Thanks Oden,

Just a remark, there was a piece of text missing in the previous post. Here it is, I just edited it back into existence.



Cheers!

Count me in as a potential buyer. Do you guys think you will have your game on Steam or will it be a direct buy option on your website?

I've only had time to skim this thread, but this looks great. Count me in as well.

Thank you Gentlemen!

About availability we're aiming for a Steam edition, that's for sure (including steamworks, achievements & all...). But if our Deluxe box thing becomes real, then we will need a buy option on the website. Naturally then, a digital version will be available on the website all the same, with a Steam key (although Steam takes its fair share during a normal sale, Valve is kind enough to provide keys to the devs when selling through other platforms, including their own). But all of this is still a bit early to tell - let us deliver you with a proper game first, then we'll give you a good reason to spend your virtual cash

I realize you haven't seen many planes so far (which, arguably, doesn't help sounding serious about a carrier command sim). I was just uploading new content, I thought some of you might want to have a look.

The first video is about a few F4Fs taking off, flying in formation and breaking formation to enter the landing pattern.



The second video is a longer example of a flight of TBDs landing on the carrier. Some parts are not animated yet, and our virtual flyboys are still too much of hotshots it seems (man, they always seem to catch that first wire, no stress...) but it's a good beginning. All the planes answer to a basic flight model that still allows for a believable behavior, but we have yet to fully test it in combat. All of this is naturally still in the works, so don't be too harsh. We're just getting started



Finally, this one is about our Air Boss / Plane Management AI. As you know certainly, US carrier doctrine had the hangar primarily used for maintenance and long-term storage, while part if not most of the airgroup complement (when these started to outgrow the ships) would be preferably stored on the flight deck. The job of the Air Boss is to make sure that the flight deck is always open for business, or ready for the next task in line at least. Often planes would be reshuffled entirely from the bow to the stern to allow take offs, and from the stern to the bow to allow landings. Being a deck hand back in these days sure was quite demanding in terms of physical effort, to say the least!



Now hopefully, it will look less empty and more convincing, especially to the eyes of our esteemed warbird-lovers (and I am one of them )...!

S!

Colour me impressed. As for EAW, yes, late nights and red eyes. Great times.

Have you posted on the WoWs subreddit? Plenty of older chaps over there salivating for a decent sim like this.

Hello Ajay,

No I didn't, to tell the truth I am a bit uneasy about communicating by myself outside of - how should I call it? - my natural boundaries. I allow myself a few posts to test the waters at SimHQ or Grogheads because, well, they're communities not attached to a publisher and covering two different categories of the public we're aiming for, but I wouldn't breach into someone else's community unannounced. Even if, obviously, WoWs' reddit doesn't belong to Wargaming - but I just don't want to give players the wrong idea, especially when it comes to poaching on somebody else's lands. We don't even have a name for the product yet (oh well, we do but it's a bit early still ) and no website to show for.

If someone else was to post about it someday and I am sorta "invited" over there to post updates or answer questions of course I'll do it with joy - like I do in the Matrixgames general discussion forum, courtesy of Red. But starting a thread on my own would be a little bit intrusive and akin to spam I think. I am comfortable doing so at SimHQ because the postcount of my old account kinda allows me to virtually pull some rank and I got invited over at Grogheads, but I won't invite myself to a community centered on another game and brag, that wouldn't be super classy and a bit presumptuous from me I guess.

(besides, I've just checked, I have grand total of 7 karma on Reddit... And that's just my personal account, if I was to create a new one just for posting propaganda now I'd really look a bit awkward wouldn't I )

Hi ADM,

I think your quite a gentelman <S>

On another note, I do hope it´s released in some other platforms besides Steam. On your own site sounds great, or maybe even GOG.

Red

Interesting. Will have to keep this on my radar for sure. I know this is very early in development but it looks good so far. I know 1C is talking about a carrier ops game as well but with more focus on the flight simulation aspect. It would be interesting to see this meshed with that title, ala Rowan's Battle of Britain.

Oh, hello Tom, what a nice surprise! Thank you!

Brings me back to these days we'd make you Babe offerings on the altar of the EAW forum
Sorry, I don't have a pic of Alyssa Milano just here to express it properly, but she's not anymore the woman you used to know anyway

By 1C I suppose you mean the project for a PTO expansion to il2 BoX, right? A project that Jason Williams himself seems to hold dear and close to his heart from what I have read - and I understand him all too well!
By every mean the level of air combat simulation and realism implied by a dedicated il2 product will be far above and beyond what we will be able to provide, especially at our current scale (that is tactical command). Even though the level of detail might allow some day after release a platform-based side dish (I wish I could fly a F4F over the TF and I am not alone in that - old 1942:Pacific Air War vibes I suppose) we will hardly compare to the level of care and depth involved in each and every plane made by the Il2 team. Of course I am happy know that Il-2 is getting to that scale itself very soon with the Air Marshall system, and I am very much looking forward to it

In our case, beyond the scope of the simulation there is also the simple fact that we need to make sure that performance will never be an issue. Part of our public is already very wargamey, if not grognard-minded, and they are not really known for running their own personal Cray-powered computer in their garage - something that might have set them apart from the simulation community over the decades. If most of the scenes rarely involve more than 10 planes at full detail level at any time, we still need to be able to run smoothly the most critical of them all, that is views showing a deckload of plane warming up. With 30+ planes all in the frame at the same moment, your optimization better be top notch. That would explain why our planes end up not being as detailed as they could be. We needed to find a balance between eye-candy and performance. I think we pretty much have it now.

As you can see, despite the fact that you won't get to fly these things, we still did put some emphasis on making them look nice to the eye. Got this few shots from our paintshop just yesterday, that should give to the trained eyes out there an insight about our skinning potential and the techs we are using. I am adamant about providing ASAP the tools needed to splash some paint around when the game comes out, so the editors and viewers we're using for development will be readily available shortly after release. Being an old EAW hand, I think we suffered enough like that 20 years ago, didn't we













Besides, being a purely solo experience for now (and as such free from the fear of seeing the system abused online) we did put together a decal system that is rather complete and user friendly. It seems right that each and every squadron in historical scenarios get the change to have their colors painted right, not to mention the pilots and their iconic mounts when they had one, of course. Truth be told, USN markings for the first half of 1942 were a complete mess of different regulations applied with more or less customization throughout the fleet, and we want to reflect that for historical flavor. It is only fair, considering the ships will have their own coat of paint too, major units in the same class showing differences in paint scheme depending on how and when they joined the Pacific Fleet (Yorktown and Hornet compared to Enterprise being rather obvious examples).



Here for instance, you can see a flight of TBDs sporting their own individual squadron markings (VT-6 hailing from USS Enterprise, circa late 1941 style).





Well well. More on all of this later. Gotta catch up with work - the real one, that puts the bread on the table

S! Everybody, have a nice day!



Oh By the way Tom, I nearly forgot, someone had something to tell you

Love that you set this shot up.



Understand about the crossposting stuff. I got a bag of karma i can afford to lose so i'll throw a small post over one there and link it back here and see if it gets any interest.

Wow. Original off Guadalcanal I believe.

Ah yes yes yes. Glad to have a connaisseur on board


Yes, August 8 morning attack, the most murderous action of the campaign for the Betty crews (and they had many). Out of 23 Betties of of the elite 4th and Misawa Kokutai attacking that morning, 17 went down, mainly due to AAA fire. 125 bomber crews perished or went missing that day. Still, they did put a torpedo into USS Jarvis and as such were responsible for her utter loss a few days later when she got jumped by 30 bloodthirsty rikko and sank with all hands. These were ugly days...

I distinctively remember coming across this photo for the first time on a weekend day, in the French aviation monthly Le Fana de l'Aviation that ran a special series of articles on Watchtower, at a time when I was actually playing these actions in 1942:Pacific Air War. Actually, a short search over the internet found me the original issue in no time:



That felt great. I was 11 or so, but by this time TV was already such a bore to me... Nothing beats a dogfight with Saburo Sakai I guess, even with that sort of painful screen resolution
And today, it is sort of special and funny to realize that our 2D artist happens to routinely draw covers for Le Fana. The circle of life or somethin', like Mufasa would say


Thank you! I'll go say hello
By the way, you also gave me the opportunity to post my first message over there. I saw people trashing my waifu.
Nobody trashes that gracious, balanced and totally historical lady that is Okhotnik on my watch!

(Oh and by the way, you sure have QUITE the bagload of Karma indeed )

1942 PAW is still my all time favorite flight sim, adjusted for the expectations of the day

Oh then, I guess you won't hate the following few sneak peeks





Making experiments with the air combat engine as we speak. Hopefully we'll have something to show by the beginning of next week.
(it's the AI flying, of course. We're just watching...)







Thank you

Good question, but it is still a bit too early to tell. What is most interesting with Steam is actually the full range of functionalities coming with Steamworks - and knowing they're taking a 30% cut, we do plan on taking full advantage of what the achievement system allows (among other things). But this virtually makes an actual non-DRM GOG version complicated to design initially. We'll see, but don't hold your breath...

(of course being the weasel I am, if Epic was ever to put 500k on the table in front of us for an exclusive, we might find a way to live without Steamworks - but in the meantime we'll just keep on making a proper game and keep dreamin' )

You won't have to fight for the last steak aboard USS Yorktown

Well there goes our realism boys! Might as well pack it up and get those pitchforks out, WE'VE BEEN DUPED AGAIN!


Regards pc specs, what sort of gear do you think will be needed for max settings all round? Also, dibs on beta testing if you ever open it up before release. Oh yes, that French artist of yours, magnifique! His work is gorgeous! And semi lastly, John Thachs wildcat at Midway and the Dauntless should be from VS5 of the Yorktown? The S letter is (should be) for scout, so scout 7 by the looks of it. I can't find the correct info on that exact plane and pilot combo though and my Dauntless units of WW2 book has let me down.

You might find this link interesting, if you don't already have it that is. The Office of Naval Intelligence U.S. Navies combat narrative of Midway - https://www.history.navy.mil/resear...dway-3-6-june-1942-combat-narrative.html

My cynical plans are already exposed! #%&*$# it!
I wish we could get duped on a more regular basis though, that would mean that more games are actually in the works
As for the specs, the objective it that it runs smoothly on an average 2020 rig with acceptable details. The engine is currently very scalable, this means that if you really want stuff to the max, theorically I am not sure it would work properly on a top notch computer - but at the same time, it still looks very good on a more average setting. We will have to make sure to design a few detail levels to choose from that all might be acceptable and offer a coherent experience. And like any simulation, some purely eye-candy functions (reflections, etc...) might be more demanding than others, and will probably be deactivable by the user if he wishes so.

The target audience being made of wargamers too (which are not exactly known for their taste in computer tuning and water-cooled graphic chips) our goal is to make sure that their default experience will be flawless, although it shall not prevent a simulation player with a good rig to make the most of what is available.




That's right for the F4F
The Dauntless is Scout 7 from Enterprise's VS6, flown by Norman "Dusty" Kleiss, scoring for the second time of the day against a carrier. "Dusty" got the second hit against Hiryu after Richard Jaccard's first bomb. This depicts the moment when supposedly Hiryu's forward elevator got blown up against her island following the initial blasts.



Poor girl!

Needed an Enterprise craft so that everybody would feature on the box art. At the end we depicted a fighter boy, a bombing deadeye and a torpedo hero from three different carriers - nobody's gonna be jealous!



Thank you
No worries, this one is already in our safe, along with all its little friends (and all the action reports available for Midway, which makes for a few hundred pages... Fortunately for us the Navy IS a bit on the paperwork side of things ^^)

Small question about "our" Reddit thread btw, because I am really a beginner and not really aware of how it works (not as much as I should that's sure), did my answer to stardestroyer001 actually got published at all? Because even though I can see it on my computer, my phone absolutely refuses to display it, and I wonder if it wasn't moderated or something (linking to the Gary Cooper movie might have raised a flag or something maybe? No idea).

Could be the phone though...

Nope, no answer to SD, just his question. Maybe you saved it instead of submitting? If you posted and a mod removed it you will get an automated or mod message stating why and i will also be able to see your post in a little box simply saying 'removed'

Are you using standard reddit app on mobile? if so switch to RiF or BaconReader. The standard app sucks RiF is my go to. On pc, old Reddit is much better than the redesign, do this 'Go to preferences, & under beta options, make sure that the first 2 boxes are unchecked, while the last option – View user profiles on desktop using legacy mode – is checked. You may also be able to do it by clicking the arrow next to your user name and selecting 'opt out', if that is still an option there.



Poor old Norman doesn't even get a mention in my book, those bastids.

Ah. Well it definitely shows on the computer though. I'll try to repost see if I get smacked

See here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldOfWar...4y?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

Strangely enough the postcount doesn't move up... Hurmpf... Do you see anything when you click that link?
If it is still not working I might start to worry about Kenpeitai involvement...!



Dont worry for Dusty, others are keeping his legend alive
https://www.facebook.com/NeverCallMeAHero/

Very helpful lot, they were able to find very rare footage of VS6 planes at Midway for us and confirm the actual paintscheme they used during the battle. Yesterday, still on Facebook, I sent a call in the wild looking for a TBD pilot's handbook, and a collector had it for me too. Actually social media isn't so bad at all as long as you socialize with the right kind of people!

Yep it shows now, 55 Minutes ago it says it was posted.

Thank you!