Wow, I came to check recent observations on the recently released Stalingrad map and after viewing the last three pages I am just giving up and moving on. I normally do this quietly but I have to admit that it's frustrating when otherwise interesting forum topics degenerate into rigid opinions (or vitriol) tossed back and forth amongst a small group of posters.

Sigh.....I think I just did it myself, didn't I?

Derek

I'd like to see some one make a video of the street view as they taxi through the city Lol. I'll see if I can put something together. Also I'm going to figure out how long it takes to fly one side to the other.

Anyone familiar with RoF can easily observe how nice the textures look for intact buildings and towns and how rough they look in the carcass towns along the NML. Stalingrad seems the same. I figure that a game that's 36% complete gets a pass.

I have them all on my HD and will keep to have them all on my HD.

Love you all Sim makers , God Bless You, please take my money!

Special thanks to ATAG boyz - if you find the model - please take my money too what you did with CLOD is beyond this world!

Wow...I get back to read this topic after couple of days and my god!!

About the Stalingrad map: Very impressive...to be WiP. The smoke is...awesome and no hit on FPS when flying by...

About object limitation on BoS (speculating here): If I can put in RoF 3500 static objects plus 150+ AA/trucks in a MP mission played by 50+ people, with the famous 50 km radious, without problem (yeah I have beeing building missions for 2 years), I can guess the limit will be higher on BoS.

I have never seen a flight sim compared to the Obama care website..but CloD certainly took that crown

CloD can take more AI planes in the air ? I don´t agree, Jason. BoS has AI planes in the air. The AI is flying the same planes than the players. CloD has UFOs, drones or whatever. But a plane is a plane in a flightsim, if it has a FM. I prefer one single BoS AI plane (although the AI is not finished) than a thousand of that CloD things, looking like planes though.
In BoS I can do a formation landing as wingman of AI. I tried that in CloD. It just "stopped" in the air. Same in climb. Suddenly it zoomed away. What sense makes dogfighting with this things ? This is no simulation for me. Nice looking game perhaps.

And if they don´t have a real FM, they don´t need CPU power. No wonder there can be thousands in the air. The same reason, why there can be billions of trees on the ground. If you fly through them, they even go through your pit. I don´t care about the better textures of the trees in my pit either.

STalingrad received some colour with the recent update. Nice improvement.

Nice indeed, new colours and some debris here an there.

Flight simmers like to b*tch like no other

New version of the Stalingrad map showing the Tractor Factory.

Looks good!

I like the new textures. They do seem to knock my frame-rate down just enough for me to think about dialling back the AA filter from 8x to 4x though.

Yes Juergen, you are correct in pointing out the difference between the two systems. Of course I know the difference, I was just talking sheer numbers or "planes". Arguing which method is better is pointless because it is a subjective topic. As you pointed out, ours focuses more on the AI's ability to actually "fly" the planes and keep them in the air. And to do so there is a trade-off in the numbers game. There is always room for improvement when it comes to AI in all sim titles. The real challenge is to allow our complex AI to pilot the planes as they do, but couple that with a lot of human-like decision making and complicated combat aerobatics while not impacting the CPU much. That's something I know our customers want and have wanted for a long time. No simple answer though. Takes a talented programmer or team of programmers. AI us something we still care about for BOS and ROF and will always look to improve in that area.

Jason

No sir that's Barrikady with Ludnikov's island behind. Walked round it in October. But yes, the new map looks awesome.



Barrikady Factory, Volgograd by Ian_Boys, on Flickr


Barrikady Factory, Volgograd by Ian_Boys, on Flickr


Ludnikov's Island by Ian_Boys, on Flickr


Ludnikov's Island by Ian_Boys, on Flickr

I won't really get into the whole CLoD versus BoS debate because it's just pointless.

I will say that I have a robust system that can run any flight sim decently except Cliffs of Dover. I gave up on trying to tweak it to run decently after about two weeks. And no, I haven't downloaded mods for it - a product should work out of the box and not rely on customers to fix it. Rather than get upset, I just uninstalled it and chalked it up to being something that just wasn't for me.

If folks love the sim, good for them!

BoS is shaping up to be exactly what it was billed to be - RoF turned WWII. I don't look at it as a replacement of the IL-2 series any more than I looked for RoF to be a replacement for RB3D; they're different sims trying for different things.

I like RoF for the feeling of flight and the subject matter, being a WWI aviation enthusiast. I fly it in single player almost exclusively due to time available and time of day I'm behind the virtual stick.

I'm waiting very patiently for the IL-2 to make it to beta in BoS, as that's why I put my money down. I won't be interested too much in multi-player in the traditional way - I want to ground pound and avoid ground fire. Hopefully I'll have some fighter escort to keep the Messers off me.

We'd all like to have better ground detail in every game and sim we play. In flight sims they do matter, but only to a point. At a hundred miles an hour or more things get a bit fast to the eye, which is why detail can (and is) often shirked a bit. What I would like to see is more distinctive bits of rubble and debris here and there. A disabled tank that nobody can recover. A yellow sidewalk umbrella that has caught up in a railing. A blue wheelbarrow overturned in the street. These are the things that become landmarks on the battlefield.

What I would like to see is more distinctive bits of rubble and debris here and there. A disabled tank that nobody can recover. A yellow sidewalk umbrella that has caught up in a railing. A blue wheelbarrow overturned in the street. These are the things that become landmarks on the battlefield.

Totally.

I'm not sure if we (or your PC) can afford that performance-wise. But this is a nice idea, and I'm definitely asking the devs for something like it.

Arma has that sort of stuff, but it's an infantry sim. For a flight sim, that's a bit of overkill. A dead tank or other vehicle here and there placed along with the buildings is a fine idea, but how long is that other stuff going to be visible before it's covered in snow anyway?



The Jedi Master

I think that the map is looking very good, the shell fire is a nice touch and the smoke is excellent. When we get there I'd really like to get the impression that there's a violent ground war going on in the city as it was truly a savage and protracted conflict. At the stage it is at at the moment it is of course pretty much a ghost town but I'm hoping that this will change significantly before release. The battle had different phases where the "action" shifted between different areas of the city it would be nice to see that reflected in the campaign.

Here's quite a nice day-by-day timeline of te battle. http://balagan.info/timeline-of-the-battle-of-stalingrad I'm not saying that anything as detailed as this would be in the least bit possible but it does illustrate the geographical spread of the battle across the city., airstrikes, major keypoints,dates etc.. IMHO without a "believable" ground war going on it would be hard to convince oneself that one is flying over the battle of Stalingrad

Regards

Aces