What Il2:FB is doing right now with it's damage model is what AH does - just with additional incremental steps between no damage and full damage, with varying degrees of flight performance being effected.
This is doable on any current PC, works quite well on my machine with full graphics - online or offline against AI.
Now what they plan on doing in BoB is up in the air, all we have seen are screenshots of the underlying structure of the plane's being made. This is not the underlying damage model (as to how a plane gets damaged, which is never seen), but instead the visual model - so we can atleast assume that there will be a skin that will be slowly holed up or blown away. Beyond that, its anyone's guess. This would lead to a lot of data communications, rather than rib1 destroyed - we now have 1x1cm hole input into area 56x 22y, and multiply that by the number of times bullets enter the skin. This would lead to a lot of data being transferred on a lowly 32player game, let alone several hundreds.
This is without even figuring in the actual computations to derive the visual model, so not only do complex calculations for the damage model need to done - now a lot more stuff is being put into packets, or atleast being transferred in multiple packets. This now requires more CPU cycles to recieve, decode, place on the plane, and so on for each plane that is being visually modelled. Then a group of planes from somewhere else on the map become visually modelled, (for sake of argument are damaged), all of their damage has to be displayed and thus communicated... and now your system has to go recieve all of this while still maintaining the usual communications processing it typically does (like what the current AH does).
I doubt how much data can be transferred at once would really be much of a factor, so long as everything can be packaged into small packets and transferred at high rates.
The real problem is with all of these graphical features will occupy a great deal of the computers work load, and then adding in the networking aspect of something this detailed for a scale this large (400 players) would require the state of art computer of two years from now to run it well.
In the case of the current FB, offline I can have combat of up to 32 AI planes on ace level with lots of AI ground object scattered around and achieve the same framerates as playing online with only 16 people with some AI ground objects.
Theres just so much being communicated that the CPU spends the majority of the time sending/recieving/updating locations, object damage/status and each player's aircraft state that something has to give - and thats typically graphics (or sound depending on the sound engine).
Keep in mind that BoB is designed to run on the top of the line computers when it is released in 2005.
-SW
