BoB info

Public IL-2 Sturmovik 1946
1

I found this on a German IL2 forum, but I cannot find the original on SimHQ… Anyway here it is:

I got the following mail today. Interesting!

Dear Simon

This article has appear on the Japanese website for Tokyo Game Show 2007. I think you will enjoy. Pls excuse transnational mistakes, I have make my older sister to translate!

Storm in a Tea Cup: Battle of Britain preview
Company: 1C
By Kazushito Hirai
Chiba City Tokyo September 20 2007

Like something from a bad spy movie, my contact from 1C told me to meet him in the south-west corner of the Makuhari Messe meeting hall at 1pm and ‘come alone’.

I was meeting him to preview a hot new flight game called Storm Of War, but which I have chosen to call Storm In A Teacup – but more about that later!

You may be asking why all the secrecy? So was I, but the answer is that my source at 1C, who has to remain anonymous, had sneaked a preview copy of the game over to Tokyo on their laptop.

Why? According to him there is a conflict between distributors UbiSoft and developers 1C which is delaying progress on the game to the great frustration of staff at both houses. They believe they have something special and all that stands between them and gaming history are the lawyers on both sides of the dispute. Developers who should be working on Storm of War have been diverted to other projects while the dispute is being worked out.

Well, do they indeed have something special? All I can say after my super secret preview is, ‘Kichigaijimata!’ (Japanese for crazy).

But first, to the caveat: the laptop which my contact and I used in a nearby Starbucks is no ordinary gaming machine. It was an Alienware Area 51 m9750, with Intel® Core™2 Duo Processors, a 512MB NVIDIA® SLI Dual 7950 GTX card, and 4GB of dual channel 667MHz DDR2 Memory. My contact actually apologised for the rig, warning that it was not sufficiently powerful to enable him to show the game performing at full potential.

So what did I see?

Well it may surprise some readers to learn my first mission was not in a Spitfire flying out of Kenley, but rather I started the game at Ursel airfield in Belgium in the cockpit of an Italian biplane!

I would say this is typical of the ability of the developers at 1C to model the lesser know sides of the conflict. The role of the Corpo Aero Italiano is barely recognised in the literature and I willing to guess that most readers would not even realise that some 200 Italian aircraft, comprising bombers, fighters and transport aircraft, participated in the Battle.

The mission started on the runway at Ursel behind the stick of a Fiat Cr42, and the first thing I noticed panning around the aircraft was that the world around me was busily at war. Ground traffic rumbled past the airstrip (detail on the vehicles is surprising for a flight sim, with the appearance of independently sprung suspension wheels and tracks), motorcycle riders and passengers in sidecars sped by, flak gunners swivelled in their positions, and just as importantly, our flight was waiting for a Br20M bomber to land and taxi from the runway so that we could take off. Our mission was to escort a raid of Br20Ms for a daylight raid on Ramsgate Harbour. I chose to fly the entire mission using compass and radio (tower) assistance for navigation, but there is also an autopilot option which certainly would have made it easier to rendezvous with the bombers and the rest of the escort (Fiat G50 bis) in the early morning light.

I can only say that the modelling of the Cr42 Falco was exquisite. As in real life I was crammed into the left hand side of the small cockpit, with scuffed leather lining the tiny glass windshield ahead and clear air to either side. To line up my eye with the gunsight I had to ‘lean’ over – difficult enough when sitting still on the tarmac, so I could imagine how much fun it was in the heat of combat! (There is an auto-align view for the non-purists.) All controls could be operated manually and levers and gears could be heard clicking into place as I operated them.

In flight, the Storm of War Falco ‘felt’ heavier than the Falco in IL2. I cannot be more precise than this because I did not have the two side by side to compare them, but it was more ponderous in the roll and more reluctant to get up to cruising speed (a modest 400km/h). My source assured me the flight model was more authentic than in IL2 and that IL2 pilots would have to relearn nearly every aircraft they were familiar with from that game due to the next generation authenticity of the aircraft in Storm of War.

This was certainly the case for my next mission in a Bf109e but more on that later!

You will also be wondering about the weather and cloud effects observed in flight. I am sorry to say that while they are close to the quality seen in FSX, that realism comes at a price – when flying through heavy cloud, or later when attacking a busy British airfield, even the Alienware machine began to struggle and there was visible stuttering.

In my heart I was a little disappointed at the weather in the game, as ‘real weather’ effects were one of the big promises made by 1C. The clouds look fake/cottony and I have to say, similar to CFS3 clouds, from a distance. This is not the case up close, where they are as, or more realistic, than FSX and the multilayered effect of different layers and types of clouds at different altitudes is quite breathtaking. I did not experience any bad weather, but I did experience quite challenging differences in air turbulence at different altitudes and my little Cr42 was given a sudden shove upwards by a wind gust as we hit the British coast, which nearly made my stomach queasy!

The modelling of the landscape, which my contact told me could not be shown at full fidelity due to the limitations of his laptop, was quite stunning at all altitudes. I departed from ‘the script’ during my first mission and went sightseeing around the Kent countryside. Ramsgate’s tiny harbour was beautiful in the morning light and I could see waves lapping at the breakwater. As I flew south along the long straight Kent coast I could again see waves breaking on beaches, and the occasional military emplacement. I turned inland, and quite by accident almost immediately found myself over the RAF Manston airfield. My contact told me there were no British aircraft set up yet in this particular mission but the airfield was fully populated and so I could not resist swooping down to see what damage my Falco’s awe inspiring twin 12.7mm machine guns could do.

If you are expecting Hollywood style visual effects from Storm of War you will be disappointed. I failed to set anything alight with my tiny Bredas, and though I made visible holes in a hangar, nothing at all was smoking as I pulled up after two gunnery passes. Which is, as a purist in these matters, all I would expect from such a lightly armed biplane.

This was quite a contrast of course to what I saw when I returned to Ramsgate. The BR20M bombers had made landfall, and the little square shaped harbour was a mess. Shipping (mostly fishing boats) was burning or sinking. A couple of warehouses were ablaze. A line of parked trucks was also smoking, and each truck seemed to be showing individual damage.

I am ashamed to say that at this point I collided with the ground! I had inverted my aircraft to enable me to better observe the damage at Ramsgate and was unable to roll upright before a wingtip hit a tree and my mission was over. My contact asked me whether I would like to restart but as we only had limited time available I opted for a dogfight mission.

This mission started in the air, with me in the cockpit of Werner Molders 109 E4 over Dover. Again it was exquisitely modelled, and I cannot express the delight one gets from seeing the detail of these aircraft – Molders Emil was perfectly represented with the yellow nosed JG51 livery, a snarling Eagle in a circle on its cowling, and most delightful of all, several rows of ‘kills’ marked on the tailplane to reflect Molders earlier successes in Spain and France.

The mission started paused, allowing me to pan around the sky, and observe the two Rotte in my Schwarm in a perfect finger four formation. I could not however immediately observe any enemy aircraft, which my contact assured me were in visual range. I took his word for it and returned to the cockpit and started the mission. Desperately scanning the skies I could still see nothing, when suddenly my wingman called, “Indianer niedriges sechs!!” (fighters six o’clock low) and surely enough there was a flight of 6 brown and green Hurricanes rising up from below and behind us, quite visible now that I knew where they were.

End of part 1

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Part 2:

My 1C friend told me the commands for ordering wingmen to attack, but I was pleased to note that the second Rotte, as per 1940s Luftwaffe doctrine, was independently breaking to engage, while my own wingman stayed with me. A small tick to 1C for the fidelity of this behaviour.

And it was here I got the most pleasant surprise of the entire experience – as I shoved the throttle forward on my Emil, there was an almost physical response and I could swear I felt my chair move forward with it and my head snap back! The Daimler Benz gave a stomach rumbling growl. It is hard to describe but the feeling is visceral, which is a sign that there is some serious physics modelling at work. Guns and cannons are modelled on the stick and I quickly armed these. As I snap rolled to bring the Tommies into my sights, my wingman struggled to follow me, which I regard as positive, because if the AI slavishly cloned my manoeuvres it would be highly unrealistic. However as I closed on the first Hurricane I noted my wingman as about 200 metres behind me, in a good supporting position.

My cannon and MG hits were clearly visible on the Hurricane’s wing, and though it did not send him down, I saw my attack cause him to break from his own formation and try to flee the battlefield. Again, my wingman stayed with me as I used the Emil’s diving energy to gain altitude again and survey the battlefield. We were no longer outnumbered, my Schwarm having converted altitude to advantage and there was one smoking wreck on the landscape – a Hurricane – and one damaged and fleeing, leaving 4 vs 4 in the air. The other Rotte was engaged in a turning fight with two Hurricanes, while the other two were trying to gain altitude to confront myself and my wingman, so I released my wingman to attack the portside Hurricane while I focused on the starboard side enemy.

In this head on pass I was very interested to see if the enemy would blindly drive straight at me, at what distance it would fire, how realistically it would behave in the pass and what manoeuvre it would use to re-engage after the pass, given that it would have extremely low energy at its disposal. To me, this would be a good example of whether 1C had achieved any advances over IL2 AI, where I must say the range of tactics available to the AI aircraft is quite limited, and some of the choices made by the AI are wholly inappropriate to the aircrafts energy state.

I was not disappointed. The Hurricane did not drive straight at me, but kept a steady bearing about 10 degrees off my nose, before kicking some rudder in about 200m before we closed and spraying my path with lead. I took some hits to the cowling and port wing, and opened fire myself, but the Hurricane rolled on its back and dove diagonally away. In doing so it disappeared beneath me, where I could not see it, it regained energy so that it could again climb to gain altitude, and by rolling on its back it showed the AI ‘pilot’ was also paying attention to the Hurricane’s propensity for the Merlin engine to starve for fuel under positive Gs. Beautiful.

I stayed high, and panning around my aircraft, I saw the Hurricane’s hits on my fuselage had been perfectly modelled, with shell holes in neat line across my cowling and the wing root of my port wing. I could also see that my engine was now leaking glycol, and so I reluctantly turned for home.

By now we were over the Dover Cliffs and these are nicely modelled, though a little too uniformly white for my tastes. If you look at Dover Cliffs on Google Earth you will see they are almost grey white, not toothpaste white with grey wrinkles, which is how they appear in Storm of War. The Just Flight VFR FSX modelling of the English coast remains the benchmark in sim landscapes of this part of the world.

My engine temperature began to climb over the coast despite how well I thought I was nursing the engine, and within sight of the French coast and at about two thousand feet, the engine seized and stopped with a metallic grinding sound. The sound effects in Storm of War contribute hugely to the experience of flying the aircraft and give real cues to the health of the aircraft and its engine.

I had a choice of trying to put the Emil down on a short and not very wide strip of beach, or try to find a flat field to land in. This is where I learned that 1C has been very diligent in using real world ground height modelling, and the flight model for the Emil in Storm of War is a new animal compared to what it was in IL2. What seemed from 200 feet to be a long flat green field, turned out at 200 feet to be rolling ground comprising grass and sand. Thank goodness trees were not modelled (these were an option that had been turned off due to the performance restrictions on the laptop).

I completely misjudged the balance needed to get my Emil’s tail down with this new flight model, and bounced horribly on landing, and when my wheels met the earth again, my undercarriage collapsed and I nosed into the turf, ending up on my back, with my pilot suitably dead. I should have chosen the beach and a wheels up ditching!

That was all we had time for, and despite my promising my contact that I would swap my Toyota Noah for his laptop, he declined and rushed away with a worried and furtive look on his face.

So, my conclusions?

Firstly, may I say, death to all lawyers. If it is indeed legal wrangles that are keeping this game from being born, then I hope they choke on their ramen.

Secondly, what I saw is a generational leap in quality over the IL2 series in two respects – the landscape, which is very high fidelity, and the damage modelling and overall graphic quality of the aircraft. The fidelity of the livery on the Molders 109E4 was simply stunning and on a par with anything that, for example, Shockwave has done for the MS FSX series.

There has also been a generational improvement in the AI, as illustrated both by the observed behaviour of my own wingmen, but also by the tactics used by enemy combatants. In flight tactical changes are fluid, and believable, and were entirely appropriate to the tactical situation.

Finally, there are the flight models. If I can say it in one sentence, they enable you to better judge the physical momentum and energy state of your aircraft by its behaviour in the air. This has always been the element missing from flight sims because they cannot model (without sophisticated hydraulics) the feel of the aircraft in flight. Storm of War comes closer to this than IL2 through greater modelling of small clues like head bobbing, vision blurring, cockpit shake, airflow over the airframe and audio cues from the airframe and engine.

In chatting, my friend also revealed some of the gameplay elements which are close to completion, but there was nothing new to report there. There will be a variety of historical missions, solo campaigns in which the player will progress from wingman to flight and squadron/staffel leader, and a strong focus on the online play (up to 32 players) which is the real strength of the IL2 series.

As I watched my friend disappear into the dark streets of Chiba City I made a small prayer that his little legal Storm in a Teacup would soon turn into Storm of War, and delight the thousand of flight simulation fans out there who I know are waiting.

3

OMG, better start on the overtime (if we did it).

Thx for the heads-up

4

Its a total wind up!.. :mad:

5

Very interesting Hans thx… oh I fear the game wants a super comp that has to be invented yet!? :o

6

Great news you gave us there, Hans!:slight_smile:

SoW sounds very intersting!

But the game is delayed because of some stupid lawyers and childish arguing between UBI and 1C?:mad:

I wish that they don’t focus on earning, but entertaining, which is the reason they made the game in the first place!..or is it?:mad:

7

That info is “supposed” to be fiction designed to wind people up, says a couple of people in the know on SimHQ.

I’m pretty sure the thread is fiction, not so sure about the reasons SoW is being held up. Maybe a tiny little bit of truth in there somewhere.

8

Shall we ask his Royal Mingnus if its true…he has friends in very high places;)

9

The email is signed by one Kazushito Hirai
Kazushito Hirai is the ceo of Sony (PS3), or so it has been said.
Whatever the source of the “leak” email, it has been totally rubbished as fiction by those in the know, and by people in the know I mean people further up the food chain than even “His Royal Mingness”

There could be a lock down because of the Pacific Fighters fiasco. That was leaked and pirated before it was even widely available in the shops. Maddox reckoned they lost a fortune in revenue on that one, with estimates that as many as 70% of PF copies being pirates in Russia and China.

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I wish that they don’t focus on earning, but entertaining, which is the reason they made the game in the first place!..

No it isn’t the reason. The reason anything gets developed, be it a PC game or a sports car, is to make money. Before the project started a business case would detail predicted return on investment, this would include effort to produce the product how long etc and how many items need to be sold before break even.

Any person trying to bring a product to market for any reason other than that would be lucky to see the product in production.

11

There are people further up:eek:

12

No it isn’t the reason. The reason anything gets developed, be it a PC game or a sports car, is to make money. Before the project started a business case would detail predicted return on investment, this would include effort to produce the product how long etc and how many items need to be sold before break even.

Any person trying to bring a product to market for any reason other than that would be lucky to see the product in production.

Yes, sadly you are right, even if it would be hard to make anything without the purpose to earn money, it would still be great. But the world is greedy and never wants to make something for the people, for the fun, but for money.:frowning:

Pity the world is like it is… At least we have modders though, who make games better (and worser, in some cases) for free…for the entertaining purpose.

I wish dev’s would have that good spirit as the modders and missionmakers…

:slight_smile:

13

Every word of it is true.

That’s my fantasy and I’m clinging to it :slight_smile:

I can find out if it’s true. I will only ask for a yes or no to an “Is it true?” question - where could be the harm in that?

But let the dust settle we’ve had Mourinho up to our eyeballs this week, that’s enough to be going on with. Russian Mafia, Mossad, Terry off his trolley it’s got everything :slight_smile:

Ming