Beta Patch – and we mean BETA!

[bando]

I find taxiing is a slide show since this patch. After landing, tried to make a taxi round the runway, quit half way, was stuttery as hell.
Being airborne was not an improvement either. Game still had a lot of stutters and freezes. For me it got worse.
Everything set to low, no grass.

I7
5870
6 Gb

[335th_GRAthos]

Finished adding pictures to my initial post
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthr...=20795&page=17

Overall, it looks like it became more playable nd fluid.
Still running at "low" resolutions 1280x

Some improvement on the amount of VRAM used is noticeable.
Nevertheless, as soon as you turn eye-candy on, there is a huge number of additional graphics on your screen, this is definitively an overkill and leads to a huge amount of data for your Graphics card.

Even at 1280x my card is using 1270Mb Ram and that is the limit (GTX570).
My friend with only 1Gb VRAM has immediately problems with the same settings and mission and experiences stutters where I have fluid game.


Also, for the first time I notice that flying inside the cockpit keeps my GPU at high speeds, flying external view over London the GPU downcocks automaticaly to lower speeds.
I experience this first time (flying over London), in other missions, flying external never caused this problem.


~S~

[Echo76]

Pre-patch : over sea from cockpit : 30 fps. outside view 50 fps
over land : major freezes whenever buildings around, erratic fps from 1-19

beta : over sea : 35 fps, outside 60fps
over land : 31 fps cockpit, 50 outside. Buildings still cause erratic 9-30 fps
but better than pre-patch.

Visual effects, model detail and damage high, rest very low / low. Trees have pretty small impact. 6vs6 over sea, no impact on fps. Constant CTD's.

Core2duo @ 3.2Ghz
4Gb RAM
512Mb 8800GTS 1440*900 on 19" widescreen
Win7 64

[DickDastardly]

My system:
Q6700 with 4GB RAM and a GTX460 (drivers=266.58 ) running Windows 7 64bit.

Peripherals:
MSFFB2, Saitek X45 throttle, 2 Saitek throttle quadrants and TrackIR (which was running but paused for the tests).

Test settings:
1280x720, fullscreen, anti-aliasing x1, anti-epilepsy filter off, model detail medium, buildings detail very low, land detail medium, forest very low, visual effects medium, damage decals medium, buildings amount low, land shading medium, grass off, shadows on, roads on.

The following tests were run by loading the mission, turning on the autopilot, waiting 5 seconds for things to settle down, bringing up the console and enabling the fps display, exiting the console and then letting the autopilot fly the plane for 3 minutes before noting the fps figures. Figures to the left of the arrow are pre-patch, those after the arrow are post-patch (min/average/max).

Bomber intercept - Channel = 04/52/79 -> 11/62/83
Bomber intercept - "Hawkindge" = 11/58/79 -> 14/57/82
Bomber intercept - London = 03/26/55 -> 06/28/51

I also tested low level performance over London by loading the London Sightseeing mission, diving to rooftop level, enabling the fps display and then flying on the same heading for 3 minutes:

London low level performance = 03/11/21 -> 02/8/16

Conclusion:
Small improvement in FPS, particularly of the minimums. Game generally seemed less prone to stuttering and smoother, very playable over water at these settings but still gives poor performance over urban areas. Definitely a step in the right direction, though .

Bugs:
1. Like another poster, I saw 3 trees appear in mid air after patching (I was playing the Hawkindge intercept quick mission with the AI flying the plane and firing at a Stuka I was approaching from behind. The trees appeared between me and the Stuka and I quickly flew past them. It seemed to me as if maybe they were drawn instead of some type of smoke or damage effect.

2. The Controls setup screen still allows you to bind the same key to multiple different functions without a warning if they're not of the same type (i.e. General, Aircraft, Snap View etc).

3. Sound engine is still very buggy -radio messages all play at the same time instead of one after the other, the sliding along the ground/wheel rumble noise plays when stationary, main menu music is erratic etc.

4. Shadows on the ground are still very flickery.

5. Duplicate low detail joystick still sometimes appears in the cockpit (so you see the high detail stick and the low detail one at the same time).

6. Some cockpit instruments are sometimes drawn with very low res textures (e.g. the altimeter and the compass in the Tiger Moth), whilst others right next to them are drawn with high res textures (despite being further from the camera).

Suggestions:
1. Create a Black Death II track which includes heavy combat over water and London (including some at low altitude) and add a Benchmark option to the menu which plays the track, generates a report which includes system info, settings and min/average/max fps and then automatically sends the results to the dev team (with an option to opt out of the last step for the tinfoil hat brigade).

You would then get tens of thousands of reports which could be processed automatically so you could immediately see what settings or hardware were causing problems -with a lot less effort than having to wade through threads like this one.

2. Dramatically increase the degree of customisability of the graphics settings in the options screen. For example, allow users to specify the maximum number of buildings or trees to draw per square kilometer and the range at which each LOD is drawn for each type of object. In general it would be good to use numerical values where possible instead of just high/medium/low so that, for example, if building detail is set to 50% the player would know that the buildings will have half the fps impact they'd have if set to 100%.

Similarly it would be good to split up some of the settings so that, for example, instead of a single toggle for all shadows it would be possible to enable cockpit shadows and those of aircraft but disable them for trees and buildings.

Finally it would be great if we had the option to set a minimum acceptable frame rate. The game could then automatically reduce things like visual detail (or flight model detail of any AI aircraft which aren't close to the player) to maintain this frame rate. Then if you started your flight at a quiet airstrip in the countryside visual detail would be high, but as you approached London it would automatically be scaled down to preserve the target fps.

You could even allow each player to rank the importance of the various features and use their choices to determine the order in which features would be sacrificed. For example, one player might prefer visual quality of the landscape to be reduced first, then visual enemy aircraft detail, then the visual quality of their own cockpit, and only sacrifice the full fidelity flight and damage models (for non-nearby AI aircraft) as a last resort, whereas somebody else might have totally opposite priorities.
Cheers,
DD

P.S. Please don't get discouraged by some of the vitriol in the forums from those whose memories are apparently too short to remember the years of dedicated support and patches you guys provided for earlier titles in the series. You've already earned our trust and I'm confident the early problems will all be sorted out eventually, you don't need to be killing yourselves working seven days a week. Take a weekend off to recharge your batteries -we need you guys relaxed and healthy so you can produce the remaining 400 planes for the new game .