IL2

[Spikes]

FM

What is FM...I never sought to ask.

[moot]

Flight Model.

[Mr No Name]

Been flying IL2 for years... learning curve is much steeper there than here, and unlike earlier comments, there is definitely a different FM for each plane - It's just less gamey than some would like.

[BnZ]

"Less gamey"? Really?


WWII airplanes really were so unsteady that you could barely make the pipper quit bouncing at any speed, no matter how carefully you trim? A 2 second burst from 6 .50s at convergence range really didn't do anything deadlier to a 190 than make it leak a little fuel? (But the wings of a 109 is mysteriously soooo much easier to saw off with even 4 .50s! in IL2...Don't ask me why.) It took a WWII pilot 3 or 4 seconds to go from looking back over his right shoulder to looking back over his left shoulder? A nitpicking detail perhaps, but if you go by IL2, P51D pilots always burned the ferry tank LAST....really? Not even mentioning the odd fact that one mysteriously misses targets flying THROUGH your bullet stream constantly.

The famous "complex engine modeling" isn't really a problem in flight...its wierdness like the stuff above that ruins what is otherwise one of the best efforts we have going in simming right now.

Simulators are harder to fly than airplanes under the best circumstances, what with no peripheral vision, no physical "feel" for the thing. Pilots were often sent into combat with 1/10th the flying hours some players here have in sims, yet often became aces, or at least survived. Like I say, I think IL2 is a case where to make the customer think they are gettng a "realistic" challenge, they have exceeded reality in difficulty, in the process making what should be simple difficult/impossible (Like destroying an un-maneuvering target at convergence range from a saddled position.)

Agree that there are differences in plane handling, in fact in some ways I'd consider the FMs themselves superior to AHII. And the team at Ubisoft has certainly worked very, very hard doing their research, creating beautiful skins, landscapes, missions, and complex engine modeling. But the Devil is in the little details and that is where HTC wins out.

[moot]

No, all the planes react pretty much the same once they are near the edge of flight.  The learning curve might be a little steeper or longer than AH, but it's certainly not more authentic.

Just one example of the many off the wall stuff an FM as scripted together as Il2's does: You can fly a plane missing its vert stab with negligible slide.  You can dogfight it, maneuver for solutions on a squirming target, without ever spinning out.
There's a lot of nice elements to Il2's physics, some of them better than AH's equivalents, but the FM isn't one of those.

If the impartial opinion of a pixel vet like me isn't proof enough that something's funky under Il2's hood, then take Widewing's word for it...

[DaddyAck]

I feel compelled to answer here, not that I want to argue or put one sim above another because I enjoy them both.  However, I do like Il2 and think its a fine sim and not that easy if flown in full switch as are the servers that I fly on (spits Vs 109s or Hellcats Vs Zeros both over hyperlobby not to mention I fly Forgotten Skies missions).  I usually never fly on the arcade-like servers not even on WarClouds wich is only icon-enabled. There have been many a time where my 109 had a hard time making it back when my wing was full of holes, the handling deminishes with the more damage sustained.  I don't know, the flight models do not seem that vanilla to me.  I fly the Bf.109/Mc.202/Mc.205/G.50 almost all the time dependant on the time period and theatre of opperation, and I have compared it to the FW.190 as well as rides of the IJN and still only the small stable of aircraft I listed above feel good to me.

Well, Im done. Go ahead and attack me for saying IL2 is not total junk. 

[moot]

It's not total junk, it just doesn't do what it should.  Filling up the interface to a plane's controls to the point that you're overwhelmed and doing more instruments management than actual dogfighting isn't a measure of FM realism.

Like I said, the FM just doesn't work.  Almost all the figter planes do the same things negligibly different when nearly stalled out..  There's lots of very strange stuff like the vert stab thing. And really, how does this thing even happen?  How does anyone see that and not start to see the cracks and seams in the whole thing?
The whole FM just seems to have been built in different parts so that the performance would match the real planes' at each different regime of flight, and it gives the impression that it was stitched together and tweaked rather than all emergent from a single physics model.
It would be redeeming enough if it was fun despite this, but it isn't.  AH's physics make for more fun dogfighting.  There's only a few things that don't behave right (e.g. hammerheads and very sharp departures at relatively high speeds like Flat Plates etc) but they don't interfere with fun fighting as much as Il2's do.

That's the physics.. AH would definitely benefit from having a detailed and gradual damage model like Il2, the graphics would definitely be as good as it and maybe BoB if HTC added some well-measured amounts of pixel shaders, and the sounds could also really boost immersion.  But if all this needs to be compromised as it is for the flight physics to be good enough not to break people's immersion, then it's not such a bad trade-off.

[SD67]

Actually moot makes a good point here, how come you can't pull of a decent hammerhead in AH? Most of the time when I attempt one I always end up in some kind of unusual attitude which usually winds up spitting me out going a different direction to the intended which tends to throw my entire attack plan out the door and leaving me having to either improvise or run away and make a new approach.
These days I lean more towards the more time consuming and potentially more Immelman style of reversal.

[moot]

The best hammerhead in AH is the one where you hear as little of the stall horn as possible, in my experience. You need to do it at very slow airspeed.

[mussie]

lurk this up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xs8HWN6UyE

ROFLMFAO 

Take Note EVERYONE hehehe

[SD67]

OMG the AImussie !!!!

[Gianlupo]

ROFLMFAO 

Take Note EVERYONE hehehe

Go away, you fake!!!! Run! I'll take care of him!!!! <extracts his pc viruses box and usb cable.....>

EDIT:

Like I said, the FM just doesn't work.  Almost all the figter planes do the same things negligibly different when nearly stalled out..  There's lots of very strange stuff like the vert stab thing.

True, once I shot the whole elevator/stabilizer complex off a PBY and it didn't fall... it kept flying, climbing in a straight course... I think I still have it on tape, though it's not playable anymore with last patches.

[dedalos]

They go overboard on making things so durable you can unload so much ammo into a wing it'll be more holes than wing, and still fly. You can lose almost an entire stabilizer with little ill effect (vertical or horizontal) but lose part of a wing and you're in a death spiral.

The damage model itself is flaky as hell. The idea behind the damage model, the layers of damage, is a good idea. That I agree about.

Does that compare with the AH version of planes continuing the fight after missing half a wing?

[Krusty]

Depends on who's flying the F4u missing all its parts... 

[toonces3]

I haven't played IL-2 and AH enough to note this similarity in the edge of the flight envelope he discusses.

But, having said that, I don't find that the IL-2 planes fly 'the same' THROUGHOUT the flight envelope.  I do find them different.  I don't find the differences as noticable as in AH2.

I've been trying to quantify my feelings with respect to the FM of IL-2 vs. AH2, and I just don't know where I come out, having never flown a WW2 plane.

Sometimes I feel that the IL-2 FM is 'hard' just for the sake of being hard.  Like someone else mentioned, I find it incredibly difficult to get a stable gun solution on an even non-maneuvering target.  No plane should be that unstable.  And, in IL-2, I find it much harder to 'hit' the target.

But, I also find the damage model in IL-2 more 'believable', the missing stab issue notwithstanding.  I have milked a few planes home full of holes, and the FM definately changed in response to the damage.  Furthermore, I've had killshots on enemy planes where I didn't know for sure if the plane was dead, or just evading low. 

In AH2, I find it much easier to get a gun solution, even on a maneuvering target.  The damage model, while certainly acceptable, is very...similar? for each plane.  I shoot the plane and the flap comes off, or an aileron, or the engine oil, or the fuel leak...it's the same sort of  damage to every plane, and I've become accustomed to being able to tell how much damage I've done to an enemy plane.  I usually know right away if I've done fatal damage to an enemy in AH2; in IL-2 it's much harder to tell.

At first I was thinking that IL-2 had the more 'realistic' damage modeling.  I didn't thing many pilots were landing 4-5+ kills in a sortie in real life, and in AH2, with good ammo management, you can rack up tons of kills in a single ammo loadout.  I've rarely killed more than 2 planes in a sortie in IL-2- it take too long to get kill damage with a single ammo loadout.  But then I've been watching Dogfights on TV, and it sure seems like there were plenty of 4 kill sorties in Pony's and other .50 cal birds.  So maybe AH2 isn't so wrong after all....

Overall, I find that both games bring something different to the table.  You can't go dropping bombs on ships in the Coral Sea from your Betty in AH2, and you can't go to CAS in your Beaufighter in AH2.  You can't fly through a thunderstorm, or fly on instruments. 

In IL-2 you can't get even remotely the same kind of coordination you get from a real-life human wingman in AH2.

I have both, play both, and am happy to have the choice on any given day.  We've really come a long way in our simming these days.