Cliffs of Dover, a Year Later

[luthier]

Dear fans,

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year. For myself and for the team the past two years are a blur. Things have been hectic long since CoD pre-release days and there’s no sign of letting down. We work in a constant state of emergency.

We know that even a year after the initial release many of you are still unhappy with many aspects of the game. We are painfully aware of your unhappiness. For me personally, it’s a constant feeling in the back of my head. It drives me and motivates me, and I in turn use it to drive and motivate the team. It is at the same time very humbling. I personally want to apologize to the community once again for the state of the game at release, and I want to thank you for sticking around this long and continuing to give us a chance to redeem ourselves.

I realize that the pace at which we release patches and updates has slowed considerably. The latest patch that has been “almost ready” for months, and it’s even more almost ready today. The graphics rework is basically done. The average framerate has shot up almost twice. Only one relatively minor issue remains that prevents the gunsight, tracers, and bullet decals from being drawn. Of course, this minor technical issue has a huge impact on gameplay, and that is why we cannot release it to the public in its current state.
Secondly, reworking and becoming confident in the graphics engine itself allowed us to spread the net and start identifying additional issues that were causing hick-ups and slowdowns in the game. That is the hardest thing to locate since they are unpredictable and very difficult to replicate. Rewriting the graphics engine fixed many of those issues, and made the others very easy to identify by narrowing down the usual suspects. We have identified some very obscure issues with visual effects, the landscape engine, the texture manager, and with the weather system that were causing the occasional stuttering that by itself arguably had a bigger impact on gameplay than low average FPS.

On our end, we are much more confident in our product today than we were a year ago, and we are also much more excited about the future. The team continues to grow. We are just now beginning to look for a huge number of new applicants that will grow the team by almost 25%. We have a lot of very exciting new things on our plate that we cannot wait to reveal. The general mood of the team is one of excitement. We cannot wait to prove our detractors wrong, crush the competition, and give our fans what they are looking for with our next major release!

Thank you again for your support!


Ilya Shevchenko
Lead Development Producer

[KG26_Alpha]

Thank you for the update.

[Kankkis]

Thanks Luthier.

[NSU]

Thx Luthier nice to see you here

[Verhängnis]

Is it me...Or did we actually get a friday update?

;But I do find it sad how our un-happiness, and not your realization of the poor state of the game... motivates you. Oh well, thanks anyway!

[PeterPanPan]

Thank you Luthier - really good to hear this news which fills me with renewed hope ... again .

PPP

[jamesdietz]

Luthier- Many thanks for the update. I really enjoy the sim ( despite flaws & lower than desirable FPS..) I wish you could hire the guys from Rise of Flight Public Relations - it might save you some grief by having a more user news & progress news release..
They too had a deeply flawed initial release , but have done an outstanding job in customer relations while steadily improving their product.
http://riseofflight.com/Blogs/default.aspx

[rakinroll]

I only can say that "thank you Luthier". It is very good to hear somethings about what is going on there.

[CWMV]

Thank you Luthier.

[von Brühl]

Now that's an update, ... faith somewhat restored...