jeroen79

Sounds interesting. How about an air controller interface? (big radar screen, comms to player aircraft, limited control over AI aircraft) That could be useful in large multiplaer sessions, one guy looks at the big picture, the rest flies.

-Raindrops on the cannopy. -Rain streaking down the cannopy in heavy rain. Yes. Bad weather should look bad. -If you fly too long low level above the sea, the windscreen gets "crusted up" with salt. One Skyhawk was lost in a landing accident because of this and later seaskimming time was limitted. If this was an important problem at the time, model it. A simple way to implement it graphically would be to modify the transparancy of the glass or fading in a texture. -Iced up refueling probes and pitots. Would modeling the thing require extra graphics? I would think that it would be noticed by erroneous readings from the speedometer and malfunctions during refueling. Or would big chunks of ice be visible to the pilot? -Groundcrews on carriers and airbases. I would like to see functional groundcrews. Not loads of them but a few of them waving their arms to point where you should taxi. Would be particularly usefull on a cramped carrier. -birds ( the animals :) ) Depends on how much time it takes to render them. Swarms of birds could be drawn as alternative "clouds" but modeling lots of individual birds could be a bit too much. I like functionality too, like birdstrikes. Penguins should fall over when you overfly them!

I was just thinking, how difficult would it be to assign realistic and simple heat values to every significant object in the game? Not that difficult I suppose. First you give every object a heatsignature property. I figure that the heatseeker code would check which objects it can see every x seconds so you program it to involve every object in this check, not just aircraft. You may have to add some extra code if you wish to model background heat from the ground or sky.

The server could still be the central controller. Instead of sending 100 packets to 100 clients it sends 10 packets to 10 supernodes, thus reducing the load on the server by 90%. The supernodes then pass the packets on to 10 clients each.

Neat. I suppose you could link even more players if you implement several layers of supernodes. Is it strictly necessary to pause the game if a node falls out? All the attached clients would need to do is contact the central server and request a new node to connect to. They could even get the ip address of a backup node at the start. The temporarily disconnected clients would be subjected to some lag but it shouldn't take very long unless you are reorganizing everything. Right? We could also have dedicated supernodes.

What kind of communications can we expect? I suppose there will be wingmen commands but how extensive? What sort of formations and manouvers can we choose? In what wys can we direct AI planes to a particular target? Can we give commands to other flights than your own? Can we talk to ATC? How about GCI? (groundbased AEW&C)

Why not let the player reassign any control?

I don't like clickable cockpits that much. You need to pan the view away from the outside and you need to let go of the controls to grab the mouse. While real pilots may have to this to I think looking at and reaching for a physical switch with with your arm is faster than doing the same with the mouse to a virtual switch. Not much of a problem when you are setting a frequency while flying straight and level at 20000' but I prefer keys to arm my bombs while on a mastheight bombrun. I won't mind as long as I can do all the important stuff with the keyboard. Maybe they could put a little crosshair in the center and pan the view with the mouse. The crosshair is then the cursor.