shouldwe view the CoD release like the initial MSflightsim-X release problems ?

[Friendly_flyer]

One does not exclude the other. We could well have an "fsX-problem", made worse by a lack of tuning and debugging. I guess we'll see (or hope we'll see).

[RocketDog]

I bought both games on release. FSX ran slowly but, IIRC, everything worked pretty much as you would expect and everything was present and correct. I enjoyed it from the day I installed it. It's a pity MS didn't develop it further, but it was always serviceable.

However, although CLOD runs (at least for me) at reasonable FPS after the first patch, the problem with it is that so much of it was/is missing. The devs clearly recognise this and have an ever-expanding list of things they are going to put into the sim at some unspecified point in the future. To me, the main failings of CLOD are i) unrealistic terrain, ii) poor AI, iii) no FSAA, iv) poor sounds, v) no weather, vi) no historical dimension beyond the useless campaigns, vii) poor QMB, viii) poor FMs, ix) undocumented FMB, x) endless minor yet irritating bugs. Because of this I don't enjoy playing with CLOD and I haven't started it up in weeks.

To me it looks like CLOD could still go one of two ways. It might be that it actually follows the RoF example and builds up over the next year or so to something really worthwhile. I'm not very confident of this because the damage to the brand has been quite severe and the devs seem hell bent on antagonising their customers by refusing to talk to them (compare the way 777's Jason interacts on the forums with his customers to the way Luthier behaves).

Alternatively, it might be that it follows the path of Silent Hunter 5, where the publishers decide that it's beyond salvage and walk away after a couple of basic patches.

To date, I think there is a better parallel with Silent Hunter 5 than with FSX.

[Blackdog_kt]

I think that a lot of it is is a case of undocumented behavior which doesn't make sense to document properly, because a lot of stuff is placeholders and subject to change and that will render any documentation obsolete pretty fast

Most of the times, problems are either due to directx version used, .net libraries and people not realizing that running at full graphics is impossible if your PC doesn't exceed the recommended specs.

It runs fine on my two year old PC:
i7 920 @2.7 Ghz (stock clock speeds)
Ati 4890 1GB
3GB RAM
Win7 x64

I use mostly medium settings, a couple of low settings and a couple of high ones, running it at 1680x1050. Runs fine and stutter free at 25-60 FPS (capped due to Vsync) depending on the terrain bellow me. The only way to make it start having hiccups is fly very low (like rooftop level) over London, otherwise it's all fine.