posted 01-12- 11:51 PM               

This I believe is needed for a few reasons:

1. To have a standard for people to work their projects up to. If all everyone did was make half finished planes/terrain/ground units... well thats not achieving the goal of making this sim better. The addons in SDOE are THE best addons for any WWII prop sim. Take a look at CFS for instance... Most (Not all) of the user made stuff for that game lacks quality. You wouldnt want SDOE to end up like that would you? We need somewhat of a quality control here...

2. Another reason I think we need set "guide line(s)" is so that people dont go around playing "God(s)" saying what goes here, and what cant go there.... Thats making rules up out of thin air. Think of this as a written "constitution" for SDOE or just a simple set of guide lines so nothing is shoved off "just because I dont like it".

3. Regarding the recent post concerning the Ju-88DN. This has upset me greatly... I want to avoid this in the future. I was just about to go on a REALLY long break away from this fourm.

I know this is an ambitious task. But I am an ambitious person! The future of SDOE IMO depends on this... Thus, lets all throw in our 2 cents worth and come up with a set of guide lines. We will then weed the suggestions out and keep only the best and the ones that are to the point and not extremely picky. Then we could post them either at the Standards Page or on a spot on this fourm. (The Site Stuff topic would be a good location)

Bring it on!

posted 01-13- 12:49 AM            

What is our expectations for planes and designers? We need to start with:

(1)Set up several plane paks that covers the full range of planes that could be used by this sim.

(2)Outline the extent of developement the designer must strive towards to be included in a plane pak.

We need to do this ASP.

posted 01-13- 01:16 AM               

Every time someone says something "isn't right" they either back up the planes performance with cold hard data, or ask you to provide the proof in hard data so they can make the aircraft comply.

posted 01-13- 01:20 AM               

We can change the dates if need be.

A question: Within each of these shall we include the ground/sea units for that era, or just bundle up all the ground/sea units into a pack of their own?

Now the developement stages... This is where I need the most input. It MUST have a working FM (Not perfect) and a minimal DM thats not overly complicated. (But it must beable to be shot down on-line if it is plane pack ready) There must be working instruments (If the plane had them) of some form or fashion to be plane pack ready. (They do NOT have to be historically correct) The aircraft must NOT crash/freeze or CTD the computer when it is completely destroyed or durning any form of play. The aircraft must not be a texture hog. (This messes up on-line and off-line play) The model can be however detailed (Or not so detailed) as you want. But it must resemble the plane you are trying to replicate with a fair amount of accuracy. (I know no one will build a bad model. I just wanted to clarify that)

Please throw in suggestions.

posted 01-13- 02:30 AM               

Please be careful with wording posts about this, and keep things positive. This can be a very touchy subject

One thing that does bother me are planes with super FM's. It spoils one person's online game when a plane is undermodelled but it spoils everyone's game when a plane is over-modelled. Rather than complain I just pick the superplanes when i play

TS

TS

posted 01-13- 04:50 AM               

For DM this would mean giving everybody a basic standard to start with (ie Condor's engine DM with "typical" damage values for wing/fuselage perhaps divided by plane type...1 engine fighter, 4 engine bomber, etc. ) if somebody wants to make a more intricate DM they could use the standard as a starting point.

For the cockpit instruments, this probably might require some form of tutorial (or directions about where to get that tutorial if one already exists).

To keep the texture hogginess low, tips/tricks to help in this respect will have to be provided.

For the FM (IMO the most important) most people will have information for many typical values that aren't too difficult to plug into OPS. But for many aircraft alot of information just isn't readily available (such as airMax, airAdvantage, airK, airInc, phyRelDensity...). Some advice as to how to get the 'best guess' for these values would be good. Some guidlines for how to test the FM would also be helpful (a plane pointed straight in the air until it stalls will probably have a greater initial climb rate than one climbing at the most efficient angle of attack). Alot of performance information is also difficult to come by (what IS the roll rate of an SM 79?) so information on how to make reasonable guesses here is also required.

..while I'm thinking about it, could somebody let me know what the roll-rate of the Beaufighter was?

It is one thing to set a standard, but it is more helpful to the community as a whole to help people reach it...

posted 01-13- 10:01 AM               

PLANE PACK

and

PLANE

Does need clarification. It is key to what happened re the Ju88DN. No one posted that the plane was rubbish, or any such thing as far as I recall. What was at issue was whether it was right to have a fictional plane in the plane pack.

If we make it clear to all builders what they need to do to get a plane into the pack, great.

We must also make it VERY clear, that if they want to build a plane, post it anywhere, and make it available for others to use, that is also great. In fact, that is MORE IMPORANT than plane pack issues. Gustavo got disheartened through misunderstandings which can be avoided.

Lets encouage people to build planes

Lets also give them an ultimate goal, the Gold Medal of plane building...Plane Pack

Yes, give them guidelines, yes give them tutorials, and give them all the help we can. I don't care who builds what, just so long as I can use it!

posted 01-13- 11:29 AM               

Now Tailslide, let me clear this up a bit. (For everyone aswell) These set of guide lines are not for any realease of an individual plane. A maker can release his/her work in any condition he/she chooses. These guide lines apply ONLY for PLANE PACK planes, not anything else.

Commando, you have a VERY good point. We need to start pulling together information and documenting it in a single document. This would help plane makers get started. If they get stuck or have a question, sure lets all help him/her out.

Bishop, your points will be covered by creating this document aswell.

-Ok people lets pull together on this one, in the end it will be most helpfull to anyone making a plane or ground unit.-

P.S. I still need input as to what guide lines should be. I posted my thoughts on them but if you have any, by all means speak out!

posted 01-13- 01:21 PM               

1.) Modeling and texturing as complete as possible.

2.) Rudimatary FM goals reached:

a.) Climb to alt.speed + or - 100 ft.
b.) Top speed at defined alt. + or - 5 mph.
c.) Max alt. + or - 200 ft.
d.) Roll-speed (if known) + or - 1 sec.
e.) Stall speed + or - 50 mph.
f.) Turn-speed (time to complete a 360-degree turn) + or - 2 sec.

3.) DM adjusted to a point to at least represent the toughness or fragility of the given aircraft.

posted 01-13- 03:00 PM               

Anyway.. blah blah etc.. I agree with some helpful guides, but not to hard rules, creativness should never be restricted

Later guys

posted 01-13- 03:34 PM               

Nat, you are VERY correct! These are nothing but simple guide lines to help people for plane pack planes. And hopefully the "Developers Notes" document will take shape aswell. All this depends on that!

Please keep the suggestions comming people!

posted 01-13- 03:50 PM               

Truth be told those FM specs are the very "least" one should do...

Even the most sparce reference usually has a few of those specs... Point is "if" the specs are known and available, there is really no excues to "not" model them.

posted 01-14- 12:57 AM               

Zur, you are an FM guro yes? Well could you pretty please post in the "Developer Notes" post things that FMers need to know? Things like tweaks and techniques that one would have to know to build an FM and how to test it? (Things like what will happen it you change this value and such would be great too!) This would be a GREAT help to us plane builders/tweakers.

posted 01-14- 01:55 AM               

Those are VERY good questions/points and Im glad you asked. Here is my personal and non biased opinion on those topics...

1. The ultimate word on FMs, DMs and overall quality of the product is the builders. (They built it after all) If the quality is equal to or greater than the plane pack guide lines it gets to go in the plane pack if the builder wishes it so. If however accurate information is found that that proves the present information on that aircraft wrong, then the builder should update the aircraft accordingly. If the builder does not wish to update the aircraft, then other person(s) may do so if the builder approves with it and if a majority (75% or greater of the people that actually participates in posting) of the community wishes it updated. If the builder believes he/she is correct in the data entered, then the builder does not have to change it if he/she does not wish so. (But the builder must post evedince that they are indeed correct) In which case it is tough luck for the community. But I believe most if not all of the builders will update their aircraft if accurate data is given to prove the present data wrong.

2. If the community REALLY wants an aircraft in a pack that is not up to "spec", then we (As a community) can vote to include it or not. If the majority (75% or above who participated) of the community voted to put the aircraft in the pack, then it will be put in and he/she has no right to complain about it being in there at a later date. (If he/she voted yes) If the majority voted not to include it in the pack, then it will not be put in.

3. If an aircraft makes it into a pack and it is not up to a person(s) personal needs, DONT FLY THE AIRCRAFT. The only way an aircraft gets into a plane pack is by meeting or passing plane pack guide lines and/or community vote. So in most instances, this senario will not happen.

Im glad you like this idea!

posted 01-14- 03:47 PM               

I would really like to see more input from the rest of the community before I go ahead with this plan. Those of you who did provide input, I thank you GREATLY. So far it seems almost all of you that have givin your input are for this plan. There are concers yes, but I believe they have ben addressed in a good manner. (Or maybe not?)

I would really like to hear what you think about what I have posted above regarding Diego's concerns. He did bring up some good points and I really thank him for that.

posted 01-14- 04:25 PM               

1)"Believability" and
2)"Completeness"

To get "believability" the plane must, at the least, use the same flight model as an EXISTING plane that it comes the closest to, in historical performance. For example, if you want to build a Macchi 202, but don't know how to do the FM, that's OK, but you must choose the "starter plane" wisely, for example, use the Spit 5 or the 109F. That at least gives you a baseline for the "legitimacy" of the flight model. Then, you should at least attempt to tweak for max speed and climb rate. That way your plane at least "approximates" the performance of "similar" planes, if not hitting ALL the numbers precisely.

For "completeness," this is pretty easy. It has to have a cockpit (which can be stolen in its entirety from some other plane, so long as it's there) with working instruments. It has to have the distant .lods. It has to have a damage model (again, exact copy from existing "standard" plane is acceptable), which should be "tweaked" to provide "relative" durability to other aircraft (i.e. don't use the P-47 damage model for a Ki-84, but the Spitfire numbers would be acceptable). Then, your "finished product" must LOOK finished. Have a decent skin (usually not a problem with the artistes around here) Have at least a Hangar Mission and an Air-to-Air Training Mission (or ground attack for those planes). Provide the cutaway.bmp and stats.bmp for the Hangar section. Have the proper ammo and ordnance loads in the loadout.ppf file, and have the pylons in the proper places on the model, with the weapons on the proper places on the pylons.

If you meet those requirements, then whoever is building the Plane Pack will put your model into the "Online Standard" pack. Otherwise, it STILL goes in the pack, but only as a "Beta" plane. That way, it's still usable for online play as a "standard" aircraft, but nobody assumes it's a "realistic" model YET.

Kinda goes without saying that once we establish these "builders' standards," we need to post them somewhere conspicuous, so nobody gets their feelings hurt, since each builder would know whether or not they'd met the standards for inclusion.

I don't think I'd impose a "quality" test of any kind, other than the requirement to come "close" to the real numbers and be "visually" and "administratively" complete.

Just my $0.02

posted 01-14- 04:50 PM               

Most of what you said goes along with what everybody else said for plane pack quality planes. The FM must be close to the real planes FM, it must have a DM and there must be instruments of somesort that work. I didnt think of the low detail LODs however... THANKS for bringing that up! That is a must IMO for being able to shoot the aircraft down as you have to see it to shoot it. Im also glad you brought up the missions. I also agree with that and I believe everyone here does. You have to have missions to fly the plane in SDOE dont you?!?! The "completeness" idea is also great! I too agree with that! Thats one thing Im real anal about. If the plane doesnt have a cutaway or hangar text, then I make one for me to use in SDOE.

Now one thing Im going to have to disagree with... I believe plane pack planes should be "complete" and any plane that does not meet the guide lines for the plane packs should not go in. IMO, plane packs stand for planes that are "complete" You download the packs to get all the "complete" aircraft to use on-line or off-line. There are MANY betas out that are not "complete" and I believe also in limiting the size of the plane packs and therefor IMO dont think alpha/beta planes should be included. Also, beta aircraft constantly get updates from the builder. It would be maddness for the plane pack organizer to get what build of the aircraft into the pack and to set a "time line" for plane pack entries.

When the guidelines are established, they will be posted where everyone will find them easily. (At least I hope they will be. Im sure me and Hawk can work something out)

As for quality testing... the community does the quality testing each time they fly the aircraft. They then provide their input to the builder. So in reality the aircraft are always being tested. Now I do not believe in a controlled test. That is VERY time consuming and really not fair to the builder.

posted 01-14- 05:05 PM               

Having said all of that, and hardly being able to make a good sandwhich, let alone a plane , I would say...most of what Zur said, and a shadow that fits the plane. That's one of my biggest pet peeves. Of course I spend most of my time running from my shadow, so what do I know.

Ya got a good topis here though.

posted 01-14- 05:23 PM            

Your enthusiasm is appreciated. Just a couple of things,

Quite some time ago I kind of started doing this independently. Nobody has ever provided any feedback on this (then again maybe noone has read it) but you might be interested in what I had thought in terms of new additions for the planepack.

Check the following link: http://www.angelfire.com/games2/spinsdoe/candidates.html

I agree on establishing criteria for planes, basically most of what has been suggested is summarized on this page.

I was not and will not play GOD with the planepack, ultimately my intent is to deliver to the community a unified standard for online play that includes planes that people enjoy or want to fly online.

The one additional criteria I had was to add what is considered innovative or unique when possible. The reason for this is simple, to give greater exposure to new and improved characteristics and features of FSDOE. I added the Seafire to the pack for this reason.

Putting together the planepack takes a ton of work and testing - and I can use help. If you're offering great. The main help I need is ensuring the best/latest files for all of the planes are included. Model divergence and losing improvements is a significant problem - Condor's damage pack is a good example, his work is really exciting but, we have to ensure that each one of his improvements was incorporated into the plane developers latest version, this in spite of people starting to push for it as online standard. A couple of inconsistencies have been noted to him already and I'm sure will be addressed.

Over the next couple of weeks I intend to update my website to include significantly more information and links, as well as improve navigation within it. Initially it was set up as a temporary download link and really needs improvement.

One of the things I would like to add is a voting/comment tool for new additions.

I don't believe the pack should be restrictive, mind you things are a lot different now than when Tailslide first started these. At that time people just wanted new planes. Now we've got more to choose from than we know what to do with. The He100 was the first new plane for SDOE and many would still consider it beta when compared to the high standards set by all of our builders today. But it was the first and showed it could be done.

As part of the website update, I hope to add sections for every plane known to SDOE with links to known versions and the websites hosted by the developers when available. Each plane will describe its current status (online standard or not), the creator, current revisions in development (and the contributors) and known problems and maybe community opinion (any good cgi writers out there?). This appears to be a massive exercise and may be more than I want to take on - then again I think it would create a useful tool for maintaining an html online planepack readme of sorts.

I have already commented on the Ju88dn and have nothing additional to say on that part of this subject. Including it in the pack seemed to have the opposite effect of what I intended - encouraging a new contributor to our community.

------------------
Spin

posted 01-14- 05:37 PM               

That is basicly what needs to be put where people can see it and have access to it regularly. You have sumed up what has ben said here in a nut shell. I will begin compiling all of the ideas that have ben said here and post them. Then we can weed out what needs to be and then do a final posting to ensure most everyone agrees. Then I'll make the official post in the General fourm and the Site Stuff fourm and try to get Hawk to post it up somewhere. You could also update your page aswell.

posted 01-14- 06:21 PM            

But he didn't say no , so I'm wondering

posted 01-15- 02:49 AM               

I know it isn't something I would be able to do - I have formed too many personal opinions on differences between online and offline performance that I would be too biased. It would be nice to see something like this worked out. But guidelines are tough to implement and even tougher sometimes to justify....good luck with it.

------------------
nealg=FC=

posted 01-15- 01:24 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by spin:

---

Spin, as you know one of my pet peeves is that the naming of the planes is "all different" and rarely historically accurate. I would like to fix this for the next pack.

Yes, I know this means changes to missions and such. My question is how far does one get by extracting all of the files in the .pars, and then doing a GREP on them? For instance if I look for all instances of "Me-163" and change that to "Me 163", but NOT if it's a filename, won't that work?

If so, I can do this as soon as you'd like to start. Or perhaps this should be a PP7 upgrade?

posted 01-15- 01:37 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by spin:
I don't believe the pack should be restrictive, mind you things are a lot different now than when Tailslide first started these. At that time people just wanted new planes. Now we've got more to choose from than we know what to do with. The He100 was the first new plane for SDOE and many would still consider it beta when compared to the high standards set by all of our builders today. But it was the first and showed it could be done.

---

So I guess I'll ask: should the He 100 be in then or not?

I fly the German planes primarily, and of them I'd say the majority are certainly PP quality. There are some that aren't however:

He 100 - climbs at 60 degree angles :-)
Ta152 - performance curves way off
Heinkel162 - known bad bugs in the model
Go229 - ditto

Now what I find the most interesting is that some of these planes are being addressed. The fixes to the Go229 are downright amazing (that was Argon, right?) and now I would certainly say the plane is PP quality.

So, what to do?

Well, how about this... we have simFiles. SimFiles rocks. Your site is also a good candiate for this... web installer.

I can't say I've looked into this a whole lot, but I know a little bit about it. IIRC there was some argument about whether or not to use par's so bear with me here.

What if I go to the PP page, and there's a selection of countries. From there I select Germany and get a page that says...

Bombers
Ju 87G-2 (new!)
Ju 88A-4
Ju 88G-7b
Ju 88DN (experimental)

Fighters
Bf 109E-4
Bf 109F-4

etc. So far so good?

Ok, now along the top of the page are a couple buttons...

All Current PP Experimental PP Online Standard

And beside each of the planes is a check box. So the user comes into the page and sees all of the planes for the latest PP checked IF they don't have those versions already. Then they hit download.

Alternately they come in, manually check some on or off, and click download.

Not only would this make the whole process a lot easier, it also has the serious advantage of listing ALL of the planes on a single page - "PP quality", "beta quality" and "experimental only".

We could do version tracking, partial updates, uninstalls, backoffs to last version, everything. We could even make other packs as simple as some JS code, the SWOLF pack, the Europa'46 pack, etc.

Assuming this is technically doable, is this the solution? If so, I'll start talking to MS and see how they do it and if it's usable.

posted 01-15- 07:25 PM               

Well I think the idea of picking what you download isnt' as good, we will have people showing up to play without all the planes all the time. Oh that plane? I don't like it so i didn't download it.

Bolillo Loco

Thats wacky cause the planes i always want to fly is the ones the germans only dreamt about, the stuff that didn't get enough use, the stuff that was just a year or 2 too late. All the stuff you don't want to use, sorry man but all that stuff has to be out there too, cause some people do want to fly it, why do you think alot of people have fond memories of that old game?

posted 01-15- 10:50 PM            

I can't comment on renaming the plane names. I have the personal opinion that it would turn into a nightmare. Mainly because of old missions with the old plane names appearing (this is also one reason (but not the only one) why the He100 will always be apart of the pack). The elimination of missions with outdated plane names would be challenging -in short - you might fix it only to have it overwritten by a bad version by accident by another host.

On the website concept - basically the interface you're talking about is kind of where I'm heading (or want to go). But parfiles will always be the way to go for distribution. The reason is shear file practicality - Plane pack 6 contains roughly 2500 files (if I remember correctly). To ensure online compatibility in a bind the user can simply rename his aircraft folder and providing the correct pars are installed he can be up and running. Individual files would prove virtually impossible for online play (especially for the light of heart).

Now I'm off to develop a new interface - or maybe fly a mission or two - hmmm.

------------------
Spin

posted 01-16- 03:36 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Nat:
If it could be setup, it would be better.

---

Ok, I think I know how to do this.

1) set up a CVS server. CVS does version control, and you can tell it to "flag" files with various tags.

2) the planes are all sent to the maintainer, he/she checks it in (easy, there's a win app for this) and tags it appropriately. For instance the infamous DN would be tagged as "PP6" and "experimental".

3) the web page uses a CGI that builds commands to send to the CLI version of CVS. By clicking the various options it constructs a list of commands. For instance if the user clicks "PP6", the system looks in the page for everything that has a PP6 tag, and grabs it.

4) the files are checked out into a temp directory. They are then zipped.

5) the user is returned to a page with a link pointing to the resulting ZIP file.

I think this would work, although this version doesn't know what version you have installed locally (which is a bummer).

Heck, we could just put the CVS server up on the net, but I think that's too geeky for the average user.

And I'll still see what MS does, that seems like the best idea.

posted 01-16- 03:43 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by spin:
I can't comment on renaming the plane names.

---

As someone else noted, isn't this just a change to the loadout.ppf? As long as the filename doesn't change, everything should be cool, right?

I guess this is best asked this way: do the mission files refer to filenames, or names found somewhere else?

quote:

---

practicality - Plane pack 6 contains roughly 2500 files (if I remember correctly).

---

Which is one zip.

The real issue here is that the par's give us an easy "here's the base, here's the upgrades" system as long as everyone has the same set of pars. And that's nice, don't get me wrong.

Buuuut, if we use a good "version aware" system, this could solve the problem.

I mean it might be as simple as making a whole bunch of zip files for each of the versions of the planes, and then simply zipping them all together and sending the result to the user. Then they -as today- just unzip the file, presto.

I'm just not 100% sure yet, so let me get back to you on that.

posted 01-16- 07:59 PM            

I think the same thing could be done with parfiles and keep it simpler.

Damn I wish the beta 1.5.1 patch was online standard, the openplane folder solves the parfile problem. You could then add and remove plane packs/beta planes and other addons by clicking an option in the options page.

------------------
Spin

posted 01-16- 08:27 PM               

Personaly I like the packs becuase they eliminate the conflicts on-line and let us fly together. It has worked great, without it we would still be flying only the shipping aircraft.

I don't think it is bad to have unfinushed or incorrect FM planes in the pack if there is a special reason to include it. The host should simply choose the kind of missions that are desired. If plane "x" is a super plane, don't use it if you want some historical match.

Including any certain plane in the pack should not, and has not been the end of the world.

People with unfinished planes tend not to want them included in the pack. People who make the pack tend not to want unfinished planes in the pack. People who fly on-line tend not to want unfinished planes in the pack. It is natural law

But I agree with the notion that there is no such thing as "finished"- so by "finished" I mean to a certain level that the three groups I mentioned above basicaly feel its time has come.

It is fun and helpful to have some alpha projects in the pack- it is fun to try them out and gives the modeler some critical feedback.

I think it is important to remember (or relize) that there is much more to a flight model than the specs. The specs are crucial, but the spirit of the flight is also important. You can indeed create an aircraft that flies very well by most all the specs, but feels completely unlike a flying machine. Also you can create a flight model that suspends all disbelief, this is flight! But the specs might not be close...

And so flight modeling remains partialy an art... and quite a subjective one at that. The right answer is to trust they aircraft authors- if they have it in for you, then you are screwed anyway

Most people understand how a bad flight model (especially one that makes the aircraft to good) spoils an otherwise nice aircraft. I think undermodeling is a good idea... if you have to error one way or another. It is all to easy to add to much sugar

posted 01-17- 09:14 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by spin:
Damn I wish the beta 1.5.1 patch was online standard

---

Yeah, why isn't it?

posted 01-18- 11:43 AM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Mighty:
There are video problems for many people.

---

Bummer.