2012 End of Year Reflections

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IV/JG7_4Shades
Posts: 2201
Joined: Mon 08 Jan 2007 11:10 pm
Location: Perth, Western Australia

2012 End of Year Reflections

Post by IV/JG7_4Shades »

Hi everyone,

About this time of the year I think back to where we have come from.

Big events this year included Badger's massive Fall Gelb campaign which reached over 160 combat missions, the recent ITA-SEOW and 102nd campaign in Crete 1941 which averaged just under 79 pilots per mission for 16 missions, and many other campaigns, large and small.

This year also saw an even closer engagement between HSFX and SEOW development teams, resulting in HSFX v6 and SEOW v6, including the indirect artillery mod and the new Technics Processor Tool (an MP Tool), plus some other things. Our map maestro, JP, surpassed himself with astounding work on the new West Front 44 map, and has since turned his attention to Indochina.

SEOW is now a major application. I just did some quick counting and found the following data:

DCS: ~60,000 lines of custom VB.NET code
MP Scripts: ~45,000 lines of custom Javascript, PHP and HTML code
MP Statistics: ~10,500 lines of custom Javascript, PHP, HTML and XML code
MP Maps: 78 sectors!
MP images: ~5,000 custom GIF and JPG images
DB: >1.2M records in the Reference database

My thanks to all who helped in this process over the past 9 years, including the visionary RAF74 guys Wall-Dog and Taipan who started it all. What we have now is actually a free (but very rich) strategy+tactics simulator for combined WW2 operations, sitting on top of IL-2 1946.

Interesting, while flight sims, developers and publishers come and go, IL-2 1946 seems to persist. There are two main reasons for this, I think. The first is the excellent architectural work by Maddox Games in establishing a sim that was "community ready", that is it allowed a range of add-ons to be built for it, including DeviceLink, campaign generators, DF servers etc. The second has been the work of the modding community, which has extended the number of available combat objects to awesome dimensions, and added many features to support more realistic operations. In fact, just the scope of operations now available in the TD and HSFX mods represents a real problem for new sim developers - how can they compete?

No doubt, in the end, a new product will come along to replace what we have here, but I suspect it won't happen soon. In the meantime, I look forward to more fun and learning with you all through SEOW.

Cheers,
4S
Last edited by IV/JG7_4Shades on Mon 31 Dec 2012 1:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
IV/JG7_4Shades
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Zoi
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Joined: Fri 14 Jan 2011 3:20 pm

Post by Zoi »

Nice to hear your thoughts Shades, many of us have contact with you when we have issues but seldom get to hear your thoughts on SEOW and IL-2 in a more general way.

It's a pleasure to have met you and get the chance to appreciate your excellent work.
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