better clouds and trees in next patch ?
 

Hi Luthier,

dont know if you will read this, probably you know already and it has been posted elsewhere?
Anyhow, could you take care that the clouds in "Cliffs of Dover" some day may look like the clouds in "Rise of Flight" ? They look much better than CloD clouds (without causing framerate loss!)!!!

With the trees it is the same. In Rise of Flight you cannot fly through trees like in Cliffs of Dover, if you do so, you crash.

What is possible in Rise of Flight,
should also be possible in Cliffs of Dover, no ?

Sorry if I dare to express again criticism, or make suggestions for improvements, see it the way you like. I know you guys are somehow allergic to that but for an improved, better flightsim, I gladly take the risk of being banned again. I`m not flying Cliffs of Dover anymore anyway until it has drastically improved !
:mrgreen:

Not another comparison thread, Please:rolleyes:

Agree with Doc, this is getting a bit tiresome these comparison threads...

yes no comparisions, at least CLOD will now have better sounds as ROF sound designer is working now for MG team too....miuahaha

I think it's fair enough to ask about having crashable trees at least. No need for comparisons to know that you shouldn't be able to fly through them. I know Luthier mentioned very soon after release that fixing this will not be easy, but let's hope they are making progress.

PPP

okay, comparisons are bad, I agree... but collision monitoring with respect to the trees is certainly no rocket science. If that's really not possible, then, certainly, the CoD has to be really bad :(

It becomes complex due to the sheer number of trees involved, if you have a nice simple solution that wont require large amounts of process time then please post it for Luthiers attention.

Hmm, maybe they can cut a deal and get the user interface guy as well...

All this rise of flight talk. I must check it out.

I somehow still don't get the point, why a simple, let's say, cylinder, which is overall even invisible (no load on the GPU...) should be such a huge thing to do or should have such a huge impact on framerates. Nobody is asking for a precise collision calculation regarding trees, it is basically enough that if you hit a tree, you crash...

How do you tell if the aircraft has collided with said cylinder?

Well, how do you tell the aircraft to collide with a solid house? Come on, if all the houses would not have a texture wrapped around and LODs and smoke rising from their rooftops and more complex structure than a simple block, the impact on the framerate would be minimal. Same should be true for trees... At least my old E8400 can easily handle building amount on "high" when the building detail is on "very low". So I guess it could still handle a solid tree with actually no detail in the structure, just an invisible cylinder... Well, oviously it is not that simple, I am sure they tried something... I was just wondering, that this is maybe a russian issue, as DCS seems to be not capable of having solid trees in their engine neither, lool (just kidding...)

As someone already said: Use a graphics primitive or two, as the "collision zone" (modelling every twig per tree would indeed be taxing to your system's resources and it wouldn't matter anyway). Since WWII planes don't move at warp speed, process only the trees/primitives in the immediate surrounding of the plane*. If (plane inside collision zone) then {activate Damage model};

* maybe a bit more to get a safety buffer for system- and/or online lag. Be aware, however that A = r² * Pi. You could further optimize the thing if you only consider trees in a "wedge" in front of the plane, with the wedge's dimensions chosen that it safely covers the plane's flight envelope, at all times (even when shot down and tumbling and such things).

As Luthier already said, even with a single primitive it currently takes too much CPU time.

I agree if the whole of the Channel map is covered by 'active trees'

when COD is ready everybody will say
PLEASE MAKE RISE OF FLIGHT LIKE COD:!:

+1
I think its just Laziness, on there part

Fixes have already been suggested. Would not be a problem if they had not misused/used the completely wrong system for tree generation (speed tree).

which is a prove the sim is not optimised well...

All you post mate is diatribe, utter nonsense and whines. If you have nothing to contribute shut the hell up!! Sometimes it's better to say nothing than to say something stupid and make yourself look like a complete tit!

Im no programmer, I wouldnt want to comment on the games coding etc, but I really dont see how these trees are such a problem.

I have been playing flight sims for longer than I care to remember and I can remember sims from years back that tackled this problem by simply making the forest blocks 30-40 feet higher than the surounding topography. Sure it looked rubbish but if you hit a forest block you died.

At the moment we have eye candy trees that arnt really there, I decided ages ago if they didnt exist I would not have them so I disabled them, sure it looks rubbish but whats the point of rendering something that doesnt exist ?

If it was hedges I could and would accept them, but If I collide with a dirty great elm or oak tree I deserve to and expect to die.

You can also fly through the radar towers.

I haven't taken an issue with the trees as I rarely fly that low and they do add to the terrain visuals at low altitude. Maybe at some point in the future they could do something similar to WOP and have the trees as a fixed part of the terrain/maps rather than a video option.

Treat the trees for what they are, Trees! I've been flying the sim for a while now and it never bothered me because guess what? I don't fly thru the trees.
Have not seen any AI try to escape thru the trees either. I don't fly online. Anyone using the trees there to evade is diluting his gaming experience imho.

Same for me, only thing what annoys me is when you make emergency land, you can land everywhere, no need for spotting for safe landingspot.

Really... last time I tried that I didnt survive to tell the tale o.O

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.

Maybe tower collision has been fixed, took the pic below sometime ago, it's not something I do on a regular basis......:grin:

http://i626.photobucket.com/albums/t...s/th_tower.jpg

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.

I don't agree with you. At all.

I would rather have the harmless tress than have a leaf brushing against the fuselage causing my Spitfire to explode. Perhaps the ideal compromise is to just put one giant hit-box in each group of trees that have 50 or more trees in them, regardless of what the user's tree setting is.

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?

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.

"

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

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.

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.

Well...im my opinion they have hit a wall...if you look at the last 2 patches the actual fixes that affect the core gamplay have got less and less with the last patch it was 90% fluff...there is a long list of major bugs that need fixing and to my knowledge Luthier hasn't even mentioned most of them (FSAA anyone?).
whats coming in the next patch? or the one after that? wheres the road map or the community manager? last weeks update was some pictures of the team...some people are happy with that...that's great for them...fantastic...i want to know when the sims going to be fixed.

There are bugs yes, they are getting fixed yes, are they working through stuff thoroughly? Yes. Is there continual development of the game and fixes? Yes. Are the fixes sometimes slow in coming? Yes and No. But that's all part of game development and research. Oh aye and the major bug of your not remembering to save a loadout ......... well I'm sure the devs will do you personally a little text message for you in game on the loadout screen when you've changed something that pops up just for you as you hover your mouse over the back button before you click it that says something like, "Hey Furbs have YOU REMEMBERED TO SAVE YOUR LOADOUT?" I'm sure they'll be right on that one for you personally mate ............ :rolleyes: They are IN THE PROCESS OF FIXING OF IT OR CAN YOU NOT BELIEVE THE THE FIXES THEY HAVE DONE SINCE RELEASE???

they definately have hit a wall. You just need to put the parts together. The delayed delayed Delay-date for the US release is approaching again and CoD still is in no condition whatsoever for a proper release. I'm aware that insults by the hardcore fraction will hit me again for this, as they "have great fun" with the sim already, but let's face it. Look at the Spit's mirror. Look at the countless landscape bugs. And, my favorite one: Look at the AI radio. And so on and so on. You may very well be able to have fun without these things, but the general user, having no deeper devotion regarding MG/1C and being used to at least some degree of quality, will be irritated pretty quickly.
And "yes, I'm still here". I've invested a few €s specifically for CoD and I want to know how implementation of the features they owe us progresses.

P.S.: Lol @ all those arguments about tree collision taking too much computing time... I wonder how they've pulled off the "bullet collision" model then...

I'm not a diehard fan but I am having fun, I don't fly ROF but I'm sure they're fixing them. IL-2 1946 still has bugs, but we have Team Daidolos and they are fixing/implementing new stuff. FSX was a let down on relaese as well if we all remember the touched up pre-relase screenshots. All these threads and whining posts are pointless and getting us nowhere and giving us all as endusers a bad name. We can all post attacking and defending the devs till the hairs in our arses touch the floor, but they'll not post development updates untill they have something to report.

Of course, this isn't getting us anywhere. If this forum wouldn't exist, it wouldn't make a difference either. We're just discussing things here.

The problem here IMO is that having a new working weather system is not a FIX. Some UIs are missing or simply unfriendly... they don't need a fix, all they need is a good analysis by the developer (well before the game was released). And what about the sound engine? Here all we have IMO is a lacking design of the application.

So we are not talking about issue that can be fixed in a pair of hours (109's PP? Still inverted?) but like Luthier said they will need some months because they need to design, develop and test the new modules.
That damned anti-epilessy filter really messed up this game!

I know we must remain positive and cheer for the developers, but I'm really frustrated since we have given so many promises and very few are actually reality.
And of course it's not about the price of this product: happily I would pay more than 50€ to have a good ww2 simulator (the one promised in these years). But all I see is a wasted opportunity to capitalize on the brand of the old IL2.

I'm sad. Really.

Don't be sad mate take cheer from the fact that they are working on it. I know I am. And yes the sound is awful and all the other little glitches and big bugs that annoy me but I do say to myself that they are working on it. I would like to see and hear something done with the menu music but I'm sure that'll be way low down on things to fix if not the last. I've disabled trees as why have them when you can't collide with them, and all the other little that I've tried to optimise on my end, but I do see the potential for a truly remarkable product that will keep me occupied for years to come ..........

If they are working on the major bugs Walshy, why dont they let us know? Again FSAA, how many threads and posts has there been about it? yet the devs have never even acknowledged the problem.

The community got together and showed Luthier and the devs the major bugs and what we would like improving, the least he could do is acknowledge its there and maybe even post in it.

Don't worry mate when he's ready to he will, I'm sure there's a Friday update this week .................

............this week its the Devs pets! ....heres some pics!! ;)


lets hope we do get something good this week.

The vast majority of the legion of people complaining about massive game breaking bugs usually complain about the surface of it all.

Collidable trees is not a cosmetic issue, but i can't help but laugh when things like FSAA and sound quality (not the lack of sound in MP, that is a valid issue, just the sound quality) are labelled game breaking bugs. They are immersion enhancing features that need to be corrected, but they are far from game breaking as they don't prevent me from flying and getting the necessary sensory feedback to do what needs to be done in a flight sim. Let's call a spade a spade for once, shall we?

Wanna talk game breaking? Let's talk about inconsistent control logic in some aircraft, the fact that you can't manually release bombs from the bombardier's seat unless you zoom out of the bombsight and click on the switch in the virtual cockpit, or how you can't use the level bombing autopilot in the Ju88 because it's tied to the gyrocompass which is bugged and doesn't work.

Of course, things like that which do classify as breaking certain features/aircraft because they can't be used the way they were meant to be, usually fly with a loud wooshing sound over the heads of the majority of people who focus all their irritation on a jaggy looking radio mast, because they are so busy picking faults with what is readily visible that they haven't even scratched the surface of what's included and needs to be fixed a bit more urgently than their pet peeve so that, you know, these planes can do what they're supposed to do ;)

And let's not even mention that the sim went from a completely unplayable 15 FPS slideshow to a state where it's perfectly playable by a majority of people within two months. Doesn't look like they hit a wall to me, it's more like the community itself working against its own benefit by disregarding whatever progress has been made in their quest to find more things to complain about :rolleyes:

There are loads of valid issues but they are not all of the same importance to everybody, because people have different priorities. As such, i don't think that the people who complain the loudest are speaking on behalf of the community (they are certainly not speaking on my behalf, that's for sure) when they usually fail to even touch upon the issues that do affect gameplay. Oh wait, the initial host of gameplay affecting bugs were fixed to a considerable degree with the first few patches and now the sim is now playable for a wide range of people.

Long story short, have your opinion and let others have theirs. The only wall i see is the one of a dwindling supply of things to complain about as issues get fixed so some people keep trying to bash it in with their own heads and find something else to pick fault with instead of actually flying the sim, but i don't go about hunting down forum members that don't enjoy the sim to try and change their mind by constant repetition of my "superior facts and knowledge".

I would really appreciate it if they stop trying to convince me and others who are having a good time that we're actually not, as if they know anything about what constitutes fun to us, or monopolizing the developer team's attention and trying to steer their efforts towards a selection of features that usually have a minimal impact on actually flying the sim.
Either that, or i'll keep replying with vaguely ironic posts to wind them up :-P

I'm not discounting the validity of the issues they bring up, i just think there's loads of things that need to be fixed and development time should be divided appropriately. Lack of FSAA, external sounds or the tone of green in the fields are all valid issues of varying importance to each one of us, but neither one is the be all, end all, single game breaking feature for the majority of the community.

Sorry, but i care more about being able to connect to a server, select a bomber and place bombs on a target than how the adjacent field's color looks or if the bomb's tail fins are anti-aliased. I suspect there's many who share the same feeling because i see a lot who actually divide their time evenly between flying and posting here and it's apparent by the fact that they have something to show for it (whether it's making skins, FMB tutorials, missions and campaigns or compiling FAQs, bug reports and technical guides to help others), which is in stark contrast to those who only demand things, can't take 2 minutes to read the relevant section of the manual or experiment on their own and don't contribute anything.

Like i've said before, it looks like a lot are afraid they might actually learn something (which is pretty weird when you consider this is a hobby) and no matter if they deserve the developer's attention due to being customers, they don't seem to deserve all the help they get from the rest of the community and the time that certain people put in to make the sim enjoyable for all of us.

I'm not naming anyone here, each one is free to decide which demographic they want to place themselves in and if anyone is annoyed well then, sue me. It's an opinion and i'm sticking to it until i see them contributing something other than a one-liner post starting with an irate comment, carrying an aggressive undertone of "when?gimme gimme now!" and ends in a series of question/exclamation marks. If i ever won the lottery i'd be tempted to offer to buy their copies and save them from all this self-inflicted anguish but i don't think many would take me up on it, some are obviously enjoying the lamentation way too much :-P

Couldn't have put that better myself +1!!! What some people here fail to realise and remember was that the constant whining of certain forum users in the early days of IL-2 drove Oleg away from frequenting the UBI forums I certainly don't want that scenario repeated with Luthier. We would ALL lose if that turned out to be the case, constantly whinging about a development update or the lack of one will in all fairness drive the man away. Some people on the forums need to sit back and relax he'll post when ready and has something to tell us. Patience is a virtue after all.

How long is too long? 4 months, 8 months, a year?
How many patches or beta patches does it take before the menus work?

As for contributing to this sim...i spent quite a few weekends of my own time talking about 200 pictures of pre war houses for this sim a long time ago.

So yes i feel i can vent about it.

Anyway were just talking amongst ourselves, Luthier isn't reading these sub forums.

These topics are bound to surface when the areas of the sim in question are not functioning as they should. To some they can be game-breaking, to others they can't. Each to his own.
One can't help buy see that CloD has a long way to go before it effectively does what it says on the tin. Aesthetically it needs to at least equal RoF in all areas, and in terms of gameplay, one would have thought that it could at least equal BoB2. Yes, the A/C may model beatuifully, and the CEM may be something brilliant, but as a game simulating the BoB, the team need to make sure that the game does actually simulate this portion of history to an outstanding degree. Spitgirl? What?

All of this can be achieved, but-as Luthier has said before-the community is integral to being construvtively critical, and providing ideas for fixes or information for future expansion.

Ok, as a younger poster you probably dont know my older posts, but I have a good track record of predicting the problems and solutions. If I dont know I dont post (in general), but like said since I am not active much anymore (sadly because of the game/forums state) I wont spaz out and jump on you for that comment (some here will know what I am talking about).

It is safe to say that the devs took the wrong "path" while coding the game. It may be that they know a way to solve it, but they simply cannot because the code or engine is written in a way, or written poorly so that these changes cannot be easily implemented, or implemented at all without major re-writes. It could very likely be that the person who wrote the code for a "section" or the engine has left the team as we saw bickering between x-employes a few months back. In any case in this paragraph I am guessing, and I know very little about the coding process compared to graphics design and system hardware. The above seem likely possibilities, but for me they are just guesses; however my comments on how tree collisions should be/are normally implemented are not guesses. But like said it may no longer be an option without engine rewrites.

So when will dx11 be coming? ;)

God knows if it ever will, when you you have the dinosaur that is DX9 still being utilised by the majority of game developers I can't see much of an uptake for it. It may be used by this game some time in the misty future but as a time frame for when ........ the man in the moon may have a better idea. It is quite likely that DX11 will die a quiet death the same way DX10 has/did. Personally I blame the consoles for the non-uptake of new technology and in my opinion the Xbox scenario was a huge mistake for Microsoft, I do hope that pc gaming will come back with a huge resurgence and flight siming as well on the back that said resurgence but I doubt it will. The consoles are effectively strangling the gaming industry in terms of technology in hardware and software.

The same time as 64bit ;)

+1

No, go look back at my mid 2010 posting history and you will understand the joke ;)

Also DX11 offers tangible visual benefits to the gamer where DX10 did not, DX11 wont die out because in a years time new games wont support dx9 (it is too expensive to do DX9+dx10/11 or DX10+DX11, only thing that is holding dx9 around is consoles but now I believe we are moving away from the current paradigm of lowest common denominator in dx9.)

Edit- today BF3 specs just came out: http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/08/ba...ents-revealed/
Edit/Add 2 - Crysis dx11 patch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSGYb...layer_embedded

I understand completely, but there is a very simple solution to this if you think about it.

What if the high and low options for trees made the render DISTANCE of the trees change, this way while one with a very high tree option enabled can see more trees than one with very low enabled, they both see the same trees around them (you can only hit a tree if you are near it anyway)

Ok, a page ago someone wrote a good post about the general community approach and I agree.

However - I believe trees should be collision objects in the same way bridges our houses should. They can be, even if only rarely, used strategically.

I also believe that lower settings should result in a disadvantage for the player, not higher settings. This is because there is a state that the game is meant to be seen and played in. Usually it's the complete state. In other words: higher settings don't add unecessary trees - lower settings just cut them out.


Generally I must say that I am very, very sad about how graphically lacking the game really is. I believe there simply isn't any excuse for this. It should be self explanatory that a game which doesn't even rival an old arcade shooter like Wings of Prey (that ironically runs on it's predecessors engine as far as I know) looks better than Cliffs of Dover. That is unacceptable and until fixed I won't be able to enjoy Cliffs of Dover at all.

And here is why: yes, WW2 simming is about fighting - but 99% of the time you simply DO NOT fight but just fly. And that is where all these "simple" matters become game breaking bugs to me.
Especially when flying with full realism you end up with limited ammo - yes you can shoot for a few seconds but then ammo is OUT.
So is it that important to only focus on fighting mechanisms? Most of the time we fly, we look at the landscape, scout for enemy planes or just watch and enjoy the sounds of the engines, the feeling of being in the sky or speeding close to the ground.



In the end I must say (my opinion):
Yes, trees need to be collision objects
Yes, the ground textures need to be much better
Yes the shore needs to look like a shore and not like laser cut border between mushy textures and half assed waves (that do not build up close to shore, heck, not even go into the right direction)
Yes, the sounds are important to me - in a real vehicle I don't look for instruments, I trust my senses of hearing and feeling in most cases


Thus, it just makes me sad to see that CoD is like IL-2 with an improved FM and better (but fewer) planes.


I also miss out of the box thinking. I miss game modes like air race and other creative multiplayer gameplay. I suggested a few but I guess the community is problematic and thus I see the risk of a great genre dying just because gaming companies lost the vision of making quality products and because the community is old, ignorant and always expecting the same, thus obviously shrinking which in turn makes it less feasible to create a product that's satisfactory.



But yes, make the damn trees collision objects! We're in the year 2011, not 1940, after all.

Luthier:
Since Cliffs of Dover has more shrubbery in it than perhaps any other flight sim developed so far - hundreds of thousands of trees around the player - enabling collision for the trees grinds the game to a complete halt, especially as they need to be tracked around every plane on the map and not just the player's. Making collisions less precise leads to equally poor results, when planes may fly through a tree but crash into seemingly empty space.
We know this is extremely important. The solution is there, but it still eludes us.

As long as there is a option to turn trees off, there can't be a collision model without imbalancing the sim for online-gaming

Wrong, it can be a server side option, just like clouds in IL2.

That's why I'm saying: lower settings shouldn't result in disadvantages for others!

Simple solutions? Add low quality trees for the low end settings. Don't just make the trees vanish!

What's next? People disabling buildings and flying through them? Or people disabling plane models and flying through bombers? Seriously, if the tree belongs there make it collidable. And if necessary add the old IL-2 1946 trees for that as they certainly were collidable and not rescource intensive.

I think the consensus is that before trees are made collidable it must be possible to have everyone seeing the same amount of trees in an online session. In that sense, a "game should conform to max settings" proposal isn't very feasible when a percentage of people still have performance issues.

I mean, we can't tell people they have to fork out $500 on upgrades before they are allowed to fly online with us and then complain that we fly on empty servers ;-)

Online play will focus on the lowest common denominator until everyone can catch up, just like it was in IL2 with server admins and mission makers fine-tuning the amount of flak for frame rate reasons. I'm not trying to be confrontational here, just saying that i expect things to progress much in the same way they did with IL2, it will be a steady but slow pace and that's largely out of our control.

After all there's no use for someone paying the hosting expenses for a dedicated server box if people won't fly on it, hence they will probably strive to make it possible for people with less than stellar rigs to fly with them too.