WarBirds III, they seem to be catching up fast.

[LtHans]

Anybody take a look back at WarBirds lately?

They just released a new version this week.  Now, I still think Aces High is ahead of them, but the gap is closing fast.

They have most of the planes from the old WarBirds II, and have also added a lineup of ground vehicles too.

M4A1 Sherman tank
M3 troop transport (4 troops, 2 machinguns)
M16 AA halftrack just like ours
M3 GMC halftrack with a 75mm howitzer.

 

 

 

They're also commenting that...yes...they are going to design their new game to be a combined arms sim, though they may not do infantry, other than as the current paratrooper drones.  They even provisioned their ocean to have underwater terrain for submarines.  Their land terrain has more rolling hills than AH has, and includes towns with artillery that you can control (like the artillery of Dawn of Aces).

It's still a beta test right now.  There are a few planes that need some work, and only half have the 3D cockpit art done yet.

I'm just curious to see what everyone else thinks of WarBirds 3.  Is it going to be better than Aces High?

[chisel1]

Its already better than Aces High.  

<G,D,Run like Hell>

[GRUNHERZ]

Their clouds are awful, AH is really the only sim ive seen that does those big puffy white ones well. Ill always remember this time I snuk up to a P51 at hi alt and blew him up right inside this huge cloud valley with massove cloud mountains on the sides, simply awesome.

[715]

One major difference between WBIII and AH is that WBIII supports hardware transform and lighting (3D geometry calculations) of GeForce and Radeon cards while AH doesn't (although I don't know about the DX8 beta version of AH).  Using the hardware acceleration of T&L allows many more polygons to be rendered in reasonable framing rates.  This allows more polygons per plane, giving smoother rounder nacelles like on the B17 above, and more polygons in the terrain, giving more hills and smoother coast lines.  It also allows much more complex cities and lots of trees.  Of course, if you depend on the hardware to do the T&L then you depend on it doing it right.  Geforce cards don't do things right when you use a 32 bit Z-buffer with 16-bit rendering.  Since 16-bit Z-buffers produce serious round off errors leading to bad polygons, you have to run in 32 bit mode to get a more accurate 32 bit (24 bit plus 8 bit stencil) Z-buffer.  This slows things down a bit.  But the high polygon count sure looks nice.

On the other hand the cockpit I saw (Spit IX) didn't look nearly as good as AH.  And then there is the WB flight model.  For some bizarre reason they limit control surface response rates: if you do a hard over on the stick the ailerons take a full 2 seconds to respond to their limits.  This leads to an annoying mushy overshoot feeling to the FM.

The other major drawback to WBIII is that it's an 85 MByte download!  And me with the poor phone line limited to 32,000 Baud  

715

[LtHans]

From what I have gathered (from some older Cornered Rat guys, not the current WarBird programers) the reason the controls of WarBirds were slow was deliberate.  The netcode couldn't always keep up with the player throwing his controls around, particularily rolling.

So, they had the rolling inertia really high to prevent micro warps and such.

Aces High and WW2 Online both don't do this anymore.  WarBirds does.

Still, I've been poking around WarBirds lately and downloaded the last two versions of the game.  I'm not going to quit Aces High just yet, but I may if either WW2 Online or WarBirds III can do the virtual battlefield any justice.

To be honest, I haven't played AH in over a month.  My brother already canceled his account with AH.

Hans.

[715]

Originally posted by LtHans:

So, they had the rolling inertia really high to prevent micro warps and such.

Hans.

It's not just the ailerons- the rudder and elevators also take 2 seconds for full deflection.  This makes control of the aircraft annoying- there is no better way to mess up a control loop than add a delay to it.  It forces you to program your brain to anticipate and backwards control the "inertia" (for example to roll to the left you have to push the stick full left and then pull it past center to the right temporarily to cancel the inertia of the overshoot- in RL you would just recenter the stick when the desired degree of roll angle was reached).

Re clouds:  WBIII models cirrus clouds and they look pretty good (for cirrus clouds).  AH models cumulus clouds.  They look very very good but the instant "grey out" when you enter them is not as realistic as the WBIII "fog" effect when you enter their clouds.  Nevertheless, you can't hide in the wispy transparent WBIII clouds.  Sunrise is way better in AH as well: for some reason WBIII thinks sunrises are green  

715

[gatt]

They are doing a good job. Nice aircraft graphics. Nice ground vehicles. Now you can capture villages and above all they have early war planes to do realistic scenarios. I wish the best to them.

[StSanta]

My problem with Wb is the horrible inertia which does not correspond to my RL experience. When the pilots at the club can throw around Cessna 182's or even some twin engine SE A II's faster in a roll than WB 190's, I know a)reality is modelled wrong or b) WB is modelled wrong  

[JimBear]

Totally  OT

[narsus]

I've heard the clouds currently in the beta are only early ones the final release should have much much better clouds. To be honest I've flown warbirds for 3 years and AH for 2 months or so and noticed very little difference in FM between the two. Some aircraft feel different like the corsair for instance others feel almost identical.

What I do like in AH is the 100% damage on gunnery. Whatevr you hit you destroy.

Narsus

[ispar]

And of course, there's another issue. WBIII doesn't work on my system. Or, it does rather, but there are no textures. Everything is white, none of the controls functon correctly, and it's sloooooooow!

[Yeager]

Ill give it aother try when the release is official and I finally get a G card.

The good news is HTC does not like being second best so whatever the pit crew at iEN does I think HTC will do better.  They sure did with WB2 vs AH1.

Lets see what AH2 does against WB3  

Y

[Fangio]

Well... I keep accounts in both, but do 99% of my flying in WB2.77.   WB3 is looking good, but its still a beta and has plenty of bugs. A bad keyboard bug makes it inplayable for combat for me...

I actually think AH has much better FM's, tons better effects such as fire, hit sprites ect.,  HUGELY better interfaces and support stuff like keymapper and films.... and I think the AH graphics, while not as good as WB3, are close enough that the other things still make AH the better sim. Hands down.

So why do I play WB if AH is the better sim?  Simple.  AH Gameplay sucks.  There is no historical arena, its all late war superplanes and the S3 events are held in WB.

Ultimately... who has the best sim means less than who has the best gameplay. For me.... WB has that hands down.

Fang
JG26

[jihad]

A big drawback with WB3 is the HUGE download if your on a modem.

The U.I. is a real clunker, the terrain is butt ugly, stick response is awful, the plane models look funky in external view. <may be that sorry bellybutton 3D Max software they model with?> The high polygon counts just add more jaggies IMO.

On the bright side they've come a long ways from the 1st build of WB3, if they can keep it alive they might catch up to AH eventually.  

[Fokker]

Following all 3 sims closely, but do my playing in AH at the moment. I do miss the historical WW2 arena in WB very much. It should not be difficult for HTC to offer a similar arena.

WBIII sure is nice graphics, and some effects are better. AH should pic the best and implement if possible. Have a look at the launching of rockets from planes in WBIII. Very very nice. Wish AH get rocket launch effects like that.

Both competing sims are too buggy for me to see them as real oponents yet, but as bugs are fixed they sure will be if AH should not develop much further. However, I trusth HT to follow suit and stay in lead.

LtData *in case you dont know Fokker, old handle *