Just a few notes --
I imagine these things in the works, so we shouldn't be squeaking about them?
A. Decent Sky effects (I want to be able to judge alt by looking out the window, none of this cartoonish deep blue stuff).
B. Acceptable AC/Terrain interaction (If you drop your gear on a botched landing, interesting things happen. I've also "righted" a B17 by lowering the gear)
C. A/C damage feedback (smoke, fireballs, etc.). The satisfaction of a nice 10-4 pass on a B17, landing 20 rounds each of 12. 7, 20 and 30 mm needs to be matched by reasonable hit sprites and something more than the bomber just disappearing. The shower of Aircraft parts on the terrain below is its own reward (the tracer smoke's there already, now that on a few pieces heading down would be mighty satisfyin'
). Oh yeah, and fires are modelled; it'd be nice to see them.
D. Better ballistics at range. Jedi described the whole game as WB1.11 with better graphics. He may be right. I've had my tail sawed off from d8 many a time.
E. Decent Sound FX. The stall indication really annoys me. Gun sounds and pings are embarassing. Some wind noises would be nice; and shaking at high speed. It's amazing how much I rely on audio cues; as it stands I compress in a 109 because I don't have
any idea how fast I'm going. I have no experiential authority on this, but it seems reasonable that I shouldn't have to look at the IAS indicator for a rough idea of how fast the sky is rushing by me. Is HTC going to do this, or are they waiting for someone to run out and offer their own sounds?
F. A26. The beauty of AH is the multiple gun loadouts (like SWOTL, only the planes don't glide so well). With the A26, we better be getting the 14-.50 cal party package.
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Finally, I saw Fletchman's AH review in which he asked for some CM tools. Perhaps it might be useful for CMs to suggest things that would help?
I will offer this suggestion:
Allow a setting whereby pilots can be grouped into flights by "joining" a leader, much like a squad on the inverse. e.g., a CM command:
.co playerid
which gives to said player "CO" status of that country, allowing the use of
a CO/CM command,
.fl playerid flightname
making such a person head of a flight.
then, you'd have participants use a
.fjoin flightname
command to join a flight (fill in the details, .fkick as well)
Then you could have a CM/CO command .assignplane [playerid or flightname] [loadout]; clear for takeoff, and all the other good things CMs want.
Oh yeah, and put a page on the clipboard for scenario comments and mission assignments.
Why bother for this? Well, it seems to me one of the biggest challenges faces a CM and COs is maintaining order at the start. Getting everybody into a proper flight, on the proper channel, in the right aircraft with the right fuel and ordnance, is nearly an impossible task, and almost never works flawlessly. There's always some joker flying a 190 with the 109s, a new kid with 100% fuel in his '17 while everyone else brought 25%, some fool who shows up late and is just "looking for a fight". It seems a few simple commands could make the annoying part of CMing a lot less burdensome.
