This is a copy of a post I made to my squadrons emial list regarding WBIII. Some of our members wanted an appraisal from someone who had tried it. Just my opinion. Take it for what it worth.
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WBIII Beta Review
OK. I’ve been playing around with this beta for a bit and I’d like to share some of my initial impressions. As a satisfied HTC customer I tried hard to make sure I was looking at it with as unbiased eye as I could muster. I don’t have anything against WB although I do think some of their developers can be abrasive, unprofessional, pompous amazinhunks, and some of their netizens are almost as big of jerks. But a games a game and should be weighed on its own merits.
Sounds:
Functional. That’s as gracious as I can be. Good sounds are at least half the experience for me. It can really make or break the immersion factor. WBIII sounds are rather uninspiring. Luckily, they appear to be compatible will several well done third party sound add-ons for WB2.x. I still don’t understand why they are that funky dll format instead of wavs. That would make it a lot easier for all users to improve their sounds to an acceptable level on their own.
Tracers:
Uhhg. Let me say that again. Uhhhhhg. I hadn’t realized how good tracers assist in aiming and add to the whole experience. WBIII tracers are…uninspiring. Big orange tennis balls. Not helped by the clicky-click typewriter sound effects of the guns (see above).
Textures:
-Ocean. Hmmmmm interesting. I think animated water textures have potential, but this particular implementation is not good. The effect should be subtler. Also ground clutter whitecaps that are stationary would really aid in the sensation of movement at low elevation. Done correctly, it could be quite impressive. The current attempt is not.
-Ground. Functional. They take an interesting approach. The base texture is very low res. Looks ok at 15k but pretty blurry and non-descript at low alts. To compensate for this, a higher res detail texture is blended in on polys that are within a certain distance of the POV. I heard some describe this as bump-mapping but I think that is misleading. There is certainly no real time bump mapping going on. Its better described as a detail texture. I have seen several graphics engines use this technique. Wildtangent (
www.wildtangent.com) offers a graphics engine that has this capability. Many FPS games use this on wall textures and such. A surface is assigned a base and detail texture that may be at different resolutions. The detail texture is usually a seamless tileable grayscale granular texture at higher res that blends into the main texture as you get closer. It at least makes the blurry base texture bearable. I’d still like to see more detail in the base. I want to see that that is a farmer’s field rather than a bland blurry colored rectangular area.
-Sky/Cloud. Pretty good. I like the layered cloud. They need to have Cu’s as well though. While not spectacular and ground breaking, they have a nice effect. Especially the more they hide the blurry terrain textures.
Terrain Mesh: Nicely done. Impressive resolution for the frame rate hit. I did raise an eyebrow when I turned off the ocean and saw the ocean floor modeled as well. Good potential there. The best feature of WBIII. Kudos where kudos have been earned.
Physics/Flight Model
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1. Nice ground handling. Consistant, intuitive physics. I see good potential for GV’s there.
2. Stall Spins are weak. I had to REALLY try to get any of the aircraft to begin a spin and all of them seemed to immediately self recover if I simply let go of the controls. Modern day general aviation aircraft might have this behavior but WWII era military combat aircraft sure as hell did not. They were built will low stability for maneuverability and they didn’t take excessive effort to get into a spin and they required some active effort to recover. I hope this is merely an oversight and not an effort to “dumb-down” the product for mass appeal.
3. Low speed wing drop. Take her high AOA until just near stall, then try to roll hard left or right. The wing should actually drop in the opposite direction as you are trying to roll. This is because the wings are already at the edge of stall and the ailerons movements to increase AOA on the wing you want to life actually causes it to stall and drop instead. WBIII passed fine.
4. Accelerated stalls. OK. Even at high speeds the wings will stall if you pull back hard enough. WBIII passed fine.
5. Spiral Instability. Uhhhg. These planes are mounted on Teflon rails. Take you hands and feet off the controls. A minute gust of wind or even a minute amount of bank that you can’t even see should start the aircraft into an insipient spiral. Gradually the minute bank should increase because the plane begins to turn and outside wing travels faster than the inside wing thus generating more lift thus tightening the turn thus causing the outside wing to continue to bank more thus generating more lift etc… Because the turn keeps tightening, the plane pulls more G’s which makes it heavier which causes the nose to drop as the turn keeps tightening. Eventually the insipient spiral should degenerate into a high speed, high G spiral dive. WBIII did not. Straight as a rail. Left it, had a shower, ate lunch, watched some TV came back and still straight as a rail. OK. Let me help it. Started a 20 deg banking turn let go. Because the outside wing is traveling faster that the inside wing it should generate more lift. This “Overbanking tendency should feed on itself unless the pilot intervenes. From what I could tell this model will not degrade into a spiral dive on its own. Something not right in the model here. WBIII failes IMO.
6. Flying in a vacuum? This one is hard to explain and rather subjective. Its especially noticeable in pitch. Its like there is no air resistance. Its like I can throw the nose +-30 deg with the same stick effort at 300mph and I can at 150mph. Or at least the diff isn’t enough. I wonder if this is because WBIII is merely translating stick dispacement directly to control surface displacement. As opposed to saying 50% stick displacement generates 6 ft/lbs stick pressure and at different speeds that buys you different amount of control deflection. I dunno it just feels as the controls are more disconnected from the world physics than they do in AH which I am more used to. WBIII failes IMO.
7. Yaw roll. Fly nice and straight and then yaw hard. Should cause the outside wing to lift. WBIII passed fine.
8. No redouts or black outs. None. Nada. Ziltch. Big fediddleen goose egg. I don’t know what I was doing wrong. I pulled enough G’s to rip the wings off a F4U once but never saw any hint of G induced impairment. Hope this is mere an oversight and not part of a “dumbing-down” conspiracy. Big fediddleen “F” here.
Overall, not horrible. More Alpha than beta. A LOT of work to be done before I’d shell out money for it. There is some good material there to work on. I’m a little concerned that its already 80 meg download and needs 256 meg of ram to run well at this early stage. What will it take when they’ve actually added some features. That a high threshold for someone with a 56k modem who wants to download it and see if it’s a game he’d like. That’s going to turn away a lot of potential customers at the download page.
Certainly not the greatest software achievement of Western Civilization whose complexity is beyond the capacity of mere mortals to comprehend. I think some of the statements of their lead designer sound like he’s channeling Derek Smart.
Regards,
Wab
