Official Fulqrum Publishing forum - better clouds and trees in next patch ?

Official Fulqrum Publishing forum (http://forum.fulqrumpublishing.com/index.php)

- Vehicle and Terrain threads (http://forum.fulqrumpublishing.com/forumdisplay.php?f=198)

- - better clouds and trees in next patch ? (http://forum.fulqrumpublishing.com/showthread.php?t=24334)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doc_uk (Post 306118)

+1
I think its just Laziness, on there part

More likely a balancing act, you all seem to forget how limited ROF is with the amount of objects allowed in a mission, possibly this is because of the trees having hit boxes?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Langnasen (Post 306217)

You'll be waiting a long time. This game has hit the wall so far as any further significant improvements are concerned. It's still not smooth, it still has no FSAA, it still looks rough, it still has major bugs, there are still no responses in threads from the devs on major issues and suggestions and queries...should I go on? It's another Luftwaffe Commander...not quite as bad, but still bad enough and still as up against that wall to be condemned for what it is and will always be...an almost great but a failure in the end.

Thanks for your valuable opinion and here was I flying online on the weekend actually thinking I was having fun, it seemed smooth for me and nothing like Luftwaffe Commander, but now that you have definatively stated that it has hit a wall, I better shelve it myself :rolleyes:

Or another idea is you shelve it and go play something else, you have no more knowledge about the future of this sim than anyone else typing here, if you don't like it fine, but why try and put other people off, with what is really nothing more than your own opinion?

Tiger, its not about if you had fun, i can take nice screenies, Frey can make great vids, or others can have a little fun...to get long term support it has to be fixed....nothing else matters.

And they have hit a wall.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Langnasen (Post 306217)

Quote:

February 12, 1999

by IGN Staff
LATEST IMAGES

Based on the conditions under which it was released , SSI's Luftwaffe Commander has a tough war to win. First, it has to gain and hold territory in a market that's already saturated with World War II sims. What's more, it carries the honor of the developer, Eagle Interactive, whose reputation with the hard-core flight-sim community slipped after their work on Virgin's Sabre Ace. The question is, can the game carry off both missions and do so well?

wow how the mighty (industry has fallen) in 10 years saturation to picking at straws

Quote:

Originally Posted by furbs (Post 306330)

And they have hit a wall.

Really I forgot that you were part of the development team furbs... What a load of BS.

I am enjoying flying on the repka servers atm and yes it still needs to be optimised but they have stated that they are working on this... In two months if the game still has performance issues then I will start to voice my discontent but until then we should not start presuming things have "hit a wall"

Everyone seems to have forgotten how messed up rof was at release now look at it quite a few planes a fantastic single player career... Just wish people would have some patience and take a breath of fresh air before throwing there toys out of the pram...

i think that the real problem with tree's hit boxes is that we all have different trees setting..
let's make an example..
i am flying in a 1v1 dogfight.. i have trees set to High (lot of trees) and my opponent has them set to low (just some trees here and there).. guess what.. he could collide with trees he can see but not with the ones i see (obviously he doesn't because of lower trees setting).. pretty tricky to explain but if it sees less trees than me, he could collide with less trees than me.. that's the real deal..

Even the most ardent supporters of the game must concede that this is a valid concern ? For the Devs the longer they stay silent on the issue the bigger an issue this will become. Whatever the underlying problems are they should just have it out so the 'I suspect' brigade can go off and assume about something else.

If you had this in say, Wings of Prey (a game I do not own btw) many would seize on it as 'evidence' that the game was an unrealistic arcade title. CoD sells itself on fidelity. Flying through trees and Radar towers does not stack up with that.

Whats wrong ?, can it be fixed in the CoD engine ?, and if so where on the fix list does it sit ?. Answer those and its done.

Collision detection and rendering is different matter. You can't say that if they can draw chimney smokes, they can check trees. No. When rendering is done, it cares only about what camera sees, so only data of one sector is loaded at given time, because only one camera is active at given time. This is different with tree collision checks, because there can be lots of planes on map and more than one sector has to be loaded.

Data for camera (rendering) can be loaded with delay (i.e. missing textures, effects for brief periods), but data for collision checks can't, it must be available almost instantly or simulation will lag badly.

Amount of trees is huge in Channel map and this gives 2 problems: memory usage for keeping tree locations and CPU usage for finding nearby trees around some point. Once you can quickly lookup and get nearby trees, then you can give hit boxes to those trees only and do collision checks. Coordinates loaded into quadtree + heigh map could be used for lookup, but that combined with current memory usage of CoD will probably make impossible to play CoD on 32-bit OS due to memory limitation.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dash2099 (Post 306306)

you have to consider the CPU, not so much the GPU in these things and framerates. The game doesnt exclusively own the CPU whilst the game is running. You have windows/AV/skype/disk indexing/garbage cleaning/driver processing all happening in the background. The CPU is the one that offloads calculations to the GPU and deals with the results. Bog the CPU down and everything slows down - if windows slows down then game slows down. Its exactly the reason why you wont see a framerate increase when running a highend graphics card on low/mid end CPU. Physx cards (revamped/redone as nvidia's CUDA technology) if utilised can give the CPU another processor to offload physics calculations to (now basically nvidia's graphics card). Not everyone has an NVIDIA card or an i7 with ssd's in raid0, hence the game loses features and options to accomodate running on a variety of minimum spec machines. *before anyone says it, yes i agree it isnt running perfectly just yet.*

with the tree's and collision, you have to also consider multiplayer as well. if they have coded in wind and tree's and branches waving, then i'd imagine those collision boxes move. Even if you just apply collision boxes tree's in the immediate vicinity, factor in averaging out latency and all the warping from lost packets. Thats a lot of numbers to crunch and a lot of predicting/updating (particularly when the wind affects the whole or a region of the map). thats not all, now throw in 128 players dogfighting in that one map. its a lot of code, and people want realistic exhaust fumes with the right color in 1940's sunlight and dynamic weather based on their region (while dogfighting a bloke in another region with his own weather demands). its not impossible, but if it wasnt done from the start then a lot of things have to change, and thats probably a new game.

The collisions could be done and should be/are normally done on the local client. That info is then sent of to the other clients therefore what you see and I see does not have to be the same thing, and even if it is, it is not an issue to implement collisions. Also collision boxes dont move with the wind, that notion is absurd. A tree branch moving a few inches wont make a differance to a hitbox.

Speedtree which is currently used to generate trees also most likely generates the hitboxes in other games, for example it was used (speed tree 1) in Oblivion, newer versions in mortal online etc. It was never meant for this type of use, maybe that was lost in translation? Its unfortunetly another sign of bad planning/managment for a feature that is ironically simple to implement. Its ALOT harder to track bullets and plane collisions with AI running.

I am inclined to defer to someone who actually knows what they are talking about so far as technical and coding issues are concerned and I am sure you are correct. Surely it is the game makers art in overcomming such issues ?

Part of the challenge of flying has always been avoiding the ground and those objects attached to it but what we have here is Harry Potter and the Magic Spitfire.