<EDIT> Please try to keep suggestions EASY to accomplish. This isn't a "muzzle flash" thread (as much as we'd all like seeing that fixed). The goal should be new objects, simple additions (new waypoint types, etc). New topic title courtesy of HH Dubbo—thanks, mate.

Features (some of which were undocumented in il-1/FB then "fixed") I'd love to see in PF:

1. The ability to "park" AI planes (used to be able to set waypoints for zero alt and speed). This is a great feature because if you mix a few parked AI planes among static planes, when they get damaged they burn, etc adding a little extra realism to the carnage. Add a new waypoint type, "parked." Maybe if they were parked the game could curtail their AI and just do damage, not do anything else.

2. We can order formations in flight, how about the ability to set formation type under properties in the FMB?

3. Taxi to TO. Ability to place planes in revetments, etc, and have them taxi to the runway, ideally with timeout options (placed at start, taxi as low speed, zero alt waypoints.)

4. Don't make landed/damaged planes disappear at all, or make it a toggle in the FMB.

5. Make a "vehicle" of a group of troops marching. When damaged the fleeing troops that trucks have do the same thing.

6. Smaller naval craft that can be sunk/burned by strafing... barges, small wooden ships, small transports, smaller escort ships.

7. Runway cratering (FMB placed as previous damage, and from bomb hits in play). Would damage planes that hit them. Crater objects for FMB could simply be crater shapes you place like a tree. Dirt craters and craters with jagged marston mat edges in a few different bomb sizes. Perhaps a bomb explosion could place such an object instead of the blast sprite?

8. Flight deck damage (FMB placed as previous damage, and from bomb hits in play). Would damage planes that hit them.

tater

[This message was edited by Tater-SW- on Tue May 25 2004 at 09:26 AM.]

[This message was edited by Tater-SW- on Wed July 21 2004 at 05:02 PM.]

[This message was edited by Tater-SW- on Sat July 24 2004 at 09:42 AM.]

[This message was edited by Tater-SW- on Mon July 26 2004 at 07:29 AM.]

[This message was edited by Tater-SW- on Sun August 01 2004 at 08:04 AM.]

9. Make a few new cloud types. One would be kinda large with a flat bottom. Another would start as a small area, and as it goes up it widens, and fans out in one direction. All would be BLACK (could be two versions, one black, one gray). These are placable smoke clouds to represent damage from previous strikes. They are static like current clouds, so it shouldn't hit FR more than any cloud does now.

tater

PS-the FMB is extremely important because it allows players to continuously create more content for the game, it's worth a little extra lovin'.

YES...FMB placeable smoke colums...with user input of smoke height ranging from 100 meters to 7000 meters. Yes strikes on oil put smoke 7km into the atmosphere, making some of the most "popular" film footage of WW2.

Exactly. I get the opportunity to see a lot of forest fires here in New Mexico, usually 100+ kilometers away. Once they really start going, it doesn't move all that fast, just looks like a big, grey cloud that goes all the way to the ground. Make it black, and it's oil fires, darker grey for structures (though they briefly go black when they torch up). This would add hugely to immersion on followup strikes.

tater

Great ideas Tater & Lexx. Id love to have planes taxi and line up before take off. As it is for smoke colums Ive been useing 262 at 0 alt so by the time I get to the AO theres smoke everywhere. But ofcourse theres a lag spike in the very beginning of the mission. It would be so much cooler to have huge smoke plumes either on the ground or on the sea from burnning oil.
Id like to see the addition of supply crates on chutes under the payloads of C-47, JU-52s etc. I think it would ad cool resupply missions.
CARPE DIEM

I would be VERY happy if triggers could be included in FMB. That way you could arrange aierial defence over distant airfields without using resources needlessly. It would bring a lot immersion to sim.

Re: Triggers

I'm sure I saw Luthier post that this wasn't gonna happen, too much work.


Time to add more stuff:

10. Some new ground objects (stating the obvious here, but WTF). I was thinking of revetment objects---berms of earth/coral that can be placed around planes (many planes in PTO were dispersed in the trees). Need a few sizes, obviously.

11. Some less developed airfields than we see in IL-2/FB/AEP. A placable AF, that we could rotate?

12. The palms look cool, but it's important to remember that a lot of the palms were cultivated. At guadalcanal the palms are in ROWS near the AF---it was a farm. A large tile of lower poly palms in rows (liek the forest tiles in IL-2) would do wonders with a few clumps in front. The same goes for rubber trees.

13. A toggle in static object properties to make them smoke/not smoke when damaged (cool for static planes that get wrecked, but you can control which were gassed up and would catch fire to adjust FR issues).

14. Skip bombing for AI. You can make AI skip bomb now (I made a AEP mission just to watch this, lol), but it takes a bunch of tweaking, and even then they drop all bombs at once. Lower alt cutoff for ground attacks might be better in general given the many low alt attacks.

15. Ability to spot static planes on CV decks.

16. Some CV deck equipment---bomb and fuel carts (last 2 say "Midway" don't they?).

tater

Tater - this is a really good thread.

I would like to know if there are any plans to change or improve the FMB and if Luthier wouldn't mind talking about some of these ideas and whether or not it will happen.

All of the ideas here are good ones (including triggers) although I saw Luthiers post about them being too costly and time consuming to install at this point.

Oh man...I LOVE the idea of placeable smoke collums. It doesn't seem to have much of a hit right now and it'd be great to have a bunch of options with regards to that. Some of the coolest screen shots could be taken with aircraft zooming out of the darkened skies.


RCAF 412 Falcon Squadron - "Swift to Avenge"

I wish they'd have changed the revments in AEP so they were larger and you could park you a/c under the camo netting.

To do it in PF would be great. Great ideas Tater.

"GT182" / "vonSpinmeister"
www.bombs-away.net
"Fly to Survive, Survive to Fly"

Some more:

17. A waypoint toggle for AI, um, "bored" or "sleepy" or something like that. After said waypoint the planes would lose their 3rd eye in the back of the head that makes them jink as soon as you're lined up. They would only react if they were hit or you crossed their 3-9 line. The ability to bounce AI would be nice (I was screwing around with a zeke and 1 wingman vs 4 P-40s in AEP and they were really squirmy just as I was about to kill them. Too uncanny, lol)

18. The ability to drag a lasso around a group of objects, then move all of them at once, or duplicate them (you could make a template of an aircraft revetment, and then paste them, then make little changes to make each unique).

19. Either the ability to clear trees, or if they made the large forest tiles available as a placeable object, they could eliminate some of them from nearby airfields and let us place them ourselves.

20. I'm sure they will have this anyway, but more primitive port facilities. Wooden wharfs, piers, etc.

21. I'm not sure if this already works, but I just screw it up, but mission goals for both sides. So you could have player defensive CAP, and AI might be set to destroy 25% of ground targets before leaving. now it seems they'll keep going til they run out of ammo.

tater

The ability to duplicate or clone objects would be cool,boy would that save time

22. (Snyde) The addition of supply crates on chutes under the payloads of C-47/Tabby (edited out Ju-52 for PTO ;-)

23. A field for the sinking time of ships by mission under "Conditions" in the FMB. This would be default at whatever y'all were thinking, but could be set as high as 15+ minutes. Ideally this default time would be modified down by heavy damage.

For example: default time is 1 minute, but the DD ship takes 4 torps. The 1st torp actually is enough to sink it. It would sink in 10% less per torp (or whatever) after the sinking damage, so in this case 30% faster, or 0.7*1 minute = 42 seconds. If the mission sink time was set to 20 minutes and it took the same damage, it would sink in 14 minutes. The % per extra hit could always be upped, or it could also be set under "Conditions."

24. A new object: emplaced infantry. From the air this would just look like a line of foxholes. It would be a CAS target. If the army had friendly line markers (US did), the red/blue designation could determine marker color for the lines (you'd have to be damn low to see them). Emplaced infantry lines might have 1 30 cal MG to represent small arms fire (very inaccurate, though).

25. Evasive AI for ships. When AAA starts firing, ships should make evasive turns.

26. Wind direction. If the FM can't handle this for now, add it anyway, but just for smoke.

27. Fire on the ground (for incendiaries). This is mostly for bombing the Japanese homeland.

tater

Emplaced infantry would be great for close ground support!
I would also like to see(1 can only hope) is Napalm for that exact situation. Id love to come in low with the Corsair, gear down, flaps down raining fire on enemy lines! Ok kinda grusome but cool just the same.
CARPE DIEM
Snyde

Yeah, emplaced infantry would be a 2d foxhole shape with the head and shoulders of the current running inf guys sticking out (with a rifle). Damaged state would eliminate a few of the inf but keep the holes. Destroyed would be just the holes.

More:

28. If they could let use place a smoke cloud based on the real clouds in game, why not let us place real clouds? Clouds are fixed for the map, it'd be nice to be able to add a puffy cloud over a target area to force quick thinking on the attackers (IP won't work with cloud cover, etc). They could also make a cloud that has an angled shaft of rain coming out of the bottom (static like the rain in game now, but just under the cloud). This would allow us to make squall lines etc to mask ships from recon.

29. (AI change, not FMB) Have planes lose you in clouds. At the very least no shooting.

tater

Yea that always erked me about the AI and clouds,hell they still manage to get shots off in the thick of the soup.

I liked the smoke suggestions. What about storm fronts or systems that you could place or direct. Wouldnt it be cool to have a storm front rolling over the target area just as you were in bound?
~Aaron

30. Sheep. I have yet to see a sheep, what kinda flight sim is this, anyway?

tater

31. "Safety override" for AI. The AI seems to be programmed not to engage in certain unsafe behavior... You set a waypoint alt to 10m over the water, and it flies at what looks more like 50m. Give us a toggle for a formation to do what we say, regardless of the AI's programming. (let's us script stuff that might have a bad outcome) (this'll be an issue for setting planes to come in a hair over the treetops to bomb)

32. Settings for stuff that doesn't make it to the FMB GUI could be in a file we could make sense of and change (the more control the mission builders get, the better the mission's we'll see as people push the envelope).

33. Could aircraft waypoints have a graphic of the plane on them (like the static planes) so we can se the size of the plane? This would be useful for on ground waypoints for planes (assuming we can do that). Also for arranging formation elements.

34. (AI improvement) Make AI bail out as soon as their plane is on fire.

tater

[This message was edited by Tater-SW- on Fri May 28 2004 at 08:16 AM.]

Nice suggestions Tater. I have suggested before that minor/intermediate damage should be carried over for a few missions, particularly if the base was in need of resupply.
Say your dashboard gets shot to bits on one mission but you make it back, on the next mission maybe some of the gauges still need to be replaced. Maybe you don't get some gauges replaced until they scrap an aircraft or you get re-supplied.

Maybe some engine damage on one mission could carry over as over-heating problems for a while. You could make this switchable in the FMB, particularly if you are building a campaign.

I think this would really add to the immersion. As it stand now you have a factory fresh mount everytime you take-off, no matter how badly shot-up you came home the day before.




Kermit the Frog is actually a south paw.

[This message was edited by Dubbo2 on Fri May 28 2004 at 11:50 AM.]