Come on guys, it's a legitimate question.
To answer your briefly, we've had a series of beta (aka testing) patches dealing with the following:
Lot's of tweaking in graphics. Essentially they rewrote about half the game engine from scratch. People debate whether there is loss of quality or not, what i can certainly say is that the colours have been redone. As for missing features and resulting complaints, a lot of people don't really read the updates. What usually happens is something gets turned off until its optimized, then enabled again in the following patch. Some features might get cut or have already been however, but the majority is under recoding (eg, distant clouds, hit decals, etc).
Lot's of new sounds. Still room for improvement but much better than on release.
Some AI improvements.
100 octane versions for the RAF fighters, still need some FM work though.
Various FM fixes.
Some very important bomber fixes. The Blenheim has been flyable for quite a while now, but it's still too sluggish during taxi. The 88s and 111s can now aim their bombs thanks to working autopilots and debugged bombsights.
To sum up, most of the work has been on rewriting the graphics code, with additional fixes in other areas being squeezed in as time permits.
Issues not yet addressed, which we all assume will be taken up once the graphics patch goes out of the beta stage and becomes official on steam:
Comprehensive debugging in aircraft systems (eg, reversed pitch levers in the 109s, things like that)
Final FM/DM improvements (who are we kidding, these are never final anyway
)
Netcode and scripting/mission builder issues.
Overall, most people report better performance with the latest beta patch, a few report no changes and a few report worse performance. I would make the balanced assessment that while the sim is far from complete there is a momentum, more people are starting to fly the sim and the number of people with problems is decreasing as each individual issue gets solved.
I think this is a fair assessment, judging also from the fact that there is less trolling and bad behaviour on the forums. We don't have so much moderating to do lately, which means that people are probably busier flying the sim than attacking each other over differences of opinion about the sim. Of course, some have moved on or are taking a break too, but in general i see an increase in actual gameplay related threads. There is an increase of "how do i do this in that specific plane" and a decrease in "how can i make this work in the first place", so we're slowly getting there.
08-07-2012, 07:21 AM
Linear Mode
