, the frame rates etc first and foremost.
It appears this has happened according to a revisit by bitgamer http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2012/06/01/il-2-sturmovik-cliffs-of-dover-revisted/1,

that’s good news.

Secondly then would be to fix the errors and rid the SIM of the non BOB period mistakes.

I see we have an Oct 2012 patch for CoD, reading through it I don’t see the mistakes fixed, instead
* Added a Su-26 acrobatics plane.
· Added racing pylon models for air races.

What ??????

Yet I still see a MkII/V hybrid spitfire cockpit and not a Mk1. Surely in a BoB SIM we should be sitting in a Mk1 cockpit by now ? Is it not important to correct the mistakes such as non BoB cockpits and not focus efforts instead on adding a racing pylon aircraft ?

I still see mostly Mk2 spitfires in screen shots by users, again when can we have Mk1 Spitfires ? BoB was Mk1 not Mk2. I put Mk1 Spitfire a higher priority than a Su-26. Why have we e.g. DW coded 610 sqdn Mk1 spit skins on Mk2 aircraft when photos of these well know coded spits show MK1 aircraft ? We now have Mk1 spits flying at Duxford so anyone (including IL2 team) wondering what one looks like can study those, including their cockpits though enough books on the BoB show them anyway !

This doesn’t equate, at the price it costs we should have BoB basics corrected.

A few examples of basic mistakes :-

Chain Home towers missing a set of platforms, again something more important than a racing aircraft ?

Do we still have laser beams as was causing dissatisfaction with users or the twisting wriggling tracer trails as was actual.

I noticed other basic mistakes like pilots wearing peaked caps which even stayed on when they bailed out, MG15 Luft hand held machine gun gunsight was instead an American gunsight.
RAF tunics as a light blue, Luft as light grey (not blue grey), sheer basic errors amidst superb artwork, but Aircrew artwork is more important than some other items added.

I gather the engine noises have taken a move towards sounding better than the lawn mower engines we first had (that really showed poor initial approach) but there is room for improvement still it is said.

The lack of desire by the IL2 team to fix these basics leaves me stumped, they should have got the basics right first, the functionality, the basic aircraft, the engines, machine gun sounds, uniforms and other features users would be staring at or hearing regularly, then released it as such with a good campaign for those that want such, and added the extra glitter in with subsequent purchaseable add ons or as free updates with the SIM selling well with the basics in place, the glitter such as 1940 tanks and if we must have them Su-26 aerobatic non BoB aircraft.

Now it seems with this Clod support/demise there is no chance of such basics ever getting fixed, yet we have an Su-29, this just about sums it all up !

Maybe this could go the way of Rowan and we get to fix it ?

BOBC

There is no way whatsoever that 1C are going to release the source code for CloD, for the many reasons that have already been explained on multiple forums. Since you appear not to have read them, here's a summary of the more obvious ones:

(a) 1C/777 studios are now working on BoS, a new WW2 air combat sim. Why the hell should they hand the code over to a potential competitor?

(b) The code contains software from third parties (eg SpeedTree) - it would violate NDA's to hand over the code.

(c) The code is by all accounts a mess - why should they let anyone see how bad it was?

(d) The code is by all accounts a mess - why should they let anyone with no prior understanding of it waste their time trying to untangle it?

(e) ...need I go on?

It ain't going to happen...

A) and b) are certainly valid.

C) and d) not so much. Shockwave handed over the BOB2 code to the BDG and it was in a less than perfect state. Small groups of enthusiasts love nothing better than 'wasting their time trying to untangle' that sort of stuff. We sim fans are sick sick puppies!

H

The source code is not going to be released. Let it go already.

There are likely some parts of it that will be ported/redone/utilized in some ways for the new sim. 1C is still making sims.

Rowan let the source code go because they were done with flight sims altogether. There was zero chance any of it would be used again.

However, my crystal ball says if you wait patiently in 2020 1C may let the CloD source code out.




The Jedi Master

As much as I hate to say it you kind of had to have a worrysome thought this sim was going off the rails when gimmicks like Spit Girl and rogue pilots were touted as exciting new features. Not as bad as Brothers in Arms Furious 4 but what in the world were Luthier & Co thinking

What they did right:
Realize that they needed to expand the appeal of Il-2 by enriching the campaign experience.

What they did wrong:
Everything else regarding that.




The Jedi Master

As in gun cam footage? Because that is not the way tracers fly.

Hi Nattylced,
quite right, I didnt quite explain it right. I had seen pics of long laser beams of light and some were commenting on this . Obviously the rounds themselves travel pretty darn straight. I think it was duration of glow that seemed wrong. This set me on a quest and I have just been studying the following footage and its interesting :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aqJwHdMDK0 0.39 2.19 and 2.45 on the clock. we see the spiralling smoke in 0.39 sequence and the tracer within as bright streaks though not dead straight, they are a bit bendy, also seen to better effect in 2.19 and 2.45. Is this camera shake, if it were, the aircraft being filmed would also be an erratic mess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uhpoLJHTTc at 1.37 sees it from the filming aircraft cockpit and also tracer right to left from another passing aircraft for valuable comparison of duration to the exterior shots I recall from CoD. I see the tracer is not dead straight on that from the other aircraft but bowed and the length of the glow is useful to see. From the cockpit the glows are very short and thin. I think CoD may have them a little too fat in diameter. This is a HD video and more useful footage is seen at 2.09 2.37 and 3.05 all showing thin and short lengths, shorter than CoD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=Zv8rFPLN_Fg&feature=endscreen 6.55 and 7.05

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deo_TdUOhN0 4.02 and 4.25 shows us CoD tracer and it does seem a bit thick diameter wise. Fantastic vid by the way. Believable as real if it were black/white, the giveaway may be the tracer so adding to my thoughts. It would also be great to have the tracer squiggly smoke more evident as I dont see it e.g. at 4.25. Barrel rifling and air vortex playing a part in reality. That smoke corkscrews very quickly so is the bullet tumbling a bit with its back end to enhance the casting out of the smoke, rifling is supposed to make the bullet travel dead straight so its back end cant be tumbling even a tads worth ?....a job for mythbusters !

BOBC

COD's tracers did improve from release where they were almost too laser bolt like, nobody wants wiggle wiggle tracers though, even if i would of liked them in a gumcam replay.

I agree BOBC they should be a little more random in flight, not so perfect and less thick.

One thing COD got spot on i think was the tracer smoke, loved it.

@OP - Interesting thread:p

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=36712

+1

Spot on.

Hmmm. I guess I have to agree that Shockwave/A2A did hand over the BoB2 code,
but there was a lot more to that. The BDG had been working on Rowan's BoB1 code
for two years before Shockwave was given the contract to rework BoB1 for GMX,
and being a small house, they were very comfortable with cooperating with the
BDG rather than just running their own ship. So BDG guys were to varying extents
involved with the production of BoB2, along with the Shockwave people. Thus,
after Shockwave reached the end of their support cycle for BoB2, they more
accurately returned the care and feeding of the project to us, with thanks and
blessings, though they still retain ownership of the property.

(As it turned out, I myself had little involvement, as for a large portion of the
development period the test builds were running only on DX9 cards while I still
had a DX8 machine, and it required an update to the nVidia drivers to get my
machine to see much of the DX9-optimized rendering, which didn't happen til
quite late in the development. Also, I was a very new recruit to the BDG when
Shockwave came along and derailed my main interest in modding which was adding
France to the map to replace the lawn that Rowan had left. I had just begun to
learn how to edit the terrain when I was encouraged to help populate the BoB2 map
with 3D objects, a project which was ultimately fruitless, as beyond the many
difficulties with getting the builds to run, the placements we did were shortly
after rendered obsolete when the underlying textures were replaced with higher
res versions which no longer coincided with the locations of the placements,
so the latter were all deleted.)