----

I've had the game for nearly three weeks now, and have a total of somewhere around 20 hours playing it. Initial impressions are not good. I'm still waiting for something, anything, in the game to leap out and drag me in. So far, there have only been a handful of "oh, that's cool" moments.

I'm not even sure if B-17II qualifies as a flight-simulator. There are an impressive range of aircraft systems modeled in the game. The B-17 cockpit has been faithfully reproduced down to the most trivial of switches and guages (50+ all told), many of which can be toggled or turned, pushed or pulled using the mouse. However, the engine management systems appear to be broken, the cockpit view system is fundamentally flawed and the flight models are so historically inaccurate that there isn't much point in fiddling with the switches or flying the plane.

The focus of the game seems to be on crew management, building up character's proficiencies over a series of missions, tending to wounded or panicking crew members and so on. That aspect will probably appeal to those who like to role-play parts. Unfortunately, I don't. If I could somehow become emotionally attached to the characters, then I might be more drawn into the game. However, the virtual characters aren't imbued with much in the way of personality; they're the virtual equivalent of Disney's animatronics, having a limited repertoire of scripted behaviours. Having run through that repertoire a couple of times, I lost interest in the crew except as a means to get back to base to try the next mission. This is hardly surprising, since the current state of the art in artificial intelligence is far from producing a compelling, believable personality. To expect that in a computer game is to expect too much. That said, designing a game around the premise that AI personalities will be compelling enough for players to care about them is a questionable decision. Obviously, it works for some people;it doesn't for me.

As I said above, the flight models are weak. The fighters perform like jets; their rate of climb is far too high. They're very skittish to control and there seems to be little, if any, inertia. I have not been able to stall or spin a fighter despite trying to do so intentionally. The main focus of the game is the B-17 so problems with the fighter's flight models are somewhat forgivable.

However, the flight model of the B-17 itself isn't plausible either. I've been able to loop the plane dozens of times, until eventually I lost count and gave up. I've also been unable to stall or spin the B-17 despite flying well beyond the envelope. Anecdotes from aircrew in various sources show that the B-17 could be looped, whether inadvertently or not. However, it should not be possible to loop the plane indefinitely, with practically no altitude loss per loop. Being able to do so indicates that the flight model doesn't model energy very well.

Historically, the B-17's rate of climb was roughly 300fpm. In the game, it's nearer 3,000fpm. Flight tests performed on the real B-17G showed that its time to 25,000ft was approximately 40 minutes. In the game, it's under 10. Climb rate should be affected by altitude, as reflected in the historical figures. The climb rate in the game is more or less constant, independent of altitude.

The tension of take-off and landing should be tangible in a bomber sim, particularly landing in a bomber that has been shot to hell. In B-17II, it isn't.

Take off runs are very short; a fully laden B-17 should be clawing its way into the air, not floating off the ground and climbing to 10,000ft in a couple of minutes. You can take off on only three engines without breaking a sweat and I've even managed to take off on only two engines a couple of times, though doing so required judicious use of flaps, brakes and WEP. Doing either in a real, laden B-17 would result in a wreck ploughing up a field at the end of the runway.

Landing is far too easy. I have yet to mess up a landing. Drop flaps, drop gear and drop the plane somewhere near the runway seems to do the job. Hell, you can probably drop the plane on the fields beside the runway and still land alright.

Ground handling is poor. There is no impression of movement when the plane is taxiing; no shaking, no bumping, no rumbling sounds, no feeling of acceleration under power or deceleration under braking. On a take off roll, there is no sensation that your wheels have left the ground without looking at the altitude readout or going to an external view.

Increase/decrease throttle and the plane accelerates/decelerates to that speed within seconds. Flaps and gear can be deployed with little, if any, noticable effect on handling or airspeed. All signs point to the conclusion that basic inertia, momentum and drag haven't been modeled or have been modeled inadequately. In a title that's passing itself off as the ultimate hardcore flight simulation, that's inexcusable.

Overall, I don't get the impression of being in a big, heavy piece of machinery.

The only redeemable parts of the flight modelling that I've found so far are that the plane does respond to variable engine throttle and prop pitch settings by yawing in what seems a plausibly realistic manner and the wide variety of trim options available, all of which seem to work as expected.

No flight model in any game will ever be accurate. It's simply too difficult to model the physics and non-linear equations involved. However, we should expect games which are marketed as high-fidelity flight simulations to be at least somewhere in the ball-park with regard to gross flight characteristics, especially when the game in question is supposed to be an in-depth study of one particular aircraft. The gross flight characteristics of the B-17s in the game are out not just by a few percent but by several factors and in the case of climb rate, by an order of magnitude.

For all these critcisms of the flight model, it must be said that from external views and when watching other planes, they give a good appearance of flight; crippled bombers tumble out of the sky, enemy fighters make slashing attacks and split-S away from the B-17s concentrated defensive fire. It all looks plausible from external views, it's only when you take control of the planes yourself that you realise the flight models are all wrong. More fuel for the argument that B-17 isn't really a flight simulator at heart.

With such a flawed flight model, one might expect the underlying physics model to be equally disappointing. To my pleasant surprise, this was not the case. The planes settle convincingly on damaged or collapsed undercarriage, they careen along the ground on forced landings with a wing occasionally digging into the ground and dragging the plane around in a tailslide (though the framerate drops through the floor with all the dirt thrown up), the planes subside into rivers and other bodies of water, planes jostle one another and bobble in mid-air and fighters which collide with bombers tumble away realistically. The underlying physics engine seems fine, which makes it all the more puzzling why the flight models are so weak in comparison. Perhaps the designers had to make compromises in the flight model for gameplay or AI reasons?

Engine management should be a large part of any simulation of a large, four engined bomber. The fate of many aircrew depended on the pilot, copilot and engineer's abilities to nurse damaged engines home. Unfortunately, the engine management in B-17II appears to be broken. It doesn't seem to be possible to overstress or overheat an engine, and damaged engines don't need to be nursed to ensure that they continue running. This makes the tension of the return trip considerably less intense than it should be. Microprose's original B-17 game modeled this aspect considerably better than the sequel.

For a newly released title, the graphics are sub-standard. Plane textures are low detail and blurry. This might be acceptable for the fighters but not on the B-17 which is, after all, the focus of the game.

The plane 3D models, on the whole, just don't look right. I can't put my finger on what is wrong with them but they look more like slightly melted plastic models than the real deal.

The B-17 model, while certainly not bad, is disappointing. When I heard that the game would support a maximum of 18 B-17s in the air in any mission because of the complexity of the models, I had high hopes that the designers had come up with a highly detailed model that would look fantastic up close as minor details became apparent. Not so. Any closer than about 300ft and the lack of real detail becomes obvious. Details aren't modeled, they're textured. And given the low resolution textures used, it looks bad.

As it turns out, that figure of a maximum of 18 B-17s in the air is not quite the whole story. No matter how many B-17s are in the mission, only six are 'real'. The remainder are 'ghosts' that neither shoot guns nor drop bombs. Their only purpose is to make the bomber formation look bigger than it actually is. Quite what is going on under the hood so that the game can only support 6 real bombers is anyone's guess. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to increase the number of planes in the air; it appears to be hard-coded into the game.

As a whole, B-17II doesn't seem to have been designed with scalability or customisation in mind. The game does not use an open data architecture; all of the data files are encoded in what appears to be a proprietary format, meaning that end-users cannot access or modify the game data files. This precludes the ability to, for example, produce custom plane or terrain graphics, nose art, modify flight characteristics or flight model parameters etc. Nor does the game come with a mission builder or editor, meaning that users cannot create and distribute their own custom missions. Whether the user community will be able to overcome these hurdles and eventually produce add-ons remains to be seen. Some progress has been made editing the RiversAndRoadsBD.imf datafile, one of the few data files provided with the game which is in open format. However, the results so far have been somewhat mixed.

The game's developers have come up with an innovative new way to do terrain, mathematically modeling it on the fly, using dynamic lighting for shadows (cast by clouds, hedges, forests etc) and environmental bump mapping to give the terrain some texture. Sounds great in theory, and there are times when the effects are very nice (for example, taking off at dawn and seeing the lighting effects on the hedgerows which cast long shadows on the landscape). Unfortunately, you can only see and appreciate these effects at very low altitude, and the vast majority of game-time is spent at 20+ thousand feet. From altitudes above 3,000 feet, the terrain looks awful.

From those altitudes, the terrain textures are low detail and look like something from a cartoon. Ground detail like airfields, towns, etc tend to get lost in the muddled mid-distance texture soup until you're within a couple of km which makes orienting or navigating by terrain much harder than it need be. Clouds are limited to a few (cirrus/stratus?) layers that are badly pixellated and which have colour aliasing problems.

There is also very noticable terrain and cloud draw-in, where you can see the textures being drawn right in front of you. This makes the terrain and clouds seem to stretch and contort as you're watching them, completely ruining any sense of immersion you might get from looking at the environment around you.

Interior graphics use pre-rendered backdrops which are stylized rather than photo-realistic. Whether you like them is a matter of personal preference. I don't. I would have prefered a crisper, more technical approach.

Crew animation is very good, which is one of the few bright spots graphically in the game. If you've ever seen or played Rainbow Six, the crew animation is on par with that.

All told, there are ten crew stations; bombardier, navigator, pilot, co-pilot, radio operator, top turret, ball turret, left/right waist gunner and tail gunner (with a left-cheek gunner position available for one of the crew members in case of fighter attack). Each crew station has an instrument view, an action view and the the navigator has an additional window view to allow him to navigate by terrain features. The views for the gunner positions are well done for the most part, affording a decent field of fire around most of the plane. Watching incoming enemy fighters from the gun positions provides some much needed atmosphere. The bombardier's Norden bombsight is also well done and, again, adds atmosphere.

However, the remaining pilot, co-pilot, navigator and radio operator views are very poor. Looking out of the navigator's window doesn't afford a good enough view of the countryside to be able to recognize landmarks for navigation points. The only option is to go to an external view, which destroys immersion and shouldn't be necessary.

The pilot and co-pilot action views are out of the main cockpit windows. The viewpoint can be panned left and right to look out of the side cockpit windows as well but the viewpoint snaps back to centre as though their head is on a spring. The viewpoint can't be rotated to a fixed location and left there, it always snaps back. This is frustrating, as it makes it impossible to focus on anything except the view straight ahead. The viewpoint can't be panned up to look through the cockpit windows above the pilot's head, or down to glance at guages either. When flying in tight formation, you absolutely need to be able to look wherever you want to look and not have the game force your viewpoint eyes front. Like the navigator position, in order to fly the plane effectively, you have to go to an external view instead of staying in the cockpit. Can you imagine what this does to the immersion?

As I noted above, to look at the cockpit instrument panel you can't glance down from the action view. Instead, you switch to instrument view which shows a full-screen pre-rendered instrument panel with no outside views. Switching between action and instrument view and vice versa takes a couple of seconds and is very distracting. In order to mess about with the instruments, you switch to instrument view and wait a couple of seconds for the instrument panel to appear, take your hand off the joystick and onto the mouse to manipulate the instruments, wait a couple of seconds to change back to action view and grab hold of the joystick again. The process is very clumsy and distracting.

These cockpit view limitations are a real shame. There are obviously a lot of systems management options available in the pilot/co-pilot positions but they're rendered unusable by view system design flaws. To me, this is yet more evidence that the game isn't really a flight-simulation at its core.

Given that the gunner and bombardier stations are much better designed and implemented than those of the pilot/co-pilot and navigator, together with the weak flight models, I'm increasingly of the opinion that this game is more of a gunner/bombardier simulator than it is a flight simulator. Those stations are where most people, myself included, are experiencing immersive moments. This is not in itself a bad thing, though it is something for people to consider before buying the game. The game is being marketed as "the complete flight simulation" but if you buy it expecting a flight simulation, you'll probably end up being disappointed.

Is the game a dog? No, it does have its moments. If you're interested in the subject matter and like your games to have a role-playing aspect to them, you'll probably enjoy it. For those that aren't interested in crew management and who have already watched the crew do their thing, the only interesting moments in what are otherwise tedious, long-haul missions are fending off fighter attacks from the various turret positions and flying through clouds of flak. Faithful to history, those moments are few and far between. Fortunate for the real Eighth Air Force crews, unfortunate for those of us who want to play a game.

---
Celeron566@707
384MB PC133 SDRAM
Asus 6600 GeForce 256 w/ 32MB on-board vRAM
1024MB fixed swapfile
running at 1024x768x32
All settings on historic, accurate, elite, hard etc.

You might want to cut Joe some slack on this review. B-17 FF: TM8 is probably the most previewed combat simulation in history. We must have twenty previews and articles on it ourselves. We joked here in the office that it was almost un-reviewable since so much has already been said.

When I saw Joe's review for the first time, I thought 'Wow! I like this narrative approach with the pictures!" It was different, that's for sure, and it got around what I was sure was going to be a re-hash of the same stuff in the previews.

To make matters even more difficult for Joe, I can't think of another sim where we've had an entire article on tweaking the release version of the game before the review even appeared. Add to this the incredible amount of information on CTD's we all saw in our forums and the ones at Bombs-Away.net from Europeans who bought the game weeks before it was released in North America.

For Joe to have gone over the same old ground we've seen reviewed in minute detail in our previous previews would've been boring. As for the stability issues, there's so many, and most of these are related to an almost infinite variety of individual system configs, it would have been impossible for Joe to speak from firsthand experience on each of these issues.

We plan to have two more B-17 tweaking articles put up tonight (update: maybe tomorrow ). Check those, check the tweaking article we put up yesterday, check the previews of B-17, and check the forums here and at www.Bombs-Away.net and I'm sure you'll have all the info you'll ever need on how B-17 runs on any computer.

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Douglas Helmer
Forum Administrator
publisher@combatsim.com

Who are you? B.C. eh? I can't believe you wrote that entire counterpoint in the time since I posted the review. If you did, then color me impressed.

I'm sure we've met, no?

Drop me an email . . . perhaps we can run your counterpoint as an article.

Razorback718
--------------------------------------------
See... that is such a completely subjective way of trying that. Of course you can loop if you perform one loop.. then gain speed.. and then do another.. gain speed.. do another.. gain speed.

The only thing you could be complaining about then is that the B-17 does not crack from the stress.. but as documented, the B-17 COULD loop.. even at full load, and survive.

So what is the complaint then? I can do a loop in the 17 in WarBirds.. Aces High... you name it... X-Plane... so what is so unrealistic about being able to do in the sim what real pilots could do to the real ac?

What should Wayward have done.. modeled loop stress on the ac FM or made the rest of the crew function realistically? Or maybe you wanted Wayward to spend more time with modeling the correct weight to loss of speed in a loop ratio? I spend more time with the crew than I do doing loops in the B-17.

This might be one of the silliest complaints in the history of flight sim complaints.

I pitty anyone who thinks this is a battle worth fighting. Sigh...

____________________

Rocketeer
0 08:40 PM
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That was one of the complaints about SDOE. The complainers knew little of the real 17. You can roll and loop a real 17 and it has been done on purpose and accidently.

____________________

Judge
-----------------------------------------
It's not a question of having to gain speed, that speed is carried over from the descent at the back end of the previous loop. If you flatten the back end just a bit, by the time you hit the bottom of the loop you're back with the airspeed you started with. This allows you to loop the plane almost indefinitely.

You also end the loop at more or less the same altitude (with a fully laden plane, you do lose some altitude but with an empty plane (a mere 33,000lbs), you lose next to nothing; so much so, that I was able to do 20+ loops starting at 2,000ft and still end up above 1,000ft). This means that there is very little energy lost during the manoeuvre.

Try doing any of the above in Warbirds or Aces High, and you'll end up a smoking crater. Even WWII Fighters manages to model the flight performance of the B-17 better than this game. Whatever else B-17II is, a high-fidelity simulation of the B-17 it is not.
__________________________

Judge

Rocketeer,
I'm not complaining about the fact you can loop the B-17; I've read more than a handful of anecdotes in various books that make it clear that it could be done (and in other heavies as well).

The loop is a convenient quick and dirty indication of how well the flight model stacks up. If you want more hard and fast figures, the historical climb rate of the B-17 was roughly 300fpm. In the game, it's roughly 3,000. Historically, the B-17 took 40 minutes to climb to 25,000ft. In the game, it does it in less than 10.

Historically, climb rate was (and is) affected by altitude, as reflected in the historical figures above. In the game, climb rate is more or less constant, independent on altitude.

Need more?

Have you tried to take off with only 3 engines? Doing so in real life would have resulted in a wreck ploughing up a field at the end of the runway. It's a piece of cake in the game; you don't even use 2/3 of the runway, and that's /without/ using WEP and /without/ holding the plane with brakes while the engines get up to full power. I've even managed to take off using only two engines a couple of times, though it's a very close thing. Anecdotal records show that this is historically just plain wrong.

____________________

Truro

--------------------------------------
Yeah really, being able to loop a B17 is a novelty, not a major problem. What I see as a problem is climb rate, especially of the prop fighters, equal to a modern jet. A big smear of arcadishness in a good sim.

_______________
Razorback718
__________

There we are in agreement.

I acknowledge that there IS a FM problem, but not one as drastic as is being insinuated and not one that really affects the gameplay for a majority of those playing B-17 2.. since most of us play it as a crew sim... and only slightly as a flight sim (once they fix the fighter FM's I will probably jump in them more).

RB
**********

It's a terrific game well worthy of a place on any gamers HD, but is at best a flightsim/virtual "Memphis Belle - the movie" hybrid. The positive review is well deserved, but taken as pure flightsim (which it was never meant to be) it falls short of BoB,CFS 2 and indeed EAW in many key areas.

Excellent points, all, and please remember that even I claim in the article that this isnt so much a review as a walkthrough, and even that is a poor choice of words.

For example, we all know that B17..

1. lacks engine management though it is claimed to be there in the manual
2. lacks stability on many systems
3. has graphics issues on many other systems
4. has AI fighters that play lawn dart at times
5. FM issues as mentioned above
6. Documentation lacks key information.. for example, how to transfer crew members

and there are others...

Who gives a rats **s if you can loop a B-17?
How many documentaries are there on a loop anyway. Even if there are any they are nut cases.

As far as FM goes would you sooner sit behind your computer waiting for 15 minutes for the bomber to climb to 15000 feet at 300fps, etc, etc, etc?
It's a $50.00 sim not an actual flight simulator. Quit whining and enjoy it for what it is, a fun game.

I found tha article very well written and entertaining and was not meant to address all the funky systems out there with crashes etc.
There are lots of fix posts on this forum and over at Bombs Away.

It runs fine, thank you very much, on my system which is a P111 450 o/c to 568 with a Voodoo 550.

If anyone thinks its easy to write a review, a perspective piece (such as this), or any other type of prose, try it your self first.

Back to the RPG/WW2Sim called B17V2...

Judge is one of the most respected and experts on Janes WW2Fighters flight sim. He has alot of experience at graphics editing and authoring tools to facilitate the many wonderful skins we now have for WW2F. He and I both agree that B17V2 is more of a RPG (Role Playing Game) wrapped within a WW2 Bomber flight sim. Frankly speaking, Judge's rebuttal is spot on from my experience. If both Joe's and Judge's perspectives were put into one article, I think it would have been very very well balanced. Just my 2 cents.

One of the things that surprised me about B17V2 was the enormous amount of memory resources it devours. While it runs smooth on my Celeron @550mhz, GeForce2 DDR 32MB, it uses over 200MB or RAM. Then there's the 46MB caching file, and then upto 1024MB of virtual swap space. Here's a picture of the RAM useage while in flight versus right after quitting the sim.

As far as Sim of the Year? I think that eRazor's and RPG's RP4 addons to Falcon4 vie for that esteemed position. And that coming from the user community to boot!

I really am a fighter jock at heart, and preferr only the very best of the flight simming experiences that I can hone my dogfighting skills against human adversaries world wide. But B17V2 still captivates me because of its uniqueness and crew focus within the famed B17 Flying Fortress.

If you want high fidelity FM and cutting edge graphics, B17V2 isnt for you really. If you want to experience the stress and man the many crew positions within the fortress from take off to landing, then B17V2 is for you (IMHO).

Another way of putting it is:
"Fighter Jocks make movies, but Bombers make History".

Its my opinion that B17V2 has made history in that it brings the flight simmer closer to the crewing portion of flight simulation. From that perspective it is very immersive.

If Wayward would just deal with the CTDs and get Multiplayer patched in a reasonable amount of time, B17V2 would not only reach a bigger customer base, but also would raise the bar in flight simming immersion.

Come on Wayward and Iain boys, how about it?

AV8R

I was soo bored with EAW, WWII Fighters, CFS I and II and the like. Fly to a couple of waypoints, meet your enemies and dogfight, dogfight, dogfight. Just graphically a bit more polished and a bit more detailed with the next WWII sim.

And now B-17 II. It's such a breath of fresh air with all that crew handling and the immersion and emotional involvement in the whole thing. But this only if you let the head and the heart fly your mission.

If the head is decoupled from the rest of the body, then you are a hardcore simmer and B-17 II is not for you. Because then you have to analyse flight model flaws or engine gauges not working correctly or non accurate AI. For me, these are the poorest people in the flight sim genre, because they probably will not have any fun in sims (no flight model or systems simulation will be perfect). Thank God I'm not one of those.

Wayward has made one big mistake though. Announcing features like engine management (it's still on their web site and yes, it's even in the manual) which are not in the sim is of course a serious thing and should be corrected ASAP.

Don't go for it if you expect to fly any fighters - their flight modeling is IMHO quite bad.

The review was the biggest load of dribble since the americans won the war of independence. I mean if this is not a promotion for a crappy game, then I do not know what is? I mean I just have to say this game is utter utter crap. I just upgraded from a P2 300 Mhz 192mb RAM (pc 100) to a AMD Athon thunderbird 1 GHZ. I can tell you it still crashes to desktop when I get into setup. I still cannot see the outside views. So this game is well dead as a dodo.. I for one neve take reviews into account since the reviewer is always in the pocket of the developer.
Is this sim better than BOB, not a chance, is it better than EAW, WW2 (janes), CFS, CFS2, SODE, not a chance. if the fixed it and made it very very stable like cfs, eaw and bob is then it will be up there. Well that is if they fixed the Fms and make the plane truthly an historical B17, instead of an arcade style game play. I mean on medium eaw is hard, and so it bob. But this is so easy to make kills and bomb your target.

rant over

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best wishes

You are welcome to disagree with my perceptions, but don't you ever again question my integrity. I will not stand for that for even a second.

I enjoyed this title. My aim was never to provide a technical review. That had already been done on this site. I was providing a player perspective overview. I even go so far as to write that very fact in my article.

When discussing climb rates, it's important to distinguish between initial and sustained climb rates.

Initial climb rates varied widely from one variant to another e.g. in the case of the B-17E, initial climb rate was as high as 1,500fpm compared to 900fpm for the B-17G. Sustained climb rates also varied widely from variant to variant (and probably also varied from test platform to test platform) e.g. the B-17E time to 20,000ft was roughly 25 minutes compared to 40 minutes for the B-17G.

The figures come from several sources, mostly books but a useful internet accessible reference site is Joe Baugher's comprehensive series of articles on various aircraft at http://home.att.net/~jbaugher/ and mirrored at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pettypi/elevon/

This site mentions the /initial/ climb for the B-17G as 900fpm but does not mention sustained climb. Operational sustained climb is documented as between 3-500fpm in various reference books. The disparity is probably due to varying loaded weights. The figure of 300fpm is mentioned in the B-17II manual itself. During testing, I used historical missions where the B-17 was fully laden with bombs and fuel, so compared against the lowest sustained climb rate figures quoted.

Other sources include Jane's Fighting Aircraft of World War II, Encyclopedia of Military Aircraft, etc.

S.

This review is indeed more of an advertisement than a review. This game is great for arcade type players, but for the serious hardcore simmers there's not much in it. I have played the game through some 15-20 missions and I think the game is too easy at the "realistic" settings it comes with. It has commercialism written all over it. After some serious tweaking it plays a lot better. The AI needs a MAJOR upgrade. Physics need an upgrade.

Please try to be a bit more objective next time.

------------------
Jeroen 'ZaPPPa' Floor
GDA website - <A HREF="http://flying.to/GDA" TARGET=http://flying.to/GDA</A>

After reading the counterpoints and the article, I am still left undecided. Maybe I'll borrow a friends copy and decide if it's worth the purchase, no?

In the future, I hope simulators are made with Multiplayer working properly. CFS2 has very poor multiplayer. B-17II has no multiplayer. Yet the top two games in the world right now are multiplayer based. You would think one would have an element inside the game to capture on this multiplayer craze.

Poor planning and development in my opinion my friends.

But where are people getting the idea that this game was not intended to be a 'serious' flight sim, in the context of the actual flight modelling?

"We consider the flight models an absolute key issue and we believe we have modelled them to the highest level of detail yet."

"The flight, physics and damage models will be better than anything you've flown, bar the real thing. I know that sounds boastful, but if you've played the current crop of flight sims and you fly ours the comparison is extremely flattering in our favour."

These are Wayward quotes from Viking 1's B-17 interviews published on this site. Note that they are mostly present, not future, tense.

quote:

---

Originally posted by impaler19:
How many of you have an IT background? Is there anyone participating on this forum who has a background in development or programming? Just curious....

---

I've been developing software for over 12 years (commercial, government and defence work). If I was involved in a project as poorly designed and executed as B-17II (over-schedule (and probably over-budget), unstable, buggy and which doesn't conform to the specification), I'd be looking for a new job.

Just because this is 'entertainment' software does not mean that the developers should be held to a lesser standard.

You asked about backgrounds. I'm not an IT guy per se, but I'm a senior engineer at Evans & Sutherland, a visual simulation company. My title says hardware but I've been writing graphics algorithms firmware the past 10 of my 14 years there. If interested see,
http://www.es.com

KR

edited to correct URL punctuation

Kinda disheartening to see the same crapola going on here as in other forums (the review vs the replies then the comeback, etc). Thought I would shelve CFS for a while, step out for some fresh air - a change of pace LOL silly me.

I see different names in here but the writeups seem to have familar tones to them, How my mind can play such tricks on me!?!?

As some may know from my posts/replies in a forum far, far away ..... he he, I'll 'bend over backwards' to help, answer, Email, whatever is asked for if I'm able to but I don't 'bend over'(Hey, U dropped ur soap!). And from what I've been reading about B17 ........

Came in this thread to read the scoop on this sim, I've read them, maybe see U's in another thread sometime.

Happy sim flying. ?

[This message has been edited by ritt_bear2790 (edited 12-27-2000).]

So when Joe Prophead brings the game home, after spending all night outside the local electronics store waiting for the doors to open, and he does like he's done with every other title he's brought home: installs it and jumps into a quick mission without even cracking the manual or glancing at the readme, and it ingloriously crashes to desktop, he's initially going to be disappointed and hurt, and then he's going to be pissed. [Ed note: It's a sentence! it's a paragraph! no, it's both!]

In this regard, Wayward was set up for a fall no matter how good the sim was once it was released. The pre-release hype was almost out of control. If B-17 II version 1.0 wasn't absolutely perfect there were going to be a lot of unsatisfied customers. But guess what? NO piece of complex retail software is released without bugs. Welcome to the real world. Writing software for home computers isn't as easy as coding games for consoles. It's flatly impossible for a developer to test their product on every single possible combination of hardware, drivers, and controllers out there. B-17 II is stable on the majority of systems if the recommendations in the readme are followed. There are a few documented, reproducible CTD bugs (which aren't unavoidable).

B-17 II is as complex a simulation as I've ever seen. It isn't another 'fly around and shoot stuff' sim, there's a LOT going on. I'm surprised they got as much done as they did in the time they were given. Wayward has admitted that the flight model is bunged. They are working on a patch already (I believe that this patch will address some of the CTD bugs as well). Bitching about the current FM is a waste of breath.

The majority of reviewers aren't "in the pockets" of the publishers. Hasbro isn't even doing flight sims any more! A reviewer's job is to remain objective and judge how well the title lives up to what the box say it's supposed to do - NOT what the pre-release hype was, or community thinks it should do. The reviewer will hopefully add their own impressions and opinions - that's why we love (or love to hate) them.

[edited for speeling error]