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#4479799 - 06/24/19 10:15 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: Raw Kryptonite]  
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Originally Posted by Raw Kryptonite
Anyone familiar with Atlantic Fleet?

.........

Turn based....



I've played it a bit but the turn based play is what kills it for me.


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#4479880 - 06/25/19 11:03 AM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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I think one of the most accurate things said about current day flight sims is that they are wonderful to play while you are inside the cockpit but they are dull as heck when you are outside the cockpit.


“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
#4479925 - 06/25/19 05:21 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: F4UDash4]  
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Originally Posted by F4UDash4
Originally Posted by Raw Kryptonite
Anyone familiar with Atlantic Fleet?

.........

Turn based....



I've played it a bit but the turn based play is what kills it for me.



I’m ok with TBS but it does seem a little too simplified to play for long. Not bad for $10 though.


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#4479932 - 06/25/19 05:55 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: PanzerMeyer]  
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Originally Posted by PanzerMeyer
I think one of the most accurate things said about current day flight sims is that they are wonderful to play while you are inside the cockpit but they are dull as heck when you are outside the cockpit.

Graphically, I'm ok with that. I never cared much about any details that a pilot or captain couldn't realistically see from the cockpit or normal outside station (on a ship or submarine).

But I know you're talking about gameplay, and in some cases it really hasn't improved, has it? Like never having to play the same mission twice (even if campaign auto-generated missions are sometimes similar, the environment is not). We've had this since the days of DOS!...

[Linked Image]

[Linked Image]

[Linked Image]

[Linked Image]

[Linked Image]


Always loved in EF2000 that you can add a re-fueling waypoint to a mission (if you have any re-fuelers left) or have AWACS vector you to one on-the-fly (although you may have to wait in line)...

[Linked Image]


You can also watch an entire campaign play out in fast-forward over several game days on the 2D maps without ever flying a mission, as the Russians invade south and conquer Norway.

All in DOS in 1995, almost 25 years ago! eek2

Attached Files EF2K_SZ2.jpgEF2K_CL1.JPGEF2K_CL2.JPGEF2K_CL3.JPGEF2K_CL4.JPGEF2K_ReFu.JPG


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Gives way and suddenly it’s day again
The sun is in the east
Even though the day is done
Two suns in the sunset, hmph
Could be the human race is run
#4479968 - 06/25/19 08:40 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: PanzerMeyer]  
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Originally Posted by PanzerMeyer
I think one of the most accurate things said about current day flight sims is that they are wonderful to play while you are inside the cockpit but they are dull as heck when you are outside the cockpit.


The one I rally noticed this on was when Rise of Flight first released. The planes and flying were awesome. Most single missions were also well done.
But, outside of your mission there was nothing. The whole beautiful map looked good for just flying but was so empty and clinical. Only your flight and the enemy flight would spawn. Maybe bombers if it was an intercept or escort, and then the ground targets for it.

The WWI flight sim I played before that was Red Baron 3, there were loads of aircraft all around. If you went off the mission and hung around an enemy airfield, they scrambled against you and it seemed there was an actual world war going on.


And another note: What I hate most about scripted campaigns are the stupid and unrealistic goals they make you meet. Like, shoot down 20 bombers, well, that's just impossible with realistic ammo loadouts. Even with unlimited ammo it's still outrageous. I think Microsoft Combat Flight simulator had a few of those.

#4480120 - 06/26/19 09:21 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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Its been a long time since I played it, but I also enjoyed Combat Flight Simulator 2 and its simplistic comic book style art design and very little animation it used for the personality or world building. Super simple but beautiful to look at and adds that little bit of immersion needed to ground the player into the little world its creating.

I think the presentation and art style of CFS2 married to Pacific Fighters would be a great combination. That'd make me a happy camper and all it is are 2D drawings with minimum animation used to bring life and atmosphere to an otherwise plain simulation. Speaking of CFS2, I remember loving that Pacific theater and all that blue water and little island strips. I saw it being demoed at our local CompUSA back when and later bought it at Walmart I think.


This is the intro, but poking around other game play videos to remind myself of the game's layout, you can see little comic book style art inserts for debriefings throughout the game.

Last edited by Coot; 06/26/19 09:22 PM.

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#4480216 - 06/27/19 03:08 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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Quote

The WWI flight sim I played before that was Red Baron 3, there were loads of aircraft all around. If you went off the mission and hung around an enemy airfield, they scrambled against you and it seemed there was an actual world war going on.



The lack of triggers for events in the RoF world is a valid observation.* Even if it was very predictable, having scouts scramble from aerodromes in RB3D was nice. And lost between Red Baron II and Red Baron 3D were the little green men sprites that could be seen rushing across the front, which was a huge loss. They looked cheesy and cartoonish, but everyone forgave that because they were there in the first place.

And that's part of the problem.

We're all chasing "realism" to the point where we're throwing the baby out with the bath water. If there's a vehicle moving along the ground, well, it better have moving wheels and simulate a suspension!

We also want "realistic" realism, which is usually completely unrealistic. If we come across the enemy and they act clueless, it's just poor AI - but in fact most pilots who were shot down never saw their attacker until it was too late. If they run away when the odds are against them, it's frustrating. If there's not a lot of movement on the ground, the world is empty.

One of the things that have struck me in my Real Life flying around at 1,500 feet above the ground is how little is really going on beneath me (that I can see). Apart from the Interstate, vehicles are pretty sparse, and in the country the cows really don't do anything at all. One would think they could move around a little to improve my sense of activity down there. I give the devs a solid C- on the whole modelling of the landscape. Some of the land formation stuff looks hokey and made up, too, with ridges just placed almost haphazardly in some cases.

* While RoF at least has a trigger system in the program, it's not hard baked into the world map like it was in the Red Baron series. At least it has one; the IL-2 series lacks them entirely!


The opinions of this poster are largely based on facts and portray a possible version of the actual events.

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#4480249 - 06/27/19 05:42 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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Coot some where along the line I picked up a mod that has actual colorized photos for all the selection screens .i found two sets one was black and white the other set was color..I still fly CFS2 every few days It's a lot easier than flying the Pacific than IL-2 Although IL-2 has better looking carriers


Russ
Semper Fi
#4480250 - 06/27/19 05:46 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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My biggest problem with flying in the Pacific in IL-2 is that the missions were so lifeless because you would see fleets of like 3 ships maximum and like 5 planes attacking them. The scale was simply too small.


“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
#4480266 - 06/27/19 06:49 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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Jane’s F-18 was very atmospheric and immersive even without a dynamic campaign. It is difficult to put one’s finger on what makes a sim great vs another one that is percieved as sterile, but I guess several little components, bits of realistic radio chatter here, a nice cockpit there, some menu music, a dab of well thought-out mission briefings and, most importantly of all IMO, a sense that you’re taking part in a world rather than just flying a detailed 3D model painted on a background, all help to set an immersive sim apart from a sterile one.

Maybe I’m a simple man, but some of my favourite sim moments have been dogfights in Wings over Vietnam and WOE, and Jane’s USAF, as well as WWII Fighters and JF18.

I give you..the greatest sim intro of all time. After watching that, and I hardly ever skipped it when starting USAF, I was always ready to kick some serious butt!



In all my years I've never seen the like. It has to be more than a hundred sea miles and he brings us up on his tail. That's seamanship, Mr. Pullings. My God, that's seamanship!
#4480283 - 06/27/19 08:10 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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Thanks rwatson for that info. I'm really interested in trying out B.A.T. mod after watching Sgt. Fresh's videos in the screenshot/video section. I'm not to savvy on modding IL-2 but I may give it a go. If its easy to mod, maybe those screens would be enough to spruce up Pacific Fighters a bit.

That is a great video semmern. I probably haven't heard it in years but that music came right back to me.


John 10:1-30
Romans 10:1-13

#4480291 - 06/27/19 09:47 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: Coot]  
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Coot there's BAT and also this https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php?topic=50919.0 WW II only and is easier to setup..And M4T has lots of careers..I have a USMC that runs from
1943 through 1968 ..Very good as long as I'm not killed..Actually I have 5 separate installs of modded IL-2 and prefer the Pacific


Russ
Semper Fi
#4480295 - 06/27/19 10:36 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: semmern]  
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Originally Posted by semmern
Jane’s F-18 was very atmospheric and immersive even without a dynamic campaign.


I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Story time, hopefully you haven't heard too much of this before. I remember playing MicroProse's F-19 and there were times when I'd be RTB'ing with some MiGs on my tail. Often I'd buzz some of our cruisers hoping they'd somehow engage the bandits making my life a lot easier but no joy. I got so frustrated that I created a new pilot who went rogue and blew up a bunch of friendly assets and landed at an enemy airfield. I discovered you couldn't keep a negative score and you couldn't defect. I vowed that if I ever had a chance to make flight sims that if possible stuff like this wouldn't happen to anyone else.

So a few years later I got into game development and after a few projects I had the chance to work on the AI for Fleet Defender. This was a dream opportunity for me. FD was based off of the code for F-15 III but the AI code had been around a lot longer than that and they figured it was a good time for an upgrade, especially with the change in focus of the game. In the previous games the enemy planes would be spawned when the Player was detected and there would only be one group at a time. Of course when that AI was initially created they had to get around some pretty limited hardware so I don't fault them at all for this. I set it up so that so that any planes in the world would be there from the start unless they were something like replacements for the Ready 5 aircraft and so would be "spawned" below decks or on an airfield. I also really didn't like the idea of encounters feeling canned so instead of telling them specifically what to do I gave them behaviors/jobs. AIs had waypoints to follow at the beginning and upon reaching a waypoint that might change the behavior for the flight, like "start attack run" (with details on what the targets were, profile for the run and such), but there was a Command AI that could change the tasking for a group or just interactions with other elements would mean they'd have to adapt. This meant that the designers could just layout the basic mission but they didn't have to worry about the minutiae. It also helped with the problem of if you assume a Player will do things one way you can be sure they won't. The comms just came out from the AIs doing their jobs. People quickly realized in FD that it was no longer "You Against the World" but with the extra audio we could had for JF-15 and then expanded upon for JF/A-18 it was even more evident about how much other activity was going on in the world.

If we had done another game after JF/A-18 I probably would have been doing a dynamic campaign. We already had persistent damage in the game and my guys could already adapt to a changing situation so most of the work would have been developing an AI to generate the missions, probably between the Player's missions and in a mission format similar to what we already had, taking into account how the conflict was going, the priorities for the different sides and the resources that were available. With doing what I felt was a pretty good job with the full co-op multiplayer in JF/A-18 that would have been the last big bucket list thing I would have wanted to accomplish in a flight sim. Part of me was bummed that I didn't get the opportunity but we were so fried from the past few games that when EA decided it was time to move us to something else we were mostly OK with it. A few years later I was queried about my interest in doing a dynamic campaign for another sim but this would have been a contract position and once that was done I'd be having to find another job so I figured it was better to stick with a full time position.

Elf

#4480323 - 06/28/19 03:02 AM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: PanzerMeyer]  
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Originally Posted by PanzerMeyer
My biggest problem with flying in the Pacific in IL-2 is that the missions were so lifeless because you would see fleets of like 3 ships maximum and like 5 planes attacking them. The scale was simply too small.

You never flew any of my revamped Coral Sea QMB missions that were included in v4.13 then. I tried to liven the templates up quite a bit.
Left most of the images as links on purpose.

http://www.mission4today.com/index.php?name=ForumsPro&file=viewtopic&p=167955#167955

http://www.mission4today.com/modules/coppermine/albums/userpics/14700/cs01.jpg

[Linked Image]

http://www.mission4today.com/modules/coppermine/albums/userpics/14700/cs03.jpg

http://www.mission4today.com/modules/coppermine/albums/userpics/14700/cs04.jpg

[Linked Image]

[Linked Image]

[Linked Image]

http://www.mission4today.com/modules/coppermine/albums/userpics/14700/cs08.jpg

http://www.mission4today.com/modules/coppermine/albums/userpics/14700/cs09.jpg

http://www.mission4today.com/modules/coppermine/albums/userpics/14700/cs10.jpg

http://www.mission4today.com/modules/coppermine/albums/userpics/14700/cs11.jpg


Wheels


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#4480354 - 06/28/19 10:31 AM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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Good show there wheels It's the excellent modders that have breathed life into IL-2


Russ
Semper Fi
#4480453 - 06/28/19 06:27 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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Thanks Scott Elson for that story and for the little window into sim development and sim history.

Thanks rwatson for the link and suggestion. That mod looks very good! I'm using something called HSFX or something like that but the mod you posted looks pretty fantastic. I love the Pacific theater and I've always liked those big Grumman naval aircraft.

Last edited by Coot; 06/28/19 06:27 PM.

John 10:1-30
Romans 10:1-13

#4483633 - 07/21/19 07:19 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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Even though I enjoy the eye candy of games since the 90s, I have been unable to immerse myself into the new stuff that it appears to take in order to enjoy them. I liked the graphics of Janes USAF, but left it shortly when the F-15 wouldn't go nearly as high and/or fast as it should. I tried F/A-18 for a bit, but felt it would take a huge commitment to the game before I understood how to receive enjoyment from it. IAF was fun and challenging at first, but it wore off once I got good at it (same goes with Longbow 1 & 2).

Every time, I returned to Fighters Anthology; a love affair that started in 1995 with US Navy Fighters.

For those interested, Fighters Anthology is still being played and improved by a group of us dedicated players. Over the last few years, I have built several new campaigns, including historical Vietnam campaigns, and made improvements to the existing campaigns (except Kuril campaign), as well as improvements to aircraft, weapons, etc...

You can read more on my website, and download the updates.

http://myplace.frontier.com/~usnraptor

Last edited by usnraptor; 07/21/19 07:20 PM.

Some sports require one ball; skydiving requires both.
#4483767 - 07/22/19 10:08 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: Coot]  
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Originally Posted by Coot
Thanks Scott Elson for that story and for the little window into sim development and sim history.


You're very welcome Coot. I don't know if you saw but I did an article years ago for here that had a bunch of this sort of stuff. Here's a link to it if you missed it then:

https://www.SimHQ.com/_commentary/all_047a.html

Elf

#4483772 - 07/22/19 10:59 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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You know Elf what really added to the immersion for JF15 JF18 was also the squadron management aspect. Its not just surviving the mission yourseld but also bringing your squad mates home with names and pictures.

I would have loved to play those games with some kind of dynamic campaign. Even if not full blown Falcon 4 dynamkc, something like EEAH/CH level would have added so much to the longevity.


"No power in the 'verse can stop me!!!"
#4483836 - 07/23/19 04:05 PM Re: One area where the progress of sims have failed me. [Re: MarkG]  
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Spidey,

In Fleet Defender the rank of your wingmen gave an indication of how good they were. This worked in with the existing difficulty level code and would affect things like how good were they at spotting bogeys, how quickly they could lock up a target and influence their decision making process. While I had a similar setup in the Jane's stuff I recall that they had me set set all of your wingmen, and I believe all of your allies, to the max level. I liked what I did in FD and thought it made you care for your squadron more but there was some reason they had me disable it. I think for enemies the difficulty setting was the max skill level they could randomly have but it's been a while (ow, approaching 20 years for JF/A-18) so the details have faded and sometimes get mixed with things I did on other projects. It also could have been the minimum level. With the first at low level everyone would be at low level and at max you'd get a full spectrum while with the second you'd get the mix at low level and at max everyone would be max. I'm leaning towards the former since when you're learning things the consistency would be preferred.

If we had done one more after JF-18 some sort of dynamic campaign was likely. After all I would have needed something to keep me busy and out of trouble. ;-) With the first two I was definitely way more than busy. To this day I have a Pavlovian response to the term "aggressive schedule".

<Edit>Of course with "Top Gun 2" coming out maybe someone with a whole lotta money will try to get the band back together. ;-) <Edit/>

Elf

Last edited by Scott Elson; 07/23/19 09:21 PM.
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