Il-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover Roadmap

[_Watchdog]

Originally Posted by luthier

Here’s what we are working on at the moment:

1. Performance increase. Over terrain, the two things that slow things down the most are trees and buildings. We are currently in final stages of testing optimized buildings that almost double the FPS over London on a test machine.
Tree optimization is a little farther away. You will probably see changes in how trees are rendered, they’ll take longer to appear over terrain, but once again, performance increase should be significant.
If everything tests correctly over the weekend, both of these should be released by early to mid next week.

Well that is interesting, for even if I have terrain turned to LOW I still cannot get playable framerates.

2. Enhanced multicore support. The mode that we unfortunately were not able to finish in time is sending all render to a dedicated CPU core. The mode is working but somewhat buggy. It easily doubles the FPS, and the performance boost is especially noticeable in larger missions with lots of stuff going on.
This is probably at least two to three weeks away, and we will probably do a short public beta of this major change before it’s made live to everyone.

So I can expect my framerate of 9FPS to go to 18FPS, is that an acceptable increase? What sort of multicore support are we talking here? Surely you are adding support for no less then 4 cores considering every man and his dog has at least a average quad core running their system.

3. Multiplayer. There is something in steam filters that prevents game servers from being found. This is only happening with live retail versions of the game. This apparently isn’t caused by us – hopefully it’s just a simple oversight somewhere and the fix will be a simple flick of a switch.

4. FM and ballistics. We have already addressed the issue where rounds appeared to leave aircraft sideways. This was caused by the difference between physical and rendered position of the aircraft, i.e. the rendered position lagged behind the actual aircraft position.
Our aircraft programmer has a huge bucket list of things to check, which he’s going over at a rather brisk pace.

What about rounds that don't appear to leave at all? I can hear the audible sounds of bullets firing, but there are no visible effects that indicate that you have actually fired your weapons.

5. Resurrecting SLI support. This is our next biggest priority; it’s done by the same programmer now in final stages of optimizing buildings. We are really hoping this will be a quick task, but I don’t have an ETA at this point. It’ll either be a couple of days, or a much longer undetermined amount of time if we have to submit versions to card manufacturers and ask for their input.

This is my biggest bugbear. Is it simply SLi support or are you also concentrating your efforts on Crossfire support also? In addition, where is the native support for multi-monitors? More and more people are playing with multiple monitors, yet programmers and developers (such as yourselves) aren't including native support for multiple monitors. This game looks absolutely terrible with multiple monitors, with the cockpit being all blown up and enlarged. It would be great if we could see multi-monitor support included by the developers rather then the likes of individuals and groups such as the Widescreen Gaming Forum. It's funny, my 5970 will chew through Crysis pretty well with 3 monitors, yet it cannot handle Cliffs of Dover, struggling to achieve 9FPS with all setting on either medium or low.

Thank you all for your continuing support! Just FYI, I’m constantly doing 20 things at once, so if I don’t respond to your question it doesn’t mean I didn’t read it! I’d love to spend more time on the forums talking to the community and answering questions, but unfortunately I just cannot do it as much as I should at the moment. Please bear with us, we do really want to make all of you very happy!

FYI, I believe I have a right to be disgruntled, considering I am not running a 3 or 4 year old system. My system stats are;

Intel 980X OC to 4.1GHz,
6GB of 2000MHz Ripjaws,
AMD Sapphire 5970,
256GB A-RAM SSD,
Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate

My system runs pretty well with every game on the market, yet I cannot play IL2 Cliffs of Dover. Why is it that games are rushed to market and are never actually finished? We pay our hard earned dollars for these games only to received something half finished and in some cases never actually finished (Operation Flashpoint 2 - Dragon Rising ring a bell).

I am crossing my fingers that the next patch delivers on some of the promises made here, however I would like to see more support offered towards Multi-GPU and Multi-monitor support. Yes, lets make sure the game runs smoothly first, but then we need to make sure it looks good as well.