Monday (???) April 4 Development Update

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Kankkis

As Luthiers mentioned before, if trees has collision model it's really heavy and we want playable framerates, secondly there is possible choose treedensity, think what it causing in multiplayer when someones doesen't have trees and others have.

Kankkis

Hmmm, i'm getting an idea here...wasn't 3d clouds a setting that could be enforced by the server in IL2? I seem to remember that servers used to run with the simple clouds initially, then when people upgraded after a couple of years they started turning up the detail and everyone who joined the server had the same clouds. Maybe something similar can be done for CoD?

If trees get collision detection in the future maybe the server can set the amount of trees to a setting that's playable for all (for example, low or medium after the optimizations are done), then everyone will see the same amount of trees and have the same collision detection.

On another note, according to Luthier's and Nike-it's posts, it seems that one of the most taxing things for the PC is not only the buildings and the tress, but most of all the building/tree shadows.

I turned down land shadowing to low (i already had forest to very low and building distance to low) and i got very playable frame-rates except for the stutters on my i7 920, 3GB RAM and Ati 4890 1GB, so i'd say that there's definitely hope. The only thing that puzzles me is that i still have stutters over water when approaching other aircraft (or using the zoom view) but i guess that's because of my low RAM and the probable VRAM bottleneck, so i'm going to wait for the patch after the one we're getting this week that will move rendering to a dedicated core before i start thinking that something is wrong with my configuration and/or settings.

Just finished flying the low level bomber intercept quick mission, 6 Spitifre IIs vs 9 Do 17s, and apart from the stutters everything else was brilliant even when i was flying above land on my way to home base. Heck, i even managed to get three kills and land safely, whereas before tweaking my settings i always crash-landed due to getting freezes on finals

If the stutters are fixed and we get 15%-25% extra FPS from the Friday patch, the sim is definitely playable. Sure, some people will still demand that they be able to max everything and have 60 FPS on mid-range rigs, but for the majority it will be very enjoyable with a few settings turned down a notch or two.