Bomber wrote:I can tell you that I've never had more immersion than flying a B17 fully crewed with gunners from around the world all talking away on intercom... Flying formation with other planes equally equipped and enemy planes attacking..
Having dedicated era servers for WWII with chain home radar would attract me.
Simon.
how would that work gaming-wise ?
I am asking because the recent progress in the Nasal/Canvas department means that we can now provide a visual editor to place arbitrary stuff, including 3D objects, AI traffic, but possibly also radar stations. So what's needed is 3-fold: 1) 3D objects to represent the actual radar (could be power pylons for starters), 2) a list of positions where those are to be placed (seems to be available online), 3) some functionality that could turn this into "gaming", i.e. hit/miss and different ways to respond this properly.
As you may have noticed, we are also working towards extending the scriptable tutorial system to support missions and adventures (those guys were actually asking for "mission ideas").
Being involved in both efforts to some degree, we could probably come up with a simple "mission" that involves circumventing a chain home radar system, or responding to its alerts.
A first prototype would obviously be "local", i.e. not involve any MP or dual-piloting, but it's not impossible, not even extremely difficult to combine those 3 features. After all, it's really just a bit of scripting tied together. And it's nothing that would take ages to pull off as long as people can live with some compromises initially.
http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_N ... Map_dialog
This is probably too modern and airliner-centric for your taste, but everything you see there is 100% configurable through images (png or svg), i.e. can be customized - we could even show symbols for radar stations across pre-defined paths, actually place 3D models (as long as we can get our hands on a list of positions) and sound some yelling or alarm if any radar is activated - combined with Thorsten's bad weather that could actually be a fun mission for starters.
So, we would need a list of positions, e.g. based on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_Home ... Home_sites
The whole thing could then be turned into a map-editor like this:
Also, tutorials & missions are just XML - Nasal isn't needed to create simple tutorials
As long as someone can provide a list of positions, we can place radar antennas, show them on a map (including radar beams), and even instantiate some piece of Nasal for each antenna that tracks sector violations. This would not be complicated to pull off, not even using just the tutorials system - and once we support Nasal blocks per model, we can easily run custom logic.