Suggestions or ideas for the next patch to BobII

[Hylander_1715]

If possible, locking and unlocking the tailwheel, so it swivels like the real thing. Also, the tail wheel rotating.

Oxygen masks on the pilots, since the RT michrophone was located in it.

Some specs for setting prop pitch ie: set your throttle to say 55% ans set your prop pitch to achieve _______ rpms, for cruising to get the best economy. This of course for the individual aircraft.

Smoke and flames in the cockpit if your main tank in front gets hit, along with the possibility of a jammed canopy.

Guns jamming, if fired too long.

Removal of the backround band for RT transmissions, and using the red colour characters like the info line.

Emergency vehicles for when you land damaged, and or injured.

Possible battle damage to flaps and landing gear for those hair raising experiences that require a change of shorts, and washing out the cockpit

Stronger parking brakes, or chocks away, so a proper engine run up and magnito check can be done without the plane rolling.

Multiskin for the remaining aircraft.

All suggestions are of course requests with respect to feasability. If any are possible, great! If not, well you don't know if you don't ask.

[Cas141]

Proper Flight Recording-
That's what I would love to see. Please do it as good as Il-2, which is fabulous the way you can replay the flight either in the cockpit or outside or, completely detached from all planes and watching from afar.

The best of it is the fact that you can fly a sortie and after it is finished you can THEN decide to put it on record.

We all have those special flights where we think- I'd love to see that again, that was good.

I consider this a top priority.

The present replay is a complete disaster- I could never understand Rowan permitting it. Better not to have had one at all, than this mess.

[ricnunes]

The present replay is a complete disaster- I could never understand Rowan permitting it. Better not to have had one at all, than this mess.

While I agree that the BoBII record system could be much better I completly disagree with your statement that "Better not to have had one at all, than this mess" and one of the reasons which is extremelly important is that a great number of critical fixes like the ones related to AI became easier or even possible due to the BoBII record system. Being one of the 2.05 testers I know what I'm talking about! I'm also sure that Buddye which as you already know is the main BoBII programmer will agree with me on this.
So remember, without the BoBII record system some of the very important fixes we currently have in 2.05 would be much harder to achive and probably some of them wouldn't be included in 2.05 (maybe, only in later versions).
So and because of this I learned to respect the BoBII record system.

Also, one thing that I noticed which is very impressive for me (regarding the BoBII record system) is that it saves the recorded movies in very small files. Obviously managing to save in very small files same trades must be made.
And I believe that the IL2 recording system saves the recorded movies in much larger files, right?

Resuming, should the BoBII record system be better? definitly YES.
Should nothing be better than the current BoBII record system? DEFINITLY NO!

[spitfireace]

too right mate.

[Cedric]

Suggestions for 2.06.

It bothers me slightly that during the instant action bombers intercept I find myself firing at the bombers when they jettison their bombs and not causing an explosion. I would've thought that spraying shots at the underside of the plane as the bombs are released would cause a massive explosion (is this correct?).

I'd like to see fire and / or smoke in the cockpit modelled. I feel this should be there because it was such a common occurence.
I'd like the option of having the possibility of this happening. The player would be given a certain number of seconds to parachute out - longer for smoke, shorter for outright fire.

Pilots sometimes suffered glycol or oil sprayed on their windscreen.

The game could also model in-flight pilot fatalities due to being hit by bullets - plane still flying. You could come up with some visual indication along the lines of the red screens that could make this quite creepy.

[ricnunes]

Suggestions for 2.06.

It bothers me slightly that during the instant action bombers intercept I find myself firing at the bombers when they jettison their bombs and not causing an explosion. I would've thought that spraying shots at the underside of the plane as the bombs are released would cause a massive explosion (is this correct?).

Are you mentioning the fact that when bullets hit the bombs they would explode?
I don't think this would be realistic since the bombs are detonated only after the bomb detonator is activated and this only happens after the bomb has fallen some meters towards the ground (usually it's some sort of a corckscrew that turns because of the airflow that passes thru the bomb and only after a certain number of turns is when the bomb detonator is activated) and only after this should a bomb detonate due to an impact. This is a mechanism to prevent catastrophic accidents I believe and I honestly have the oppinion that a large scale "accident" (such as a huge fire or a powerfull nearby explosion) would be needed to detonate a bomb which doesn't have its detonator activated. So I doubt that some bullet impacts on a bomb would ever detonate it (unless the bomb had some sort of manufacturing fault).

I'd like to see fire and / or smoke in the cockpit modelled. I feel this should be there because it was such a common occurence.
I'd like the option of having the possibility of this happening. The player would be given a certain number of seconds to parachute out - longer for smoke, shorter for outright fire.

Pilots sometimes suffered glycol or oil sprayed on their windscreen.

The game could also model in-flight pilot fatalities due to being hit by bullets - plane still flying. You could come up with some visual indication along the lines of the red screens that could make this quite creepy.

I totally agree with all of these points and it would be great IMO to have them in 2.06.
It's curious that you metioned the "red screens" since those red screens do already exist in BoBII (they sometimes happen when you collide with an another aircraft or object) and the BoBII red screen actually gets so red after a while to the point where you can't see anything beyond the red screen (like if you're dying). So if this is already modeled and together with the already modeled broken canopy glass, I guess it shoudn't be so hard to implement it, would it?

I also like the "oil sprayed on the windscreen" feature, I remember that this was one of my favourite features in EAW when I first bought that game.

[Tako_Kichi]

Are you mentioning the fact that when bullets hit the bombs they would explode?
I don't think this would be realistic since the bombs are detonated only after the bomb detonator is activated and this only happens after the bomb has fallen some meters towards the ground (usually it's some sort of a corckscrew that turns because of the airflow that passes thru the bomb and only after a certain number of turns is when the bomb detonator is activated) and only after this should a bomb detonate due to an impact. This is a mechanism to prevent catastrophic accidents I believe and I honestly have the oppinion that a large scale "accident" (such as a huge fire or a powerfull explosion nearby) would be needed to detonate a bomb which doesn't have its detonator activated. So I doubt that some bullet impacts on a bomb would ever detonate it (unless the bomb had some sort of manufacturing fault).

Your description of the bomb arming mechanism is correct and is still used today on 'dumb' munitions. Back in the 80's the British media made a major cock-up during the Falkland's Conflict and IMHO were directly responsible for the deaths and severe injuries caused to hundreds of British sailors and soldiers on the ships approaching the islands and at anchor around the islands.

This was at the very start of 'instant' satellite war reporting and the press would have live feeds of the conflict on the evening news every night. Early in the conflict the 'Argies' had been dropping bombs on Britsh ships but many of them did not explode, they just punched through the decking instead. One evening some idiot from the BBC gave an in depth LIVE report on the fact that the reason the bombs were not exploding was because the 'Argie' pilots were coming in too low and the bombs did not have enough 'drop time' to fully activate the detonating mechanism! The very next day several ships were either sunk or severly damaged and the resulting fires killed and injured many personnel who were trapped below decks. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that the 'enemy' had also seen the report and issued orders to their pilots to make sure they dropped the bombs from a greater altitude!

[mugwump]

I'd like to see the key mapping interface cleaned up a bit with clearer descriptions of each entry rather than the somewhat cryptic line entries that are there now.

[Cedric]

Ricnunes, thanks for your post and for clarifying that a bullet strike on a bomb wouldn't set it off (I thought the combination of heat and high explosive would've detonated by itself).

I know about the red screen in BoB - that's what I was referring to. As you say, that could be implemented easily for pilot fatality due to bullets when the plane is still airworthy. I've noticed on a number of occasions that when assessing the plane I'm flying during a mission, after combat, there have been a good number of holes in the fuselage right where the pilot is seated.

[Cas141]

The present replay is a complete disaster- I could never understand Rowan permitting it. Better not to have had one at all, than this mess.

Resuming, should the BoBII record system be better? definitly YES.
Should nothing be better than the current BoBII record system? DEFINITLY NO!

Ricnunes S!

Aha- In view of what you have said above , about how invaluable it was to modding etc, then , of course, it has turned out to be better to have it, than not.
As an ordinary user, as opposed to beta tester and/ modder , then I would not have been aware of that usefulness; nor could I be expected to be so aware.

But as it turned out, it did (is ) assisting so yes better to have than not.

I didn't find the size of the trks ( as they were called ) in il-2, made much impact on HDD space to cause a problem. many were able to be stored , and any could be deleted to make room for new ones

[ricnunes]

I didn't find the size of the trks ( as they were called ) in il-2, made much impact on HDD space to cause a problem. many were able to be stored , and any could be deleted to make room for new ones

While I did say that the IL2 movies ocuppy much more memory space than the BoBII ones, I never sugested that these movies would fill a HDD very fast.
What I meant in my previous statement was that the BoBII movies usually occupy something in the range of a few Kbytes of memory while the IL2 movies occupies something in the range of some Mbytes. Looking at this you can easily imagine that the IL2 movies occupy much more than the ones of BoBII (something like 1000 times more). But since most of us have HDDs which memory capability are in the range of a few hundreds of Gbytes than there is absolutelly no problem having lots and lots of IL2 movies in the HDD.
While there is no problem by storing the IL2 movies in the HDD things can get more complicated if you want for example to host those videos (for example my FTP space has a limit of 10Mbytes, which is almost nothing in our days) or if for example you want to send them to someone else. These were situations that happened during the beta testing of BoBII lastest patch (and not only) and believe me that the small amount of memory space that the BoBII videos occuppy was extremelly usefull!

Again, I'm not saying that I don't agree with you regarding with an improvement of the BoBII recording system, because in fact I do agree with you! I just didn't agree with your statement that "nothing is better than what we currently have", this surelly I don't agree.

[borton]

Flying pretty-well full Realistic is great fun for taking off and landing. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to manage a take-off without the Fat Controller telling me that I would be mincemeat in a real situation!

I also like to take off in the Campaign and, indeed, have to in the IA Low Level Attack. Unfortunately, by the time I am airborne, the rest of the squadron are long gone. It would seem to be the solution to change Engine Management to Auto just for these ops but it would appear that you lose the full benefits of the realistic flight model, e.g. damage to controls doesn't affect the aircraft's performance. I also like to be able to switch the engine off when I've landed!

Would it be possible to have a toggle which could switch Engine Management On/Off during flight, so that one would not have to manually start the engine but could restore all the realistic features after take-off? Presumably the default setting would have to be Off which would be the setting when 3d started and then turned On with the toggle. IOW it would be nice to have the engine running at start as the default.

[Hylander_1715]

Or full engine management with the engine aready started by your ground crew? Like the good chaps they are.

[borton]

Or full engine management with the engine aready started by your ground crew? Like the good chaps they are.

My point precisely!

[Buddye]

Or full engine management with the engine aready started by your ground crew? Like the good chaps they are.

My point precisely!

Guys, doesn't ENGINE_ALWAYS_RUNNING=ON in the Bdg.txt alraedy just that. The crew leaves the engine running and you still have the complex engine management functions?

Can you check it out, please..........