Beta Patch – and we mean BETA!

Quick flight over england mission.

With my low spec machine I noticed a good gain in FPS. I am running land detail low but gained about 10-15 fps then pre patch with the same settings. What I have noticed which I also had before patch was a texture ( loading ? ) problem. See in picture 1 the Hurricane has low texture detail. This just changes from high detail to this for some reason - while at the same time the Hard drive has heavy loading activity and the stutters occur as well as a FPS drop.

While in this picture the graphics are back to higher resolution on the Hurricane some seconds later with higher fps and more objects visible.

[wilburnator]

It's a wash for me. There is some improvement with the stuttering over land, but I would say it's still way short of playable. I can fly around without crashing, but dogfighting? No.

I took a huge hit over water... frame rate stays about the same, but now I get massive freezes every so often, before over water it was at least playable with a very limited number of a/c in the air. Now I get freezes that last so long, my plane has crashed by the time my computer recovers. And they are regular and on-going, and not just when firing the first time or encountering new aircraft in the sky like before.

Also, now when I start the game, I MUST remember to click on the desk top while the little airplane loading icon comes up, if I forget I get a black screen and Ctrl+Alt+Del will not bring up the task manager to close the program. Alt+tab won't get me to the desktop. I have to reboot. That is maddening.

There is still no Crossfire, and I have my doubts about whether or not the "Anti-Epilepsy Filter" check box actually does anything at all. I personally believe it to be a dummy button intended to humor people. It makes not the slightest difference on my machine, on or off.

So, after patch 10 to 15 fps overland, with stuttering still present but decreased somewhat, an 20 to 25 fps over water with new, mission ending freezes.

I7 975 Extreme
ATI 5770 x3
6 gigs Corsair Dominator DDR3 triple channel ram
Win 7 Pro 64 bit

[rollnloop]

Multiplayer coop broken.

Prior beta patch, used to work (flown several coops succesfully).

Now, with somewhat new interface clients can't select a plane to fly, only host can. Clients don't see the colored icons and can't pick them.

Mission selection when launching multi defaults to single folder too.

Even if this new interface worked, it seems very unintuitive.

Suggestion: go back to something close to IL2 1946 interface, people are used to it, and it works !

Windows 7 Home, Core I5, GF470, RAM8gig, OCZ vertex SSD.

[DickDastardly]

My system:
Q6700 with 4GB RAM and a GTX460 (drivers=266.58 ) running Windows 7 64bit.

Peripherals:
MSFFB2, Saitek X45 throttle, 2 Saitek throttle quadrants and TrackIR (which was running but paused for the tests).

Test settings:
1280x720, fullscreen, anti-aliasing x1, anti-epilepsy filter off, model detail medium, buildings detail very low, land detail medium, forest very low, visual effects medium, damage decals medium, buildings amount low, land shading medium, grass off, shadows on, roads on.

The following tests were run by loading the mission, turning on the autopilot, waiting 5 seconds for things to settle down, bringing up the console and enabling the fps display, exiting the console and then letting the autopilot fly the plane for 3 minutes before noting the fps figures. Figures to the left of the arrow are pre-patch, those after the arrow are post-patch (min/average/max).

Bomber intercept - Channel = 04/52/79 -> 11/62/83
Bomber intercept - "Hawkindge" = 11/58/79 -> 14/57/82
Bomber intercept - London = 03/26/55 -> 06/28/51

I also tested low level performance over London by loading the London Sightseeing mission, diving to rooftop level, enabling the fps display and then flying on the same heading for 3 minutes:

London low level performance = 03/11/21 -> 02/8/16

Conclusion:
Small improvement in FPS, particularly of the minimums. Game generally seemed less prone to stuttering and smoother, very playable over water at these settings but still gives poor performance over urban areas. Definitely a step in the right direction, though .

Bugs:
1. Like another poster, I saw 3 trees appear in mid air after patching (I was playing the Hawkindge intercept quick mission with the AI flying the plane and firing at a Stuka I was approaching from behind. The trees appeared between me and the Stuka and I quickly flew past them. It seemed to me as if maybe they were drawn instead of some type of smoke or damage effect.

2. The Controls setup screen still allows you to bind the same key to multiple different functions without a warning if they're not of the same type (i.e. General, Aircraft, Snap View etc).

3. Sound engine is still very buggy -radio messages all play at the same time instead of one after the other, the sliding along the ground/wheel rumble noise plays when stationary, main menu music is erratic etc.

4. Shadows on the ground are still very flickery.

5. Duplicate low detail joystick still sometimes appears in the cockpit (so you see the high detail stick and the low detail one at the same time).

6. Some cockpit instruments are sometimes drawn with very low res textures (e.g. the altimeter and the compass in the Tiger Moth), whilst others right next to them are drawn with high res textures (despite being further from the camera).

Suggestions:
1. Create a Black Death II track which includes heavy combat over water and London (including some at low altitude) and add a Benchmark option to the menu which plays the track, generates a report which includes system info, settings and min/average/max fps and then automatically sends the results to the dev team (with an option to opt out of the last step for the tinfoil hat brigade).

You would then get tens of thousands of reports which could be processed automatically so you could immediately see what settings or hardware were causing problems -with a lot less effort than having to wade through threads like this one.

2. Dramatically increase the degree of customisability of the graphics settings in the options screen. For example, allow users to specify the maximum number of buildings or trees to draw per square kilometer and the range at which each LOD is drawn for each type of object. In general it would be good to use numerical values where possible instead of just high/medium/low so that, for example, if building detail is set to 50% the player would know that the buildings will have half the fps impact they'd have if set to 100%.

Similarly it would be good to split up some of the settings so that, for example, instead of a single toggle for all shadows it would be possible to enable cockpit shadows and those of aircraft but disable them for trees and buildings.

Finally it would be great if we had the option to set a minimum acceptable frame rate. The game could then automatically reduce things like visual detail (or flight model detail of any AI aircraft which aren't close to the player) to maintain this frame rate. Then if you started your flight at a quiet airstrip in the countryside visual detail would be high, but as you approached London it would automatically be scaled down to preserve the target fps.

You could even allow each player to rank the importance of the various features and use their choices to determine the order in which features would be sacrificed. For example, one player might prefer visual quality of the landscape to be reduced first, then visual enemy aircraft detail, then the visual quality of their own cockpit, and only sacrifice the full fidelity flight and damage models (for non-nearby AI aircraft) as a last resort, whereas somebody else might have totally opposite priorities.
Cheers,
DD

P.S. Please don't get discouraged by some of the vitriol in the forums from those whose memories are apparently too short to remember the years of dedicated support and patches you guys provided for earlier titles in the series. You've already earned our trust and I'm confident the early problems will all be sorted out eventually, you don't need to be killing yourselves working seven days a week. Take a weekend off to recharge your batteries -we need you guys relaxed and healthy so you can produce the remaining 400 planes for the new game .

[Ailantd]

Hi

After reading some coments of people here I made some tests with the latest beta patch, with game running in a window an graphs of my machine resources at the other side, cpu, gpu, memory and hardrive access.

My system is a 775 quad core, 4 gb ddr2 and Nvidia 9800 GT wich is a very old card. win 7 64

My first bottleneck as expected with this card are shaders, so shader terrain for me is a killer and I need to have it deactivated so I can fly over terrain with more than 1 frame per second in a window bigger enough so I can see something. Over sea I can fly at even 40 to 66 fps with all maxed but terrain if terrain is not visible and is not too much planes, no more than 10.
The test also is performed with trees, buildings and terrain at low level, max effects and models and shadows on.

Over terrain what I have seen is that the CPU and memory is never fully used ( not even only one of the 4 cores ), the GPU is not performig so bad in windowed mode ( less pixels to perform shader calculatios ) so I can fly with average 20 with max about 30 fps over terrain (not over cities) unless the HD is being used. Every time de HD runs the game freezes like crazy. Of course over terrain, even in this low settings, the HD is working every few seconds and I think thats the bottleneck, as others have already reported.

I think that is the reason because even in most powerfull computers the game perform bad, they have good CPU, good GPU and a lot of memory, but none of these are fully used because every one have a standar HD, bigger or smaller, not more fast than 7400, 7600 rpm.

I would like to see someone with medium system and the game installed in a really fast hard drive like a ssd.

[akodonnell]

I'm running a Russian version of the game with a maddox.dll that converts the Russian to English. I tried patching but either get crashes on startup or a message saying that it thinks something in my game is a virus and the launcher crashes. I'll wait for the live patch I guess.

Overall, my computer has never had many of the problems others are having. There are small stutters, but I can dogfight with 20 planes over land or the channel without any real problems and it is completely playable. Great game.

[adonys]

but you've tried the russian patch with the new maddox.dll from the english patch (as you should), right?!!

[jt_medina]

Originally Posted by jt_medina

I get a crash to desktop when trying to play any mission. In game menu let me chose any graphic configuration but just when I am going to play there is CTD.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.50
ATI 5770 1GB
4GB RAM
Built in Sound card
Windows 7 64 SP1.

I removed the conf.ini and the game created a new one so, CTD is gone.
Overall I get better framerate now I can play over the channel with same settings and 1920x1080 with better performance.

I can't fly over land at least over the British map because stuttering kills framerate. Bombers and fighters still give stuttering and in some moments when I switch external view to look around I get stuttering too for a few seconds.

I tried a fight on the Isles doom(I don`t remember the name) and I got playable framerate. Stuttering was the only problem on bombers and buildings.


It's a step forward but there is still work to do. I am positive this sim will be playable very soon.

[II./JG1_Krupinski]

Originally Posted by Binni

Patched, now only sound but no screen. By activating task-manager i will get the screen back, but if I try to start a mission I get the error message that the launcher-exe has stopped working...


And the most important note. If you notice REDUCED performance, crashes, or any kind of other crippling issues, it is extremely important you post your system specs including your version of Windows. That's the only way we can troubleshoot your problem and make sure it disappears by tomorrow!

I get the same - a blank / black screen on load; if i use CTRL+ALT+DEL and then cancel, I can get to the game menu.

Sometimes, I get the game back in a "borderless window" and can see my desktop. Hit CTRL+ENTER or ALT+ENTER will not get me back to full screen.

In the few moments that I can see the game under "normal" conditions I do show a 5-10 frame rate increase to 30-35 over water with High Object detail, Landscape medium and the rest low, very low or off.

Windows 7 Ultimate x64
GeForce GT 240
AMD Phenom II x4 965 @ 3.4GHz
4 GB RAM

[akodonnell]

Originally Posted by adonys

but you've tried the russian patch with the new maddox.dll from the english patch (as you should), right?!!

No I didn't download the english patch because i didn't think that would work, but I'll try it when I get home and report back.