Fórum Brigadeiro Nero Moura

PatrickAWilson

Hi all,

I wanted to take a moment to talk about PWCG for BoS. I have been working on this for a couple of months now. It is finally in a state where I am debugging mission generation, ths the recent questions. It will take a bit longer to get done. Expect something around November.

RoF PWCG users will be right at home. There is a great deal of similarity in mission profile between WWI and WWII on the eastern front, which was almost purely a tactical air war. This allowed me to reuse most of RoF PWCG mission generation code.

PWCG for BoS will, by necessity, be a bit different. The biggest, obvious difference is that BoS is a series of battles and not a continuous war. PWCG will initially support only the Battle of Stalingrad from August 1942 to February 1943. Initially, it will always be winter. Hooks are in place to add more battles and maps as they become available. If/when summer and fall come to Stalingrad that too will be supported.

In the future, when there is more than one battle available, pilots will start a career at a point of their choosing within the scope of available battles. When a battle ends the pilot will move to the next battle. Using the current plans as an example, a pilot will be able to start in Moscow, fight that battle, and then move to Stalingrad. He will not be able to start in Stalingrad and then go back in time to Moscow. If it ever comes to pass that two battles overlap PWCG will allow transfers between them.

Missions will include fighter, dive bomber, attack plane, and level bomber. Fighters will fly intercept, patrol, scramble, escort and possibly attack missions. Dive bombers and attack aircraft will be limited to that role. Level bombers will get primarily bombing missions but may also get recon.

Some items - WWIisms - have been removed. No artillery spot or balloon missions. Recon takes a back seat to bombing. Night missions will not be supported in the initial release. The ability to play as an observer has been removed, so you will always be the pilot. Depending on demand some of these features may be added back in, but for the initial release they have to be left on the cutting room floor.

Historical aces are not there yet. All of the code to support them is there but I just don't have the time to do the data entry. If somebody out there is willing to do it I will add it.

I don't see any mention of this on the ATAG Forum yet, so thought I would post this information. It has been announced that Pat Wilson is creating a version of his Rise of Flight campaign generator for IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad. This will help single player content for BoS immensely. For those of you not familiar with Pat Wilson's Campaign Generator for RoF (PWCG) here are some bits and pieces I've posted about it from other forums:

My note below is for Rise of Flight, but now knowing Pat is working to convert PWCG for IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad its worthy to note the strengths of PWCG and its potential for BoS. I know nothing about the specifics of the conversion, but PWCG has enormous potential to open up unlimited game play in BoS.

"For anyone who hasn't tried PWCG but has RoF and is looking for something more, it is a must have. If you want shorter "instant action" type missions, but with career tracking, then shorten the mission distance in Advanced Config. If you want longer more realistic missions (like me) then increase the mission distance. If you want some "no contact" missions in the mix, never knowing if or when you'll make contact with the enemy, then move the percentage chance of contact to 70 or 80% instead of 100%. If you want to change the skill level mix of the AI pilots you face, then change the random skill level generator percentages. If you aren't happy with something about the missions you are flying PWCG lets you change it. I'm guessing there are over a hundred different mission parameters you can change in Advanced Config. And of course there is a Simple Config for point and click changes that can be made in just a matter of seconds. PWCG is incredibly flexible for both beginners and advanced users.

In PWCG I've had missions where I'm rolling off the field with bullets kicking up dirt all around me and wingmen on fire as I take off during an attack on my field. And I've had missions where I thought I would have no contact while taking out a bridge in an R.E.8 flight, only to be hunted down after a 90 minute flight while I'm trying to set down on my field. I've flown 3 hour Gotha missions into England, sometimes not intercepted, sometimes intercepted over England, and sometimes hunted down on the way home over the channel from squadrons patrolling out of Dunkirk (you can use time acceleration to turn them into 2 hour, 1 hour, or 20 minute missions).

Or fly Handley Page bombers on night raids into German territory only to be intercepted by Albatros night fighters from Kest squadrons coming in at you out of the dark. Or fly for a British Home Defense squadron or a German Kest at night trying to find the Gothas or Handley Page bombers in the night sky. When the big bombers reach a major target and the search lights come on its an incredible light show (whether you're in a bomber or in a fighter hunting them). The stuff that can happen in a PWCG mission pretty much blows my mind when I really think about it. Its absolutely white knuckle. If you haven't used PWCG with RoF, you really haven't played RoF as a single player. PWCG showcases features you didn't even know existed in RoF. Oh, and you can also fly in the role of a traditional hotshot fighter pilot"...

Edit 1: Another important feature in PWCG is the ability to set the density of ground and air units to tune the mission size to the abilities of your computer.

Edit 2: PWCG uses an internal system generated "dice roll" for probability percentages. For instance, when you adjust the skill level of AI pilots to say: 25% Ace, 50% Veteran, 25% Rookie that means that overall you will face 25% Aces on the average of say 100 missions. It doesn't mean that on every mission you will face 25% Aces. You could run into a squad of rookies, but on the same mission you may run into a squad with a couple of aces and two veterans. So you can control the overall big picture, but on any given mission, or any given encounter within a mission you won't know for sure who you're up against. Of course, you can skew the percentages to 0% Aces and 0% Veterans if you only want to fly against Rookies. But any reasonable spread of percentages makes things fairly unpredictable but with a slant towards the percentages you have specified.

Here is a YouTube tutorial for PWCG done by a player. It focuses on initializing a new campaign and does a pretty good job of showing you most of the screens within PWCG:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCNDZn6P5xQ[/video]

PWCG runs outside of RoF as a separate application. It can be launched from within RoF using the GUI referenced above or can be run as a stand alone application using Alt-Tab. I really consider PWCG to be a separate game that uses the RoF engine for missions (PWCG is that comprehensive). Other than flying you will spend almost all of your time within PWCG. Pat Wilson is a professional Java programmer, but does not work in the gaming industry. PWCG had humble beginnings, but in his spare time over the past 3 or 4 years Pat has turned PWCG into one of the best 3rd party applications I've ever seen for a game.

Matt Milne (a professional composer with credits including scoring Star Trek TV episodes) has donated music for PWCG. Here is one of the tracks that you will hear as you move around inside PWCG:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekp9sM_rpCo[/video]

All told, PWCG has the "wow" factor of a complete separate game where you will realize "oh, yeah, I'm using the RoF engine to fly the missions." Combined with PWCG, RoF becomes one of the best combat flight simulators of all time IMO (or maybe its the other way around) ;;)

PWCG is a freeware product for Rise of Flight and it is my understanding it will also be a freeware product for BoS. You can visit Pat's website for more information here (I don't know if this will be the url for downloading the BoS version, but this is a start): http://www.pwcampaignmanager.com/pwcg/web/PWCG.html