I've logged about 20 hours playing this game... take this for exactly what it is worth... an oppinion from someone with a fixed set of views.
Flight Model:
- Rudders: The rudder authority in the P-39 is way overdone. A slight touch to the rudder gives you 5 degrees of movement on the nose.
- Roll: The roll rates seem a tad bit high.. actually... pretty damn high. Definately needs work.
- Acceleration: If you deem being able to accelerate to 600 mph in a P-39 without using wep excessive... then something is a tad bit wrong here. You can go from 200 at the top of a loop to 400 at the bottom with 0% throttle and constant g's being applied.
- Turning: The seem to have modeled this realistically to a point. The side-slip is noticeable, but I think it is over exagerated. A 720 degree turn at 350 drops you way too much. Seems to me that at the higher speeds, rudder input in the turns is not as prevelant as at lower speeds.
- Stalls: Some stall entrances are very predictable and actually very well modeled. Others are a tad odd. It seems that any stall can result in a flat spin (belly down)... even if the stall occured while you were inverted. Other than that, I think the stalls are modelled quite well (at least as far as departure goes).
- High Speed handling: Way off. There is no difference in a planes handling from 200 to 500. Everything seems the same.
- Low Speed handling: This is a hard one. I am having difficulty getting a feel for the plane going into low speed scenarios. It almost seems like there is some kind of "low speed handling on" switch that occurs... never when I am looking at the digital speed readout.
Graphics:
- Cockpit: One of the best I've seen. The stick in the cockpit responding to your joystick movements is a neat touch. I do find the forward view a bit restricting as far as reading guages goes. The Il-2 makes must have had this come up... for there is a digital speed indicator and altimeter as well as a digital compass to feed you that info. I also think that the cross-supports are too view restrictive in an environment where you aren't allowed to move your head at all.
- Enemy Aircraft: Modeled much larger than I've seen in other sims. I really like this aspect of them. Kudos to the team for this.
- Terrain: This one is very much a mixed bag. I was flying along using the map and decided to check out a nearby town. I flew over it at about 7k and had to rely on the texture mapping looking a tad bit different to tell me it was there. I got below 5k and some structures started to pop into view. The town looked nice, but you had to be right on top of it to see it.
The tree-lines fall into the same category. It is cool, though, to see an enemy bail and his chute disappear into the forrest.
- Low level flight: The bitmap overlay really adds to the velocity experience down low. This is quite similar to WW2OL's low level graphics and HTC's beta graphics. That cool feature is more than made up for by the inability to determine your altitude at low speeds in relation to the ground. I find this to be one of the most frustrating aspects of this game.
- Muzzle Flash: This seems to be a sticky point for many.. I don't really have a problem with it. I don't know if it is more or less realistic than any other sim and could simply adjust. The same applies to tracers
- Framerate: Its awesome... but there are problems. When I first loaded the game I went whole hog and set it up for 1600x1200x32 and started to fly. The FPS stayed extremely smooth, but my controller response was abysmal. The plane was virtually uncontrolable. Setting the display to 1024x768x32 solved that problem quickly.
Using the "Quick Mission" planner showed another small issue. The game does not start the mission with all aircraft at once... it ads them. I get a major stutter as it adds each flight. This would suck in multiplayer big time.
Another note here... I have to play the game in OpenGL. If I attempt to play in Direct3d, the framerate is around 1 FPS.[/list]
Damage Model:
- On "The Enemy": Seems there needs to be quite a bit of work here. Maybe the engine cowlings (on bombers) and props were able to withstand several hundred rounds of .50 calibre fire, but I don't think so. Targetting any other part of the bombers issues neat little shrapnel droppings, but little else. The big gun on the P-39 is another story. Anything it hits it tears off. Though, it has the uncanny ability to stop after it hits an elevator and not do any damage to parts on the other side of it.
- In your plane: I'm going to reserve this one for a later time. Right now, this is somewhat of a sore spot with me too. Whatever they are doing here just doesn't seem to be working... but I need to find a way to express that.
Summary:
For a beta, this game is in excellent shape. Hell... this free version kicks bellybutton all over the last WW2 game I bought. The graphics set a new standard in gaming, but they are system tasking.
The flight model sets a new standard in gaming too. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to sim standards. There needs to be major overhauls here to bridge that gap. Unfortunately, in most boxed sims, that gap is usually too big
I'm hoping that people stop arguing over who's data is right and realize that Il-2 doesn't match any of the numbers. 600 in level flight in a P-39? No compression? Instant acceleration? Sigh.
The gunnery model is a mixed bag. I don't think the tracers are visible enough, but the muzzle flash is too visible. I can deal with this aspect of things though and don't see it as a major issue. I do question the modeling of .50 cal AP rounds, but that's a difficult one to seriously argue so I might as well just leave it at that.
This game really has some things to offer. They've moved some aspects of things far enough ahead that they will be getting my money when the game is released. How long it stays on my hard drive remains to be seen. The Il-2 developers are going to have to put it into HTC development mode to keep me interested. I wonder if they can or will do that?
AKDejaVU
