DCS WWII: Europe 1944

I'd rather have the 109 as well. It's number four on my list of favorite aircraft, while the Focke-Wulf is something like number seven. But, hey, I can't complain about having a well-modelled virtual FW 190 to fly. It was ten years ago that I first experienced my long desire for a twin study sim: Lockheed P-38 versus Messerschmitt Me 109. Perhaps, someday ... someday.

You can already do that. If you want to simulate being the P-38 pilot, go to your local grocery store, and ask to see their freezer room.:lol:

Anyway, this is all great news. I am looking forward to a high fidelity WW2 sim.

Gents,

Can we stop referring the FW-190 D9 as "Dora". Call it D9 or whatever... but not Dora. Thank you :-)

Gents,

 

Can we stop referring the FW-190 D9 as "Dora". Call it D9 or whatever... but not Dora. Thank you :-)

Why? Dora is a nickname that was always used since she went into service. Calling her D9 would feel very weird.

it's like calling her R2D2

HAHAHAHA

My daughter loves that cartoon.

To be honest, everytime I see somebody mentioning Dora here, I can't think of anything else than this :P

Was "butcherbird" a nickname for a specific version, or the whole 190 range?

Or was it an allied nickname...

I think it is just the English translation of "Würger" (although I would rather translate it with "Shrike").

And that one was the name for the whole series.

EDIT: Just looked at Wiki "butcherbird" and I _think_ the Wiki page with disambiguations might be wrong concerning the FW-190. Although it might be both the translation of the German name AND a name chosen because of the lethality.

Okay, so it's not Dora the explorer, it's Dora the butcherbird :)

that sure has a nice ring to it :D

Well, looks like I'm late to the party again, not too sure how I missed this. Rather interesting news, and to be honest I don't know how I feel about it, while I did love IL2 and totally adored Pacific Fighters, I was seriously burned in the disaster that was Cliffs of Dover.

Granted there is now the patch that pretty much makes it playable and show off hints of what could have been.

I think I will be watching but I'm very weary about getting into the water with these guys again. However that said, if ED trusts and believes in them, they haven't let me down yet so I will certainly be following this closely.

I do wish Luther and the team all the best and hope this project goes better than the last one.

I just hope the forums don't turn into the Banana Forums, it was awful over there.

Cowboy10uk

 

I just hope the forums don't turn into the Banana Forums, it was awful over there.

 

Cowboy10uk

I flew Il2 since the beta. I remember the UBIZoo forum. It had some nasty fights.

I flew Il2 since the beta. I remember the UBIZoo forum. It had some nasty fights.

Do you remember back when it was still absolutely verboten to even mention the existence of IL-2 mods?

That was some crazy crazy nonsense.

777 Studios (the developers of Rise of Flight) announced that they had merged with the former Cliffs of Dover team. So these Maddox Games remnants mentioned in the O.P. are people who didn't stay on to work with 777 Studios, but chose to go for DCS instead?

Yes, also heard that after spending months hoping Cliffs of Dover would make it through all the bugs!!

I know some people will be pissed, but so what,, I want to say I hope they don't screw up the American and Brit flight models again like they did in IL-2 and to some extent in CLOD. They bungled our planes on the allied side pretty bad. Even when real pilots who flew many of the planes tried to tell them what needed fixed they fought back. We stil have some WWII and Korean era pilots who flew planes that are in IL-2 sim, and had long engineering and flight careers, and had data to supply and back-up the data. But it was ignored.

I hope they don't screw up the American and Brit flight models again like they did in IL-2 and to some extent in CLOD. They bungled our planes on the allied side pretty bad. Even when real pilots who flew many of the planes tried to tell them what needed fixed they fought back. We stil have some WWII and Korean era pilots who flew planes that are in IL-2 sim, and had long engineering and flight careers, and had data to supply and back-up the data. But it was ignored.

This is true. It's about damn time I met someone else who recognizes this. Maddox's complete disregard for realism and historical accuracy--all the while swearing it was right--is appalling to me, even after all these years. I'm willing to give Luthier a chance, because he seems like his heart's in the right place, and CloD was a step in the right direction compared to the previous IL-2 games (as a sim, that is--never mind the frame rates and game crashes). But I swore years ago that I would never pay another cent to Mr. Maddox, and I never have. I am very glad that he no longer is making flying games. I can forgive little errors here and there, but the massive and countless flaws in old IL-2 were just horrid; I've never seen a 300% error in any other sim. Ugh.

To be fair to Luthier and CoD,He was under contract and deadlines by UBI,Who care nothing about quality or number of bugs in the product.

There's a reason DCS left UBI and Lock-On Behind;)

Echo38 you said : "I've never seen a 300% error in any other sim. Ugh."

Be interested to know the exact thing/parameter/aircraft that was 300% out ...

Be interested to know the exact thing/parameter/aircraft that was 300% out ...

Browning fifty-caliber dispersion. It was about three times wider than the real deal at all ranges. We were using unambiguous British wartime test documents (as well as plentiful and clear gun camera footage) to demonstrate the point, but Mr. Maddox insisted that his ridiculous 3-times-too-wide diameter was right. He only changed it when Ubisoft finally stepped in (very unusual--but I guess even they could see the error, since it was so large and obvious) and told him to fix it.

... Which is where it gets really interesting. His exact words on the forums were, I believe, "You wanted unrealistic and unhistorical? Well you got it." He put the .50's to their correct dispersion value (the value he was calling unrealistic), but he quietly nerfed them at the same time by setting them to fire exactly synchronized. Tightening the guns to their real-life value should have made it easier for a good marksman to make kills (though harder for an inexperienced shooter), but we were noticing that we were having less success than before. Maddox's lapdogs on the Ubizoo forum accused us of just sucking at gunnery, but it didn't take long for someone to notice the real problem.

This fellow did an easily-reproducible test and posted the screenshots--before the change, all machine gun banks in the game would fire a steady stream. If you fired them at the ground while pulling G's, you'd see two lines of dirt puffs on the ground, one line for each wing-bank (the fifties' lines being three times wider than they should be). After the change? Well, the other guns were still making lines, but the new .50 banks were now firing in neat little packets, so there were two rows of dirt-puff clusters, instead of two lines of dirt puffs. The clusters were spaced far apart, instead of a solid line; the higher the AoA, the farther apart the clusters. What was happening was that, in hard turns, the enemy was flying between our bullet-clusters.

I hope I don't have to point out that real aircraft gun banks do not fire synchronized with each other in this manner--every individual machine gun fires at a slightly different RoF, and this is good, because when firing them in banks, you have a constant stream of lead which the enemy cannot fly through under any conditions without taking hits. With a bunch of packets instead of a constant stream, however, resulting from Maddox's intentionally-unrealistic synchronization (again, specific to the new .50's, about which he was bitter after having been forced to set them to their correct dispersion), the enemy could "fly through" if the shooter were at a high AoA. Or, rather, the clusters were going around the enemy--one below him, the next above him, as your pitch has changed between the synchronized shots.

Maddox fixed this ninja-nerf not too long after he was discovered, but this sort of stubborn disregard for realism (in both issues--the dispersion and the synchronization)--and his pettiness and intellectual dishonesty in sneaking in the nerf to try to have the last laugh--was the final straw for me. There had been hundreds of these sort of errors before, as well as Maddox's loud refusal to acknowledge any evidence presented (he once called official U.S. wartime fighter performance documents "American propaganda"--I wish I were only joking). But finally realizing how Maddox went beyond simply not caring about the reality, but actively opposed it out of some bizarre sense of pride--well, that did it for me.

I too remember reading something about it. The .50 cal being ridiculously messed up because Maddox personally believed that it was the worst machine gun of WWII...

Yeah. I was there. I read his posts, I e-mailed the guy, I got dismissive response. Got proof? If it isn't Stalin-era Soviet documentation, it's American or British propaganda ... Christ, I'm so glad he isn't involved in making flying games anymore. Maddox's greatest accomplishment was convincing the majority of the flight sim community that he made an ultra-realistic simulator, when he actually made a mediocre flying game with shitty flight physics, lite engine management, and delusional aircraft & weapon performance and characteristics. P.T. Barnum could have learned something from that.

However, I have relatively high hopes for Luthier. The fact that he wishes to make a sim at the level of DCS: P-51D is promising--I've only known about three flight sim development entities which have even expressed a desire to do so. The rest realize that there's not much money to be made there and don't even try.

Hey Josh, that's an amazing story about the .50s. If only half of it is true it is very disturbing. I had always wondered why the P-51 guns fired in such a retarded pattern in 1946.

I too remember reading something about it. The .50 cal being ridiculously messed up because Maddox personally believed that it was the worst machine gun of WWII...

Tony Williams also does not hold the .50 cal Browning in high regard, and he is an authority on air-to-air weapons from WW2. The reason has to do with weight, and not ballistics. The Browning was almost twice as heavy as other heavy machine guns with comparable muzzle velocities and rates of fire.

http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/WW2guneffect.htm

But he wrote:

To sum up, the preferred US armament fit was effective for its purpose, but not very efficient by comparison with cannon.

Also, he doesn't take into consideration reliability, manufacturing, etc. etc. This sort of comparison is no different than saying today, 'F-16 beats F-35 because a clean F-16 can sustain higher G turns'.

Interesting comments have been made about modern gunnery also: Take the Gsh-30 installed in MiG-29's and Su-27's, vs. the M-61. Those guns fire slower, but each round packs more power than a 20mm round fired from the M-61.

On the other hand, if someone with an M-61 decides to take a snapshot and hose down the bandit, they're guaranteed hits if the bandit flies through the stream, and while a single 20mm round is less powerful than a 30mm, the probability of hitting with multiple 20mm rounds is high.

So while you might want to call this a less efficient weapon, the real answer is in the pudding: How did it fare in combat?

Ps: My mistake, he mentions all this very very briefly in the last paragraph:

To return to the obviously controversial question of the relatively poor performance of the .50 Browning: as has already been stated in this study, "the preferred US armament fit [of six or eight .50 HMGs] was effective for its purpose, but not very efficient by comparison with cannon". It is worth pointing out that for as long as the battery of .50s proved adequate against the targets usually encountered, there were strong arguments in favour of retaining the weapon, as the standardisation of production, supply, maintenance and training provided great logistic benefits by comparison with the plethora of different weapons fielded by the Germans and Japanese in particular

Tony Williams also does not hold the .50 cal Browning in high regard, and he is an authority on air-to-air weapons from WW2. The reason has to do with weight, and not ballistics. The Browning was almost twice as heavy as other heavy machine guns with comparable muzzle velocities and rates of fire.

 

http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/WW2guneffect.htm

Ah, but Mr. Williams appears to be dealing objectively with facts, whereas Mr. Maddox went almost solely with personal feelings and perversely stuck to them, regardless of what facts were provided to him. The Browning may not have been the best weapon, but that doesn't mean that it is reasonable to portray it in a simulator as being far worse than it really was. There's really no excuse for sticking to a 300% error. Imagine if that'd been a speed error instead of a dispersion diameter error; that'd be Mach 2 prop planes. : /