its a new year and its time to see if we can bring around some change
ive talked to many many pilots over the years and ive narrowed down some of the issues hurting air combat on sl. the breakdown is between dynamic and easy aircraft
everyone is to blame. there is no right side in this argument but to blame the individual pilots and not the brands. what it boils down to is an MMO term known as ganking. EVERYONE IS GUILTY OF IT
- so instead of ganking a new pilot why not take them with you and let them fly as your wingman. maybe teach them a few things.
- so instead of ganking down a dynamic aircraft with your aircraft that can fly up inside its own tailhole
in recent years the best way to combat this was to simply turn off vice. land. and leave the sim. so stop wondering why your sims are dead and empty.
what im hoping to do about this is to propose a sort of honor system. the pilots should know what their choice of aircraft is able to do. and they should respect other pilots enough to pick on something they know can defend itself. in short check your targets
our sim Guadalcanal welcomes all aircraft from all creators. but it needs to be the pilots held accountable for how they use their weapons of war. air combat can return from the abyss. but its going to require a community effort to do so
at the end of the day don’t we all just want to fly?
so before you brush me off and what im trying to say here. backstory time!
ive been around from the start. i built the first vice combat sims to deploy more than just aircraft. and i deployed the first respawn tags. far before even olds afb made their own modeled after ours. this was all back in 2009
why cant we just make things fun again? im not going to give up hope.
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Guadalcanal/207/186/23
I do have some sympathy with Aeon Voom’s intent with the MCE system, but the project feels dead, and combat of all kinds seems to have faded away from the peak of a few years ago. I hardly fly Aeon Voom’s stuff now: I struggle with the current control systems.
My main interest in such things over the years has been infantry combat, and I have sometimes being shouted at for using a camouflage uniform so that opponents (wearing black and marching up the middle of the street) haven’t seen me.
At least it’s possible to feel realistic. Infantry can fight in a 256m sim without too much hassle from that limit. People who wargame with miniature figures usually use a smaller scale for the movement and weapon ranges than they use for the figures. One inch, the figure height, might represent 25 yards for movement and shooting. Most systems use a smaller difference, Limit a gun to 100m, SL scale, and you can do interesting things within a sim.
Air combat has always been difficult. A Spitfire has a turn radius of about 210m in the real world. With the effects of sim crossings, just flying around becomes difficult. It flies at 180 metres per second. Featherstone’s “Air Wargames” described the problems (and add 3D poitioning of models) when the scale problems of ground battles has been more or less solved.
I don’t have a fix, but there’s a clear problem dealing with aircraft from different eras. What would work for a Sopwith Camel would be wrong for a Mitsubishi Zero, and then came jets and missiles. Air combat manouvering hasn’t changed so much since the days of Oswald Boelcke but it had to be rediscovered at least twice, and some of the past methods seem a little superfluous. An F-16 turns so well that the advantages of using a vertical have faded away. Or have they?
Perhaps the extremes of SL aircraft design can be treated as similar to that. Maybe there could be a chart that has ordinary planes on the diagonal, by history and space needed. An F-16 that could be flown like a Sopwith Camel, would be way off that line, A practical SL plane (which need be neither historical nor “fair”) would be close to the line, and the ones with a bit more realism would be on the other side to that F-16.
And then maybe we’d see that there really are gaps. Maybe a range sits in a nice compact cluster, but it’s all USAF.
Perhaps a schedule of planes organized on their sophistication and training time would help. This would give the player a better idea of what they need in the way of experience. This schedule would not be based on age or style, the rating would be based on how long an average pilot took to learn how to fight their aircraft effectively.
An example: 1942’s stuff is dated and simple but it is fun and easy to fly. They use a commonly available script set and take very little time to learn. At the other end are the offerings ZSK; they are complete with gauges and telltales but take a fair amount of time and computing power to handle. When competently flown by experienced pilots, they clean clocks with ease – but they take a number of hours to learn to use effectively. THI’s offerings come in two flavors, the older VICE models and the later MCE models. They float between ZSK and 1942 in their learning curve and the scripting is a bit easier to manage for effective flight and combat. YAMATO is pretty much a Japanese language set of planes.
Why the schedule? One, it allows competitions between aircraft of equal capability and power. Two, it lets the new-to-combat pilot start out simple and work their way up. Three, it means that X, flying a 1942 Me-109 doesn’t get repeatedly reamed by someone flying a THI Mustang or a jet of some sort. That sort of experience can cost us players, who decide that wargames in Jugeot are weighted in favor of the people who have the most Linden$ to spend.
An idea… who knows, this might even work.
One of the reasons I’ve been idle and not sinking freighters and tankers is because there are none around for me to sink. Not all of us are available during the day (SL time), for some of us the evening is when we can log into SL and prowl Jugeot gulf. Perhaps scheduling events during the evening hours (18.00 through 20.00 hours PST/SLT) could bring more action to the gulf and more activity to our wargaming program.
Adapting existing designs (thinking the XXIII class German sub here) to use the LANCE system and offering them for sale apart from the current VICE offerings would improve the gameplay by upping the risk/opportunity within the games.
Vessels suggested for LANCE conversion and sale as separate LANCE items might be:
The XXIII sub, the PT boat, some of the artillery batteries that are currently VICE, Appropriate-era Fighters and Bombers, and perhaps a couple of DD’s and DE’s (Fletcher and the German one).
The more ships and planes that can sink each other, the better.
For the most part, though, let’s have some SLT evening events! Not everyone can participate during the day, some of us have day jobs that overlap into the weekend –
thus excluding us from some apparently great battles.
“If you Schedule it, they will come” (and I don’t mean baseball)
Matching each aircraft with some of similar capability is a hot button and has been for many years. I partnered with some great people to bring “Indochina” to life and have an area for Vietnam conflict er combat including air. What is odd is the numbers of people that think an AMOK F4B Phantoam II cannot defeat a THI Mig-17 even though both are armed differently and fly somewhat as they would in real life when against one another. Any 3D experience or ‘game’ will always have those that only want to point and click to cause a win. But to take one of the aforementioned planes and defeat the other, then switch and defeat what they just flew with the other is unique and takes thought and training.
I love VICE for being able to be used most anywhere but the same open source that made it wonerful also damaged it. Some folks just have to have the faster turning with more bullets quick kills thing instead of an level or realism or re-enactment experience.
LANCE seems interesting and fun, but I see no aircraft for it. Only ship vrs submarine as I see it so far. MCE looked promising too, but I have not seen anyplace to work that lately.
Three things turned me off regarding MCE. One was the who controls it issue. Another was the same thing that gets me upset in VICE. Once was reported to me that a person came to WW2 MCE area, saw an American tank wandering around and wondered if the machine guns on the bf109 would damage it at all. As the person rezzed the bf109 the tank driver jumped out of his Allied tank, rezzed a German mobile AA gun and started using it as on the Allied side the tank was on. Shooting at the 109 before it even left the runway. Since when would an American soldier rez a German AA gun next to the German runway on sims where there were specific rez zones on the other side of two sims? One last issue is two fold, Tunisia went away which I loved in favor of a European rural area which is far too common. Then, I jumped in a Matilda and shot Tank is his Comet several times causing no damage. He one shot killed me. He claimed the Matilda had a smaller caliber gun and so forth. What he failed to realize is that the penetration power of a Matilda’s gun was near good as a Comet and the Matilda was a heavy tank while the Comet was a light tank. Again, sacrificing realism and fair play for the quick kill mentality.
I prefer team play and tactics and strategy to some quick kill weapon that drives everyone away.
You will see me fly VICE in Jeogeot from time to time and I invite those who wish to to visit Indochina for a Vietnam experience.
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Gulf%20of%20Tonkin/155/119/718
The big problem with Vice is that it’s considered an obsolescent system and hasn’t been upgraded in years. Another problem with Vice is that certain scumbags hack the system so their machine gun can sink a Yamato class battleship.
What’s needed is a Vice-like system that is upgradable and hard to hack (although some sludge eaters will hack it anyway). Vice is open…it could be used as a starting point for a new unobtrusive system, unlike the resource wasting extras included in MCE.
Or…the people who make MCE could offer a simple system that doesn’t require a blessing from on high to activate and does what Vice would do if it were modernized.
Not holding my breath on that one, though.