Graphics Rewrite and navigation?

[Chivas]

I'm hoping the graphics rewrite will not only improve performance, but add hedgerows. Not only will it make England look more like England it might also make navigation easier. Currently I can't see the forests for the trees. I use roads and forests for navigation, but as it is now its hard to distinguish the outline of large forests from all the other trees on the map. If hedgerows replaced some of the trees on the landscape it should make it easier to navigate using roads, railways, towns, and forests

[ATAG_Doc]

I'm hoping the graphics rewrite will not only improve performance, but add hedgerows. Not only will it make England look more like England it might also make navigation easier. Currently I can't see the forests for the trees. I use roads and forests for navigation, but as it is now its hard to distinguish the outline of large forests from all the other trees on the map. If hedgerows replaced some of the trees on the landscape it should make it easier to navigate using roads, railways, towns, and forests

+1 totally agree. But on the other hand you'd be hard pressed to find a day in which you have good VFR anyway. There is a reason they call that jacket maker London Fog. I've never seen England so clear in my life as you do in this sim. Now when you get the weather turned on just wait and see then. It would be fantastic but seeing roads and navigating this way would probably be challenging nevertheless.

[Dano]

Luthier stated that it wont look any different.

[Chivas]

+1 totally agree. But on the other hand you'd be hard pressed to find a day in which you have good VFR anyway. There is a reason they call that jacket maker London Fog. I've never seen England so clear in my life as you do in this sim. Now when you get the weather turned on just wait and see then. It would be fantastic but seeing roads and navigating this way would probably be challenging nevertheless.

I agree that the England's weather is historically bad, but during BOB it was much better than usually, although I look forward to flying low in poor weather trying to spot landmarks thru the fog and low cloud, lol.

[Chivas]

Luthier stated that it wont look any different.

Thats unfortunate although I don't remember Luthier saying that, and I've followed the development very closely. That said I'm getting old and my memory fails far to often now. ;)

Hopefully if thats the case some modder with alot of time on their hands could slowly replace some of the trees with hedgerows.

[Dano]

3. Performance. We are in final stages of testing a thorough overhaul of the game’s graphic engine. It won’t look any different but it will be much more streamlined. It’s too early to say what the FPS increase will be in the final version, but it shouldn’t be less than 50%.


http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?p=350181#post350181

[ATAG_Doc]

That we already knew. But the weather isn't turned on yet. For MP I speak.

[Ploughman]

To be fair, most mature hedgerows in England are populated by trees. What's unrealistic about the sims depiction of the English countryside is the density and proximity of trees to road, rail and hedge. The sim depicts trees along roads as if they were the leafy avenued approache to a great house, but in reality a country road would have the trees tight onto the road edge with boughs overlapping over head.

[Dano]

Indeed, a great many roads would be almost, if not completely hidden until you were on top of them.

[Ailantd]

What bothers me the most with roads is that secondary texture roads, even sand roads, are wider and detailed from altitude than main ones. Also that roads don´t cut texture mapping behind them so the integration with standard terrain features is so poor. For me this looks so ugly that I usually turn roads off to have a better looking landscape.

[Chivas]

The hedgerows don't have to be modeled to cover the roads. From a distant where you see parallel hedgerows you would know there could be a road or railroad there at times. Single hedgerows could at time indicate only the edge of a field. I like navigating to the target at treetop level so a mixture of trees and hedgerows would make navigation much easier. I realize that this isn't a priority, and is something that could be done at a later date by the community.

[ATAG_Doc]

Something like this??

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4P0mnCI9c8M/SX5tKv_IwqI/AAAAAAAABEI/JFWvhv0Ekrg/s400/Hedgerows.jpg

[Ploughman]

It's been a while but the last time I flew over Kent at, I'm guessing, 20K, the most obvious feature, the very thing Chivas is referring to in terms of a navigational aid, was the line of the old Roman road from the coast (Deal?), through Canterbury, to London. It stood out like a sore thumb. It is the sort of thing that's missing from CloD.

[priller26]

If you have your roads or grass set ON will it reduce your frame rate ONLY when you are low enough to see them, or globally? Meaning, if my grass and roads are set to on, and I'm flying very high or over water, will it reduce my frame rates?

[fruitbat]

It's been a while but the last time I flew over Kent at, I'm guessing, 20K, the most obvious feature, the very thing Chivas is referring to in terms of a navigational aid, was the line of the old Roman road from the coast (Deal?), through Canterbury, to London. It stood out like a sore thumb. It is the sort of thing that's missing from CloD.

Hythe to Canterbury, its called Stone street (which is almost certainly what you saw), which is a subsidiary of Watling Street which goes from Richbourgh to the Old Kent road.

[kendo65]

I would also expect that we'd get a performance boost from replacing what could be a fairly significant proportion of the current tree coverage with hedgerows. Compared to most photos I've seen the current tree density seems excessive anyway.

Unfortunately I don't think anything is going to happen on this front. Most people aren't that interested and the devs have bigger tasks to tackle.

I hope it may be possible in future with release of SDK to maybe have some community tweaking of the map, but I recall Oleg/Luthier saying that they would keep the main map locked but allow people to mod the smaller maps or create their own small maps.

[kestrel79]

I doubt the new engine will look much different, but it should run better. That's what I remember Luthier stating.

I'll be a happy camper as long as the new engine has AA that actually works, better performance, weather/clouds that doesn't kill fps, and adding the better lighting and sunsets back we had in earlier builds and in dev screenshots.

[Ailantd]

I doubt the new engine will look much different, but it should run better. That's what I remember Luthier stating.

I'll be a happy camper as long as the new engine has AA that actually works, better performance, weather/clouds that doesn't kill fps, and adding the better lighting and sunsets back we had in earlier builds and in dev screenshots.

+1 Completely agree.

[speculum jockey]

Has Luthier said anything about Direct X 11 support? He said that it was a high priority before the game was released, and has yet to comment on it. You'd think with a new graphics engine it would go without saying that DX11 is supported, but saying it would be nice. I've heard that some games run faster with DX11 than 10, and it would be nice if the new graphics engine didn't just give us the fabled 50% fps increase, but some due to DX11 as well.

[robtek]

Has Luthier said anything about Direct X 11 support? He said that it was a high priority before the game was released, and has yet to comment on it. You'd think with a new graphics engine it would go without saying that DX11 is supported, but saying it would be nice. I've heard that some games run faster with DX11 than 10, and it would be nice if the new graphics engine didn't just give us the fabled 50% fps increase, but some due to DX11 as well.

Once more, DX11 is supported by the game engine from the beginning, it's just not used.

[Chivas]

Has Luthier said anything about Direct X 11 support? He said that it was a high priority before the game was released, and has yet to comment on it. You'd think with a new graphics engine it would go without saying that DX11 is supported, but saying it would be nice. I've heard that some games run faster with DX11 than 10, and it would be nice if the new graphics engine didn't just give us the fabled 50% fps increase, but some due to DX11 as well.

I suppose they could start using DX11 if the graphics rewrite goes well. That said I really can't see them not having DX11 in mind as they are doing the rewrite. It may not get implemented yet, but I'm sure it will at some point in development. The developer has always made available new features as the game resources allow.

Edit.... the developer has found it necessary not to comment on what will make any patch unless their absolutely sure it will make the build. I certainly don't blame them for that as we brought it on ourselves.

[priller26]

From playing Crysis 2 with the Directx11 add on, I can tell you it takes a lot more graphics power, but it looks amazing.

[jimbop]

Once more, DX11 is supported by the game engine from the beginning, it's just not used.

Robtek, could you please briefly explain or link to an explanation? I tried searching but there are too many hits on dx11 (mostly whinges). Btw, you shot me down yesterday - good job! Sort of.

I am hoping that the new engine fixes 1) launcher crashes (it will it think) and 2) SLI/Xfire scaling (very unsure about this).

[speculum jockey]

From playing Crysis 2 with the Directx11 add on, I can tell you it takes a lot more graphics power, but it looks amazing.

But that's when you up the graphics to include proprietary DX11 features that you take a FPS hit. What about playing both versions with the exact same eye-candy features enabled? How do the FPS compare then?

Once more, DX11 is supported by the game engine from the beginning, it's just not used.

Nope. Luthier said that it was not supported, but would be a priority. Then he said nothing about it again for almost a year now.

[Ataros]

Robtek, could you please briefly explain or link to an explanation? I tried searching but there are too many hits on dx11 (mostly whinges).

Here is one of links http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=361845&postcount=455
I think there were more detailed ones in the past. You can search for ACE-OF-ACES' posts with "directx api support".I think he knows what he is talking about as quotes from Microsoft confirm this.

As far as I understand "DX11 API support" means that all the DX11 technologies can be switched on step by step unlike in other games which do not support DX11. Maybe API is the key word. CloD does support DX11 API fortunately for us.

[jimbop]

Thanks.

[tintifaxl]

I'd really like to know what the culprit was they found in the final stage of testing. Luthier stated that happened around mid-October.

+1 to more distinguishable English countryside.

[speculum jockey]

As far as I understand "DX11 API support" means that all the DX11 technologies can be switched on step by step unlike in other games which do not support DX11. Maybe API is the key word. CloD does support DX11 API fortunately for us.

Luthier said that the engine did not support DX11, and I'd be more inclined to believe him than 1C's marketing dept. Hell they said that it was a game, when in reality (at release) it was just random code that occasionally resembled a working flight simulator for some people.

If this game supports DX11 there should be some option or line of code that would allow you to activate it. . . there is not! Supporting something (the real deal or API) means that you can use it (even if the newer features are not enabled).

To use an analogy. Saying that Cliffs of Dover supports DX11 or DX11 API is like saying that a Commodore 64 supports BlueRay, because there is an empty connection at the back that theoretically you could alter, to attach to a BlueRay player (after you have spent a year reprogramming the entire thing and adding new parts, and pretty much changing the entire way that PC operates).

(C64 pictured below for people who don't remember the 80's)
http://i.imgur.com/P17vg.jpg

[ATAG_Doc]

Some day and I hope soon we will have weather!

[speculum jockey]

Some day and I hope soon we will have weather!

Luthier said that it was originally working at 1fps a month or two before the release, and when everything was fixed with the actual game, they would devote time to optimizing it. Since everything is far, far, far, from being fixed, I'm expecting it to be a feature of the next sequel possibly, or maybe the one after that. Best case scenario, MG feels guilty and releases it in a patch.

[Varrattu]

Alter config.ini - [window] value to

Render=D3D11_0

when using WIN7/64 with Radeon 6850 or higher is possible.

Result: no change in graphics ... and no error ...

~S~ Varrattu

[speculum jockey]

Alter config.ini - [window] value to

Render=D3D11_0

when using WIN7/64 with Radeon 6850 or higher is possible.

Result: no change in graphics ... and no error ...

~S~ Varrattu

Because it doesn't do anything.
Might as well add "P51Value=" and change it to "1". Same result.

[KG26_Alpha]

Alter config.ini - [window] value to

Render=D3D11_0

when using WIN7/64 with Radeon 6850 or higher is possible.

Result: no change in graphics ... and no error ...

~S~ Varrattu

You might want to have a look at this thread also just for your information :)

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=29002