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Originally Posted by Tvrdi View Post
Luthier, One crucial question, which will decide me backing or not. Do you plan to make a collision model for trees. If not then ppl would use trees in mp to excape level chases. To hide. Its killing fun and is highly unrealistic. And if we turn off trees terrain will look ugly.
Let me be perfectly frank here.
I just cannot promise it at this time. All I can promise is that we will try.
I may have deja vu after my old project, where we've had quite a few instances of saying "we will do this" instead of a more semantically correct "we will try to do this", and where we eventually ended up not being able to deliver what we promised.
As it is today, EDGE is still being integrated with the rest of the game. That's precisely what's being done right now, today, having various game objects interact with terrain. Vehicles need to drive, planes need to collide, etc.
We're obviously extremely interested in having tree collisions. There's no gameplay or realism reason for why it should not be that way. The only reason why trees would not have collisions is performance.
There are obvious algorithms for making this work. There are also less obvious ones. We need to finish the programming, try things out, and make sure everything works well.
Need to point out that the people working on this are ED programmers. They're outside my control, and they obviously had absolutely nothing to do with any of my old projects.
This is why I personally cannot say with 100% certainty we will have tree collisions. My certainty is, let's say, 93.6%. This may be PTSD talking, but I don't think that's good enough for a promise, especially if your pledge depends on it.
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Originally Posted by ishtmail View Post
As it stands now, there is some confusion.
One part of the description states that at 100k funding goal we get 5 airplanes (P51D and FW190 included), in another part it states that we get 3 airplanes.
Five airplanes total, three of them free.
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Originally Posted by Mogster View Post
I don't really understand the business model at this point.
Giving 3 free DCS level planes seems a strange choice, unless the idea is to draw punters away from other products the initial release being really a loss leader. DCS isn't known for anything other than jets, the WW2 hardcore may take some drawing away from the IL2 series. Maybe this is Tishin's play for world flight sim domination.
This decision was based on gameplay considerations, not marketing or sales.
DCS World is based on decades of content. While there's only one free plane, there's tons and tons of other content that the player encounters, and there's a lot of fun to be had.
DCS WWII starts from scratch. We can't do all that much in the next year. If we were to release a free version of the game with a single flyable plane, there'd be significantly fewer options for the player.
We want people to enjoy themselves and really have a good, all-around complete product even in the free version.
I personally would be very uncomfortable releasing a bare-bones single-flyable free game. We still have to strong paid aircraft in the basic version, and we really hope that the influx will drive enough people to purchase the P-51 and the Dora to keep the series going.
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Originally Posted by Furbs View Post
1. How will MP work? Coops/servers? how many players in a mission.
Same as DCS at least, and we're hoping to improve on it as much as we can.
Like I said in the kickstarter description, we really want to spruce up the MP, but we don't know how much we can do and how fast, so perhaps some major features will be added on later.
In other words, we have lots of strong opinions and a lot of plans, but it's way too early to talk about them. We'll only know what we can do in the process of doing it.
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Originally Posted by Furbs View Post
2. How big is the map, ive heard 100/160km but is that just the detailed area with more less detailed map area around that, will there be a English coast?
100x160 for the detailed terrain, yes.
This is the current size of our WIP map.
We can extend it at any time but we have not done so yet.
I'm personally scared to include England because it really opens up a whole new set of tasks. I am very uncomfortable doing low-quality terrain, especially with all the great things EDGE can do given enough effort. I think we could be shooting ourselves in the foot by releasing low-quality poorly textured inaccurate England with a few major airbases.
In other words, I'm potentially open to the idea, but perhaps it needs a bigger discussion with the community. We might try to add on some England and show how it can be done quickly, just so it's there, and then ask and see if the majority of the players would rather have something like that, or have nothing at all.
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Originally Posted by Furbs View Post
3. Can Paypal be added to the ways to pledge?
Sorry, we can't do anything with the kickstarter system. Whatever it supports, we'll take. Whatever it does not, we can't.
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Originally Posted by xaoslaad View Post
You need to get some of that first days momentum back!
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http://forums.eagle.ru/attachment.php?
It's already looking eerily close to what happened to the F-35A, big contributions on day one and two then a trickle from there on out.
We do have a few more things up our sleeve. As a matter of fact, even with the slowed down pace the project is doing better daily than we might have hoped for. It's just that the first few hours were so unbelievably strong, that's making the current pace look bad in comparison.
We really do need to pick up the pace and really get the momentum going again if we really want to hit those stretch goals. A flyable B-17 is my personal dream. There's gotta be a way to get there somehow.
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Originally Posted by -=MadCat=- View Post
First off, I am curious if the initially provided planes will be at DCS or FC level ?
I honestly can't see three planes at DCS level given away for free, but I'm asking to make sure.
Please excuse if this has already been explained, but it is impossible to remember every information in this giant thread.
Like I said above, this isn't just a kickstarter for the project. The project itself is supposed to kick-start a new WWII flight sim series.
We want to start it with a bang. So we really are doing three free DCS-quality planes. Yes.
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Originally Posted by -=MadCat=- View Post
We get the Fw190D-9 as a full price module by ED, matter of fact.
If stretch goals are met, we then get a Fw190A-5 (I expect it to be a full price module too) by RRG.
Here, one could still argue those are fundamentally different planes (radial vs inline).
What if then, later on, it gets decided to do a Fw190A-5 1,65 Ata or any other version, whilst we already have the D-9 and A-5 ? !
Is this then expected to sell as another full price module too ?
Same with the various Bf109s and/or Spitfires ?!
I really hope that you'd trust the guys who give away three DCS-quality planes in order not to nickel and dime everyone not to nicked and dime everyone on another plane
We want to have a strong series, and we want to build a good relationship with our players. We are not against giving stuff away for free, as you see.
FW-190A and FW-190D are really very different planes. That's why we are putting them as two separate line items; please not that we have not released even a hint of the pricing structure for anything because we ourselves do not have it set at this time.
I personally only have a vague idea of some sort of a anthology pack for major aircraft that includes various important variants in a single purchase, with a heavy discount for the owners of the initial single-variant package. But like I said, we are nowhere near far enough in the kickstarter, much less the development process, to really have made any decisions about this.
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Originally Posted by klem View Post
Why do you want to model individual trees? Why not forest and hedgerow blocks, like single objects? I suppose one answer might be to allow vehicles to travel through forests but are we really interested in that? The Ardennes aside (January 1945) where you could perhaps use trees or clumps of trees, I don't see the need for them in an air combat simulator. Surely the compromise should be in ground vehicle operations rather than flight aspects.
We'd want to have individual tree collisions because in my experience with my older projects anything less is not precise enough.
When your wingtip passes through a tree with no effect, or you fly a foot away from a tree and explode, that's horrible. And that's what happens when your collision is too rough.
If we were to go with blocks of trees, that would really change the look of the terrain. We'd need to have all fields, all roads, all parks, everything, to be a multiple of the standard tree line width. You'd see that right away. The terrain would look horribly blocky, almost Minecraft-like.
So we really do need to have fine tree collisions for this to work well. They need to match the shape of the tree, otherwise the disconnect is extremely maddening. There's nothing more upsetting than flying in MP, inching closer to the kill at tree-top level, pulling a hard turn around a tree, and exploding even though the tree is over there, just because the collision is a little too coarse.
Anyway, back to video editing for tomorrow morning!
