Cliffs of Dover Technical FAQ

[luthier]

Thank you for purchasing Cliffs of Dover! If you have previously purchased our sims, you should know that they are a constant work in progress. We as a team are proud of the fact that we continuously support, expand and improve on our releases. We hope, with your support, to continue this tradition and to help the series grow in the coming years.
Here are some common issues encountered by players with the initial release, and how to resolve them.

1. Q: I have low FPS.

Answer:
A. Please consider disabling the anti-epilepsy filter (Options – Video – Anti-Epilepsy Filter). WARNING: disabling this filter may induce previously undetected epileptic symptoms even in persons who have no history of prior seizures or epilepsy. Please read the complete warning on the game’s splash screen.
Disabling the filter will add up to 10 FPS to your game, depending on your hardware configuration.

B. If your machine does not exceed the recommended system requirements, consider turning down some graphic settings. The two options that cause the most performance gain are Forest and Building Amount (Options – Video – Show Advanced). You should not need to turn down other settings if your computer meets the recommended requirements.

C. If your computer is well below the recommended system requirements, please also consider turning down Land Detail and Land Shading, and turning off Grass.

D. The options that cause the least performance gain for the largest decrease in visual quality are Model Detail and Shadows. We only recommend turning these off if your computer is right at the edge of the minimum requirements.

E. NOTE: DirectX 9 offers slower performance and lower graphic fidelity. If your system meets Recommended system requirements, upgrading to a DX10-capable operating system will offer better performance boost in Cliffs of Dover than perhaps any hardware upgrade.

2. Q: I have an above-recommended SLI video card set up and my FPS is very low.
A: At some point in the very hectic pre-release rush, we have broken SLI support and we have not yet been able to discover the reason for it. We are working very hard to re-enable it. In the meantime, disabling SLI will significantly boost your FPS.

3. Q: I see a black screen when launching the game.
A: You are most likely running an Nvidia card with 266.xx drivers. There's a problem with that particular driver version.
It can be resolved by either rolling back to a previous driver version, such as 257.21, or upgrading to the just-released 270.51.
The issue can also be resolved by manually adjusting one of the driver parameters in the registry. This is for more advanced users. Please modify the registry at your own risk.

Start - Run
regedit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\GraphicsDrivers
Edit - New - DWord
Name = TdrDelay
Value Data = 12

4. Q: I am experiencing periodic FPS hic-ups when flying low over terrain.

A: The issue is apparently caused by our extensive vegetation. We are feverishly working on a solution, which should be available in a matter of days.

5. Q: I am seeing a gray rectangle in the upper left corner of the screen.

A: You have created a new Info window. These highly customizable windows allow you to set up your own user interface in-game. Due to the fact that the game also features clickable cockpits, our solution to having distinct clickable elements that possibly overlay each other is making the cockpit elements selectable with a regular left-click, and the interface overlay windows selectable with an alt-click.
So, simply alt-click the grey rectangle to select it, and then either move it and resize it, right-click to customize it, or right-click to close it.
This can also be done with all standard interface elements, including no-cockpit gauge overlays. Or you can right-click anywhere on your screen and add new Info windows to your interface layout.

5-A. Q: I did all that, but Closing the window does nothing.

A: We have as of now seen two users who created 52 and 82 overlayed info windows respectively. If you are closing a window and it does not disappear, it probably means that you have multiple Info windows stacked on top of each other. If you do not wish to manually close each window, you can edit them out of a config instead.
All the Info window settings are stored in the [ChatWindow] section of
(Documents)\1C SoftClub\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\confUser.ini
Our standard interface has 5 elements numbered 0 through 4 and titled "Motor Controls", "Secondary Controls", "Info. Window 1" (no title is shown for this one in game), "Voice", and "NetStats"
If your ChatWindow section looks to have a lot more than these 5 sections, simply delete everything past the lines numbered 4: and save the file.

6. Q: I have turned down Model Detail and now strange things are sticking through the cockpit of my Hurricane.

A: The external model of the Hurricane wasn’t designed with decreased graphic settings in mind, so lower-detail portions of it began to stick through the cockpit. We are working to have this addressed ASAP – in the meantime please consider turning Model Detail up as it does not offer significant performance gain on anything but the slowest machines.

7. Q: I am running Windows Vista / 7, and my game constantly crashes.

A: You have most likely manually reset your render to use DX9. Cliffs of Dover only supports DX9 on Windows XP. Please use DX10 on DX10-capable operating systems, as switching to DX9 actually reduces performance, in addition to leading to unexpected crashes.

8. Q: I cannot see propellers on any planes!

A: Rotating propellers were causing the game to fail epilepsy tests, and so drastic changes were made to the propellers in addition to the Anti-Epilepsy filter. If we can be perfectly frank, there is a chance that this will never change back.

9. Q: I see two small black vertical lines on my screen.

A: These are cursors in the Info windows (see #5 above). A very annoying, nasty, despicable bug that we've been hunting down for months and those damned cursors are still there. Grrr! They are on our hit list.

10. Q: I can fly through trees without receiving any damage.

A: Since Cliffs of Dover has more shrubbery in it than perhaps any other flight sim developed so far - hundreds of thousands of trees around the player - enabling collision for the trees grinds the game to a complete halt, especially as they need to be tracked around every plane on the map and not just the player's. Making collisions less precise leads to equally poor results, when planes may fly through a tree but crash into seemingly empty space.
We know this is extremely important. The solution is there, but it still eludes us.

11. - Deleted

12. Q: I am an old-time fan of the series and I can no longer manually edit my conf.ini.

A: By default, your config is now stored in the steam cloud. This allows you to log into steam on a new machine, and carry over your entire config including keyboard layout etc.
This also means that manual edits to the config files are automatically overwritten by the server when the game is launched.
NOTE: editing conf.ini is an UNSUPPORTED FEATURE for advanced users only. ALWAYS back up last working version of the conf.ini.
To disable cloud config storage, go through these simple steps:
* Right-click the game in the game list in your steam Library.
* Go to the Updates tab of the Properties window.
* Uncheck "Enable steam cloud..."
* Press Close
* You can now manually edit your config file!
NOTE: (once again) some of the settings in the conf.ini are legacy settings left over from when some features were not yet set in stone, so you WILL horribly break the game if you begin to randomly reset random settings to see what they do.

13. Q: I am running Windows XP. All missions stop loading at 95% and never complete.

A: Your memory is too low to fully load landscape with grass. Please go to Options - Video - Show Advanced and uncheck Grass. This will allow the game to fully load.
(automatic fix is on the way)

14. Q: AVG antivirus detects rendobj.dll as virus.

A: You can add the file as an exception.
1) open AVG
2) Click on Tools along the top.
3) Select Advanced Settings
4) Select PUP Exceptions
5) Add rendobj.dll
6) click apply then ok
7) Launch CoD
NOTE: Deprecated after April 8th patch removed DRM from the game.

15. Q: Note about Aero Desktop Composition.

A: If you are experiencing an issue with framerate in the game, disabling Aero Desktop Composition in windows can slightly improve in-game FPS. NOTE that this is an unsupported feature at this time. If you experience any problems, please reenable Aero again. Aero is only available in Windows Vista and Windows 7 and is not available in Windows XP.

1. Brose to the main install flder for Cliffs of Dover. By default it is
(Program Files)\Steam\steamapps\common\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover
where (Program Files) is the actual physical location that can vary for your individual machine.
2. Find a file called Launcher.exe in the folder. (it may simply be Launcher, if you have disabled the display of file extensions in
Windows)
3. Right-click the file and select Properties.
4. Select the Compatibility tab in the window that appears.
5. Check the "Disable desktop composition" checkbox in the Compatiblity tab and press OK.
6. Depending on your system specs, you may see a performance increase when flying the game.

16. Q: I have installed the latest patch and the game no longer launches.

A: Please clear out your shaders cache by deleting all contents of the
(Documents)\1C SoftClub\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\cache\shaders
folder
[to be expanded]