Friday Official Update, July 20, 2012

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Frequent_Flyer

Blackdog, Good points. However, it appears performance related issues, ie. the sim pausing when a group( as few as four ) EA are encountered. Dramatic framerate reduction when hits are obtained causing debris particals, vapor, smoke and/or fire to trail from an EA. Sometimes followed by CTD . Even if the bomb sight calulations are rectified it appears the performance issues most encounter would reduce the immerssion factor to an unacceptable level. I find it disconcerting no mention from the developers regarding performance increases.I was under the impression the " new graphics engine " was being implemented for this express purpose. I am cautiously optimistic the " trees" will be fixed.

Well, the reason i'm advocating these changes is that most probably it's a purely numerical calculation issue in the bombsight code (Edit: at least that's how it seems from testing done by various pilots, there is definitely a mix-up between imperial and metric units in how the sight treats your inputs regarding tracking the target and calculating the release point).

It's probably at the same level as the non-starting Hurricane that they fixed. For example, they might have made it possible to start with a colder engine or raised the starting oil temperature, both of which is just changing the value of a variable. That's less than one line of code.

And since i'm simplifying things a bit to make a point and i haven't actually seen the code, let's just up this a little and say it's 100-200 , or even 1000 lines of code. To put this into perspective, i'm a beginner programmer and i can routinely crank out 300 lines of working Java code in the span of a two hour lab session at uni. In these two hours i have to read the problem/assignment, understand it, analyse it, decide on a modeling solution (what classes i need and so on), implement it and check for errors.

Fixing the bombsights is probably an evening's work for the developer team at most, and that's probably the guys who are not even involved with the graphics rewrite.
Small things like that would not tie up the graphics programmers, not to mention that it's probably the field of the AI/systems programmer to do this and not the job of the graphics guys, so it wouldn't really delay the performance fixes.

As an example, the Ju88 gyrocompass was not working ever since the release of the sim and got fixed in the previous beta. All this time however, there was a similar compass on the He-111 that worked fine and the code could have been copy-pasted all along.

I'm not disrespecting anyone's flying preferences here because i fly most of the aircraft in the sim, but this example clearly shows that trivially easy to fix issues with big impact on gameplay are neglected, because most people try to prove/disprove rights and wrongs in the FMs of their favorite/opposing fighters and more or less "steal the spotlights" in every single patch.

If it's not 100 octane it's the lack of DeWilde ammo, the grass being too green, the lack of MG-FF/M in the 110s, etc, etc. Well, these are all important issues to fix but also more time consuming (or at least equally time consuming) to giving players the ability to aim some bombs. And even if all of these things are corrected, there is still no battle of Britain without bombers. It wasn't a mid-channel scrap, it was a bombing campaign.

Just take a look at the FM/DM section and you'll see what i mean