IckyAtlas

Horses before a cart and also horses pulling artillery (mostly WWI but also in WWII). I would add also trucks pulling artillery units.

I remember that Jason said in a discussion of an IL2 update where the detachement "vehicle" model (five soldiers in a row) was released that he was against that idea and it was Han's who did it. Jason may have had a valid decision in regard of the resources, but I applauded that it was done. This was requested so many times over the years. It is limited but still you can animate a little airfields and certain places. And when the latest ships came out there were humans behind all the guns. But older ship models where not updated and we still have robotic guns. I hope that in this new sim "humans" will be everywhere. Behind any gun there must always be a human. Humans on Carrier decks for sure. Human in the landing ships. Humans on airfields. This was so much lacking in IL2. The randomly wandering poor guys did not much to animate the airfield. So Japanese and US soldiers must be modelled and in a varied number of postures or dynamic motions, like walking, running, standing etc. And maybe a few others like mechanics, that would be nice to have around planes or service installations. Let's hope this time Jason does put "humans" in the must have list. I know it is a very long list but excellence comes at a price 🙂

I would love to have a flyable Catalina and for the bombers a flyable B25, and why not the B26. Here I would not expect four engine bombers, but flyable two engines yes. After having ditched in the sea to be rescued by a floatplane or a friendly ship that is something I would love to have.

Getting it right to model the sea is an extremely important element in a Pacific Map with 80% sea water. The water dynamics, with flat calm sea to tropical cyclones you name it. How the ships will move through water is as important here as how planes move in air. Water sprays, transparency of the water, and the right sky color reflection. Behavior of waves according to wind direction and speed. Coral reefs seen through the water from above when the sun is high in the sky, same for submarines at periscope depth, and torpedoes. One important elements is the sense of weight and mass when ships plough through the waves. And finally here we will have the pilots either with a Mae-West or on a dinghy floating nicely on the sea calm or with waves. A Catalina (must have plane) will gently land and pick up the stranded pilot. Yess! So many elements that well designed will contribute to create the right believable environment and ultimate sim success.

Gee eight years. Now I understand why I am 63 and did not see the time passing. Just woke up and bingo fuel 63! After five years of waiting for CLOD I was exhausted and lost the count of time 🙂.

With the present IL2 Editor you can do this for Object/Target links only. Event links are unfortunately not well managed and can be created only one by one. This could be improved. You have to use the Search and Select / Find Mission Objects tool. This is a very very very powerful tool and in combination with the Mission Tree you can optimize and work more quickly. This tool allows to work across groups nested groups, and you can link objects inside different groups. But you need to have some steps. The naming convention must be clear and logical to be able to use the Find Mission Objects tool. Example: We are in a very complex mission with hundreds or thousands of MCU's, objects of all kinds etc. Let's say that you have 100 objects inside 10 different groups or even sub-groups and you want all of them to be Target linked or Object linked to one object that is himself inside another separate subgroup of a group. Step 1): First you use the Find Mission Objects and check the following Double-Click Results options: Move Camera to Object and Select in Mission Tree. Search your object by using the name, number, type etc. Once you have it in the list, double click on it. It will appear in the mission tree but will not be selected (important) and you will also see it on the center of your map. Zoom the map so you can clearly see it but as I said do not select it and do not click on the map otherwise the whole process is cancelled. Step 2): Use again the Find Mission Object and list the 50 objects that will be Target linked again using a proper name that will have them all listed, and using the right checkboxes according to the type. If they are all in the list then you select them (classic way with click to select then shift click at the bottom of the list, or ctrl click if they are in different places in a larger list) and you click the button Add to Selection Objects Selected in Found List. Once this is done close the Find Mission Object window. Step 3): Now all the 50 objects are selected and stay select in the internal selected list. Your cursor arrow must be displayed on the map, anywhere but on the map, then press Shift-T or Shift-O and you will have written on your cursor arrow Target or Object. Step 4): Go on the mission tree and right-click on the name of the group (this can be a nested group doesn't matter) and click Set Group as Working which will activate the objects in that group and make them linkable. Step 5): Final step. Move the cursor arrow onto the object on the map and click on it. You will have the 100 arrows in one shot connected to this object. Once you are used to this it is done extremely quickly and these five steps are not an issue. But I agree it could be done in a shorter way with a dedicated function. I added a point in my list 🙂

I totally agree. There must also be a self defined discipline on how you group things and how you name the objects. If you set a well defined and logical naming structure and have groups organized as building blocks that have a given function, then the full visual power of the Editor becomes visible, and the visual debugging even quicker. I will give a short simple example. If you have a Trigger Counter you can name it according to what it is for and at the end of the name I add the counter value when it is more than 1. This has a small shortcoming, that is when you change the counter value you must also change the counter value in the name. Again a problem of rigor and discipline. But it is extremely useful when debugging as you can immediately see how many target links go to it and the number in the name (without the need to open the Properties of the MCU, and so see visually immediately if there is a problem. The same for the Timer. I have a naming that is as an example "Timer 1sec" and reflects what is in the time parameter. Same with another example like the MCU's Delete, Activate, Deactivate, etc. In the naming you have as an example Delete and then followed by what you delete. And the text of what you delete is the same of the one that names the object that will be deleted. It may seem verbose, but when looking visually to the map in a decluttered way you see quickly if it is correct and then check if the link does correspond. The limitation I found in this method is that the text length that is displayed is not long enough sometimes and I would have liked that text length gets not limited or like 64 chars at least. In this way you have your code in a very readable way By the way regarding the naming and the text I added another point in my list 🙂

I have received all the equipment and should be starting to build my new rig this week. It is a mixed work/game rig. CPU: Intel 13900KS CPU Cooler: Be Quiet Silent Loop 2 360mm GPU: Asus ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC 24GB Motherboard Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero Memory : Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 128 GB SSD: 2 x Seagate Firecuda 530 NVMe M2 Gen4 4TB (8TB Data), 1x Samsung 980Pro NVMe M2 Gen4 - 2TB (Sytem disk) PSU : Corsair AX1600i PC Case: Be Quiet Silent Base 802 Once mounted and fired should Rock.

As he is building from "scratch" he will need to invest in the most recent and powerful tools (visual, physics etc.) if he wants to be able to produce the sim with a small team and in an acceptable time span. We can only remember the Maddox IL2 CLOD drama. Six years in development and finally a disaster at release. Now seriously I asked GTP4 to design me a 3D model of a B17 Bomber, with articulated surfaces like aileron, and for propeller engine, and do this in Python. He did it and I was astonished. Sure it was not ideal as he used a drawing library and then listed all the polygon vertice coordinates (pages and pages) tp finally have a 3D model. But hey it is just incredible. But I simply stated what I wanted in one simple phrase. I could have said in a more detailed way and do it but using this library and so and so forth. You can guide the AI system to generate the code you want. I mean by that that today code generation is something that OpenAI will continue perfecting in GPT4 and GPT5 and later. Code generation has come up as one of the very important contribution of these AI tools. Maybe here Jason can use AI to leapfrog code production and do with a small team what others did in many years with very large teams. An intelligent combination of latest sim technology platform and AI may do miracles. And we need miracles here 👍

A vos ordres Amiral

As external visual model or as its operational model?

I am not really for point and click switches. Have them animated yes. I prefer to have an animated pilot body in the cockpit and not an empty cockpit. And in VR I suppose that to have a pilot body in the cockpit would be even better. Let's now dream a little. When you are in expert mode and do the full procedure to startup the engine then when you hit the key for the radiator or switch on the electric power on, prime the engine switch fuel valves etc. etc. then it would be fantastic! to have the animated pilot arms in the cockpit go and press the right switches corresponding to what we did. And if you hit one key in simplified mode to do an automatic engine start then you would have the pilot body arms go automatically through the whole process. Awesome, that would be AWESOME! This would really bring the sim to a higher level.

In a PTO sim the service ships like tankers, liberty ships, submarines, destroyers, cruisers, battleships and Carriers will be as important as the planes in terms of model quality and their functioning. After all they are both the main actors. To cut it out financially, very complex battleships like Yamato and other major BB's maybe should be sold as collector items.

True and I designed many with the original IL2 fmb. But with that editor I would never have been able to make missions like the ones I made with the present editor. I do not say that they should not make a better interface and more intuitive, user-friendly etc. Sure they should try definitively as it can really be improved. But still a lot of functionalities and capabilities means a lot more to learn and more time to devote. You cannot avoid that. But you still made a point here and I corrected my list adding point 13).

It is important that the mission builder is designed from the beginning as a tool that will come with the game release. Not like IL2-GB where it was finally delivered under pressure and multiple requests and as is with no real support. Regarding the interface and the ease of use I leave it to you. I am very happy with it. Any complex tool has a steep learning curve and you need to accept that if you want to master it. The more complete the tool is and the more complex mission design it allows and inevitably the more you will need to learn and so it is an investment worth doing. Personally the IL2 mission builder is the best in terms of what you can do and and I hope we get something at least as good but completed with what is lacking. Here a brief but not exhaustive list of topics I think as a heavy user of the editor should be covered: -1) We must be able to create layers on top of the map to help with the decluttering of the display. The actual object filters, and the link display management etc. all that is perfect and should stay. The search function is also excellent and should stay. But we should be able to create layers at will and so to be able to work on a selected layer. Then you can combine the layers (some or all) according to your need. There also should be in the Link management functions to have the circles defining an area to be displayed or not in a selective way. -2) All static objects (to be clear, a house is a static objects) that are used to make and populate the environment should be manipulated in X,Y,Z or all three spatial coordinates. That means we can translate along the three directions and we can rotate it also around the three axis. This gives full power to exactly position objects as they should be, along a slope as an example. In addition the function of setting the object on the ground should remain. -3) Static objects must ALL be deletable, spawnable, destroyable. There should be a static version of all the dynamic objects (vehicles, planes, artillery) with no exception. For the ships it is a little different. There are no static ships except when they are destroyed and either sink completely, or partially. This is why you should have destroyed static ships that you can have either put partly on the shore or just in shallow waters so that it is indeed static. You had many of these landing crafts of all types destroyed on shallow waters. -4) Link management is good in IL2 except that you cannot display a list of all the objects that are linked (target, object or event) to a given selected object. By that I mean that when you select an object you do have in the parameter window the list of all the objects to which it is pointing to. But we should also have the list of all the objects that point to it. This is extremely useful in large complex mission design and lacking in the present editor. -5) In your editor there should be a command that gets a key value from the player (hitting a key sequence on the keyboard) and based on that to carry out an action in the mission. Or said in another way you cannot directly send a signal into the mission script and have something happening based on that. -6) We should also have more possibilities to change parameters during the game. -7) On bombers the pilot action parameters and gunners action parameters should be separate. Waypoints should be adapted to allow this. -8) You should be able to detect when a plane is at an altitude of More than a given value or Less than a given value. -9) We should have the IF THEN ELSE logical branching possibilities in the coding of a mission. This means to be able to do conditional tests. It can already be done in a certain way but maybe this could be improved. -10) We should be able to rigidly link an object to another one. Example, if I link rigidly an ammo box on the carrier deck, then if the carrier moves the ammo box moves with it. -11) Whole flights should be spawnable. -12) We should be able to severe or generate the link between a wingman and a leader. We should be able to create on the fly a link between a leader and one or more wingmen. Example: four independent planes (or remaining flight planes after a combat) find themselves and decide to continue flying together one becoming the leader. -13) The MANUAL. A comprehensive manual should be part of the release. We lost so much time to understand how things worked in the editor and what were the side-effects etc. that basically this has killed a lot of goodwill from those that wanted to build something. So this time we should have this information upfront. Maybe Jim should be hired to do the job 😄. But I am not sure he will pitch for it again. -14) UNDO Button a must have. -15) Allow for longer character strings for naming all objects be visible on the map display. Say 64 chars. -16) When displaying the mission tree, have the window size vertical and horizontal to be freely set so that we can display easily all groups and sub-groups with their names completely. Same for the Properties window with all the object names in the Target or Object Link list. -17) Two points here related to Link Management. a) Make dedicated functions to allow connecting Object, Target or event links between multiple objects that are in various groups. b) In the event table displayed as advanced properties the event links are displayed with their event name and the object number to which they are connected. Please display also the Object Name. The number is useful when multiple objects have the same name (can happen but should not be) bit otherwise they are not manageable when you have large and very complex missions. Nobody remembers numbers (and they change at each new editor session) but names are the right way to go. -18) ...... Voilà I think this covers the major things, considering that all what exists already as functionality in the IL2 Editor will be also available here.

Jason you rock!. I was sure you could not let down the Pacific. The immense blue ocean, paradise islands with blue green lagoons, warm waters 😄 etc. etc. This will be a wild ride. What is an excellent decision is that you start from scratch and this means in terms of game engine you can be at the very best of the visual technology in all terms. Same also to use optimally the latest CPU power. This also means a lot of additional development to do (upfront costs) to build all the development environment but after a slow start once you have all of it things will accelerate.