IckyAtlas

Can't stop drooling ....

It reminds me when I was flying on glacier with a PA18 Piper SuperCub with a wheeled landing gear equipped with a hydraulic ski system. To lower and rise the skis we had a lever and you had to pump nearly forty times to fully bring it down, and same back up again.

Correct but this is connected to physics or to how materials behave upon a given force. I read about new type of Grafene transistors that will work in the terahertz range and consume a tenth of todays power or even less. When we have that kind of CPU and GPU then all this will not be a topic and completely dynamic environment with all the physics will be come the standard, a given. We may see that in about 10 years from now.

It is impressive however it lacks natural dynamics. If we take all the demos where we have vegetation, not one leave moves in a gentle breeze. The jungle environment is photorealistic and impressive, however not one grass moves. It seems like all vegetation is completely frozen. We do see some dynamics like birds flying, flames, smoke, waterfall, leaves falling on the ground but the vegetation, trees, bushes environment is as static as rocks. I will be totally impressed when I will see all this vegetation have some movement according to wind strength and direction.

I have grown up adult kids, that always gobble my graphic cards as soon as I change them, but this time my 4090, may become available when a 5090 will appear. The reason is that they use more and more laptops which have become very powerful and so my personal built towers are more difficult to send down the generation line. Stay tuned maybe there will be an opportunity here.

By the gold release of the first campaign the latest intel CPU will be two generations ahead anyway, and the Unreal Engine will also go through some revisions/updates, so I do not see this as an issue as long as like Jason mentions, it does not affect the dev team in the development phase and I would add the early access phase players, which by definition is not gold but say maybe wood at this point 😄

Largest ever measured crocodile was about 6,2 meters. It was a salt water crocodile. Looking at the size of the woman in the cage she is probably 1.70 cm at least. In comparison the crocodile seems to measure about 3 times her body length which makes it for 5.21 meters. That is a large size for a crocodile, and you do not see them so often. If you look at the video from the amusement park you will see that the crocs are about 3 to max 4 meter long. To me either the picture was taken with a perspective and zoom to have the croc appear very large or the picture has been arranged. As usual marketing has added a little drama. 🙂

Clap Clap Clap !!!

This one is clearly a true original one. No doubt 🙂

There don't seem to be a bomb otherwise we would have seen a paint trace (even not exploded) between the landing gear legs. It seems a VAL bomber that after having used its bomb finally ended up as a kamikaze trying to sink a ship. This is the kind of picture where one could wonder if it is not a fake one. Too clean, to precise. The wing is exactly as it is but this is a head on collision. There should be many traces all over. This is too crystal clear. Or the picture was taken after the side was already washed up and only the most penetrating traces of paint and metal remained. I still have some doubt. Interesting picture for sure.

Wonderful. Have a great weekend too.!

I think the problem with a completely new from scratch Combat Flight Sim is the time problem. DCS, MSFS, IL2, War Thunder etc. they all have years or decades of head start, proprietary engines that have been improved and polished for decades. Now as a newcomer you want to take a share of this small market. The only way at this point is to be the best in a sense. Top visuals, top scenario, top battle scale, top action, tens of planes ships, and land action in a furious battle. All this as said Jason without putting on fire your computer. How can you do that as there is no off the shelf solution ready to use as is in such a game. These combat systems are maybe the most complicated in terms of physics, ballistics, dynamics etc. Let's make it simple there is no engine ready to use for that. But you need to be as good or better than the best on the market. I see no other solution than to choose one of the existing "modern" ones that are available and not proprietary, that will be used as a base platform. You need a platform that will give you the possibility of fast track creation. The choice will depend and many factors but you have to be sure that you will be able to add "easily and quickly" all the specialized modules that you will have to develop to finally have a kind of hybrid engine that will become your "Combat Pilot Engine". Does Unreal fit the need, I do not know. Sure when one looks at all the demos, visuals and some tutorials you may think that it could be a yes, but this is a superficial feeling and in reality I will say I have no idea. And Jason is right to say that it is too early. Most probably in this phase of development he is testing multiple solutions, before taking a firm commitment. In the interview with Enigma he was talking of a 15 year adventure. This means that whatever he chooses, on such a time span, it must be kept continuously updated to stay always relevant against competition. Man I can understand you have to be cautious before committing yourself to a given engine. Once you have done it there is no way back. I simply will wait until he tells us officially what his choice will be. I can wait another 15 years no problem 🙂

Just had the time to follow this very long interview. Thanks to Enigma and Jason for such an open discussion that covered all the important topics. It is clear the ambition of Jason is here very high, and we all applaud that. I believe it can be reached and Jason knows how to avoid all the traps that such a high ambition can create. I am absolutely not surprised about what Jason is saying in this interview. And for us combat flight simulator simmers it is all good. And coming from Jason I do believe that at least from my side I will be getting what I expect out of this game. I absolutely support his idea that we will be able to buy something very very early on. If I can propose what this first very early module one can buy would be: 1) A carrier moving in the wind at a certain distance of an island (atoll), at sunrise. 2) One plane at this stage is enough so a Wildcat on the top of a carrier. 3) We can take off and land on this carrier. a) Optional, we can ditch in the water. b) Optional we can land on the small island, say on the beach or rough terrain. With these three points we can already have nice visuals overflying the island: a) admire the vegetation model and the ground map model b) admire how nice the sea is modeled, and maybe water transparency from above about the submerged coral reefs around the atoll. c) admire the atmospheric model with the sunrise. For just what is above you have my money.

The only thing I see here is the models like the humans, the pilot in cockpit, the smoke, the sea, the ships etc. Some visual qualities for sure, the rest is crap.

Will we have people on board ships and carriers? Not only behind the guns but also on the carrier decks and inside hangars?

I was in awe at the carrier hangars. We can imagine them filled with planes, bomb racks etc. It is a long long time we hoped this was coming one day. The guns have an excellent metal surface finishing look. The quality of detail is also excellent. The planes are looking great. Very clean for now. They will need some weathering, oil and smoke traces but the base is looking fantastic. Keep us drooling! P.S. For improving cash for the development two proposals: 1) Why not once you have some polished nice flying demos, do a pre-early access round. This is a round where you buy your right to a premium early access (early-access with some goodies) but you do not get yet an early version of the game to play with. 2) Have a kind of Patreon system with some privileges like game meetings with devs or Jason for Patreon only or stuff like that.

Thank you to keep the link alive. Stunning pictures, and a lots of details in the models. This is what I love. True craftmanship. Thank you for your work and dedication to the project to all the Combat Pilot Team. Thank you Jason to try to make our dreams come true. Have a nice New Year's eve with your families, and I wish you all a happy, and successful 2024 in very good health and spirit.

Excellent. Boom you got it right. Congratulations.

Unfortunately I do not know what was the ship depicted in this picture. I am not sure it is the exact reproduction of an existing ship, maybe a more artistic depiction of an existing ship.

Excellent work ! Carriers, Planes guns, buildings. It's going fast. Run Jason Run 🙂 Water will be absolutely important. Its transparency around the atoll according to depth is paramount. What I see seems excellent. When we will have some landmass then we will be able to appreciate fully. Longing to the Early Access, maybe end of next year? who knows. Anyway you will get my greenbacks.

When I was flying, we had in our club organized a precision landing competition, where you would be evaluated about what distance (right or left did not matter) you would touch down from the runway center line, and what distance from the main runway threshold marking you touchdown with your main landing gear. In this latter case if you are behind the line then you have failed, and is measured only the distance if you touch down on it or in front of it. And you must not after touch down bump back in the air and touch down again this will again fail your attempt. The further the distance in both cases, the lower your mark will be. This kind of training and competition is a lot of fun, and does make a lot of sense in Switzerland where runways are very short and narrow compared to US. And we always learn flying patterns with high precision in the three dimensions as our various circuits and mainly landing circuits holding circuits etc. are extremely tight because of the high density of population, and so many associations immediately complain if you just went meters (yeah meters) out of your circuit allotted space. Yes you have retired citizens in those associations that just have all their time to pass their time tracking the planes and checking that they are spot on. This is also true for take-off and landing. The reason is due to height constraints of your circuit due to noise regulations. So the take-off slope and landing slope have also to be tightly respected as you often fly over populated areas. From all this I could assume that we would have a good basic training to land on carriers. I say basic because we are used to fly in a precise way, but that to finalize our carrier landing capability we need a rolling runway on X an Y axis and going a little up and down on the Z axis and that is receding from us as we approach at a certain speed. I am too old now but I would have loved to add such a training. As we do not have any seas and carriers we excel in mountain flying, and the Swiss jet fighter pilots are one of the best in the world in flying in high altitude mountainous terrain (Alps), which also requires very tight and precise flying.

Just for someone who came form the world before social networks, in what sense Discord is a better option than the forum?

Sure, here comes the right use of LOD. The right detail at the right distance. A very very important thing to manage well. I agree that these visual "quality" features should be in the graphic options list so that anyone can have these selected according to their PC power.

For the Wildcat it is difficult to assess at this point. For the bombs the gun and torpedo I would say very appreciated. We have then to see how it will appear ingame with lighting, shadows, reflections etc. I think we need a little more context around the objects to really appreciate the style. The challenge is like always to have surfaces and texture that do not appear too clean. During war material was used in a very rugged way, so it was full of dents, scratches, rust (mainly in tropical very humid region as soon as paint was scratched, or due to aggression of sea water, salt is terrible), bruises etc. It is that kind of realistic aspect that is difficult to render. One important thing is also to have the right 3D appearance of the surface. I mean if you have a dent that this dent is indeed seen as a physical dent in the material and not a "painted" dent on flat surface. This does impact a lot the visual feeling. But with the existing tools of today like Unreal Engine etc. this should be feasible I suppose. A lot of challenges for the team and Carl. Good luck and keep up with the good work.