better clouds and trees in next patch ?

[Madfish]

Ok, a page ago someone wrote a good post about the general community approach and I agree.

However - I believe trees should be collision objects in the same way bridges our houses should. They can be, even if only rarely, used strategically.

I also believe that lower settings should result in a disadvantage for the player, not higher settings. This is because there is a state that the game is meant to be seen and played in. Usually it's the complete state. In other words: higher settings don't add unecessary trees - lower settings just cut them out.


Generally I must say that I am very, very sad about how graphically lacking the game really is. I believe there simply isn't any excuse for this. It should be self explanatory that a game which doesn't even rival an old arcade shooter like Wings of Prey (that ironically runs on it's predecessors engine as far as I know) looks better than Cliffs of Dover. That is unacceptable and until fixed I won't be able to enjoy Cliffs of Dover at all.

And here is why: yes, WW2 simming is about fighting - but 99% of the time you simply DO NOT fight but just fly. And that is where all these "simple" matters become game breaking bugs to me.
Especially when flying with full realism you end up with limited ammo - yes you can shoot for a few seconds but then ammo is OUT.
So is it that important to only focus on fighting mechanisms? Most of the time we fly, we look at the landscape, scout for enemy planes or just watch and enjoy the sounds of the engines, the feeling of being in the sky or speeding close to the ground.



In the end I must say (my opinion):
Yes, trees need to be collision objects
Yes, the ground textures need to be much better
Yes the shore needs to look like a shore and not like laser cut border between mushy textures and half assed waves (that do not build up close to shore, heck, not even go into the right direction)
Yes, the sounds are important to me - in a real vehicle I don't look for instruments, I trust my senses of hearing and feeling in most cases


Thus, it just makes me sad to see that CoD is like IL-2 with an improved FM and better (but fewer) planes.


I also miss out of the box thinking. I miss game modes like air race and other creative multiplayer gameplay. I suggested a few but I guess the community is problematic and thus I see the risk of a great genre dying just because gaming companies lost the vision of making quality products and because the community is old, ignorant and always expecting the same, thus obviously shrinking which in turn makes it less feasible to create a product that's satisfactory.



But yes, make the damn trees collision objects! We're in the year 2011, not 1940, after all.

[Vengeanze]

Luthier:
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.

[robtek]

As long as there is a option to turn trees off, there can't be a collision model without imbalancing the sim for online-gaming

[furbs]

Wrong, it can be a server side option, just like clouds in IL2.

[Madfish]

That's why I'm saying: lower settings shouldn't result in disadvantages for others!

Simple solutions? Add low quality trees for the low end settings. Don't just make the trees vanish!

What's next? People disabling buildings and flying through them? Or people disabling plane models and flying through bombers? Seriously, if the tree belongs there make it collidable. And if necessary add the old IL-2 1946 trees for that as they certainly were collidable and not rescource intensive.

[Blackdog_kt]

I think the consensus is that before trees are made collidable it must be possible to have everyone seeing the same amount of trees in an online session. In that sense, a "game should conform to max settings" proposal isn't very feasible when a percentage of people still have performance issues.

I mean, we can't tell people they have to fork out $500 on upgrades before they are allowed to fly online with us and then complain that we fly on empty servers

Online play will focus on the lowest common denominator until everyone can catch up, just like it was in IL2 with server admins and mission makers fine-tuning the amount of flak for frame rate reasons. I'm not trying to be confrontational here, just saying that i expect things to progress much in the same way they did with IL2, it will be a steady but slow pace and that's largely out of our control.

After all there's no use for someone paying the hosting expenses for a dedicated server box if people won't fly on it, hence they will probably strive to make it possible for people with less than stellar rigs to fly with them too.