Oleg Maddox's Room #1

[Asheshouse]

Originally Posted by Vigilant

Will the trains be late, just like their real counterparts?

Depends on whether MG programmes in leaves on the line in Autumn and "the wrong snow" in winter.

[Billy885]

Originally Posted by F19_Klunk

Will SoW take advantage of multi-core setups, dual or even quads?

Imperative to know when planning for a new rig.

I have a dual core and Forgotten Battles uses both cores. Maybe that will help answer your question about BoB? I can not see Oleg backing up with the new game.

Also, if you check on UBI forum, someone posted an INI setting to tell Forgotten Battles which core to use but I dont remember what it was.

Update: I went looking and found it and it does work:


[rts]
ProcessAffinityMask=1 or 2

If it equals 1, it uses the first core, if it equals 2 it uses the second core. Any other setting it uses both cores.

[choctaw111]

Originally Posted by Billy885

I have a dual core and Forgotten Battles uses both cores. Maybe that will help answer your question about BoB? I can not see Oleg backing up with the new game.

Also, if you check on UBI forum, someone posted an INI setting to tell Forgotten Battles which core to use but I dont remember what it was.

Update: I went looking and found it and it does work:


[rts]
ProcessAffinityMask=1 or 2

If it equals 1, it uses the first core, if it equals 2 it uses the second core. Any other setting it uses both cores.

Not quite right. Zero is core 1. One is core 2 and 2 is both cores. There are even numbers to tell it to run on 3 and 4 cores if you have a quad core processor but I have tried this and Il2 does not run any better using 4 cores over 2 cores. Il2 does run better on 2 cores than 1 core.

[DoolittleRaider]

Originally Posted by choctaw111

... Il2 does run better on 2 cores than 1 core.

Are you positive of that..and can anyone else confirm, as well?

I'd been under the impression that unless a program is written specifically to take advantage of dual core, there is no advantage...and that IL2 specifically did not utilize a second core at all. [In fact, I thought I'd read that setting up for dual-core use would negatively impact IL2 performance]
Now you have me curious.

[Foo'bar]

I just tried it out and found out that the game is loading much faster than before. The game itself isn't any faster.

[GF_Mastiff]

it is using 2 cores, it works. utilizing core 2 more than core one though.

[Avimimus]

Oleg could make a blitz era train simulator. After all we will have the physics and terrain in place. It could be a budget title.

[Foo'bar]

Originally Posted by choctaw111

Not quite right. Zero is core 1. One is core 2 and 2 is both cores. There are even numbers to tell it to run on 3 and 4 cores if you have a quad core processor but I have tried this and Il2 does not run any better using 4 cores over 2 cores. Il2 does run better on 2 cores than 1 core.

Could you please tell me where you got this from? I was told that IL-2 always is running with only one core. You just can set on wich one:

[rts]
ProcessAffinityMask=1 (on core 1)
[rts]
ProcessAffinityMask=2 (on core 2)
[rts]
ProcessAffinityMask=3 (on core 3)
[rts]
ProcessAffinityMask=2 (on core 4)

Or am I wrong?

[MaXMhZ]

AFAIK ProcessAffinityMask is a bit-weighted value meaning
bit 0 governs core0
bit1 governs core1
etc

If it is commented out the OS will decide which cores to use.
"IL-2 is not a ,ultithread application." True
IL-2 only uses 1 core" False.
so
PAF=1 - core 0
=2 - core 1
=3 - core 0+1
=4 - core 2
=5 - core 0+2
=6 - core 1+2
=7 - core 0+1+2
commented out - all cores

If a core is enabled, it does NOT mean that core will be performing 100% while the other cores that are not enabled do nothing.
The enabled core needs an active thread to perform,
The disabled cores will be assigned tasks by the OS if needed.
There is only one way to switch off cores - the power switch - meaning all or nothing lol.

There was an long thread at SimHQ some time back exploring this(end 2005/beginning of 2006).


a '1' bit will enable the core, a '0' bit disable it.
Actual activity of cores can be checked through TaskManager. Keep in mind in general Windows OS runs hundreds of threads at the same time IL-2 runs. download a free process viewer here - Have Fun!
A substantial part of IL-2 is written in Java which can use in excess of 100 threads. (source: Sun Microsystems) Shift-Tab opens the Java console in-game Yep that's where all those white messages come from.

[choctaw111]

This is what I dug up. I did make a mistake about the zero value. The zero value distributes the load across ALL cores.

Bitmask: 00000000000000000000000000000000 = Decimal 0
Processor affinity is off, and the load is distributed across all available processors.

Bitmask: 00000000000000000000000000000001 = Decimal 1
Processor 1 selected. The process will only run on processor 1.

Bitmask: 00000000000000000000000000000010 = Decimal 2
Processor 2 selected. The process will only run on processor 2.

Bitmask: 00000000000000000000000000000011 = Decimal 3
Processors 1 & 2 selected. The load is distributed across both processors, effectively the same as setting 0 above for Dual cores.

Because 0 puts the load across all processors and 3 puts the load on processor 1 and 2, they are essentially the same thing for Dual core CPUs.



For Quad core CPUs you can use more values:

Bitmask: 00000000000000000000000000000100 = Decimal 4
Processor 3 selected. The process will only run on processor 3.

Bitmask: 00000000000000000000000000001000 = Decimal 8
Processor 4 selected. The process will only run on processor 4.


And any combo between 0 and 15, for example:

Bitmask: 00000000000000000000000000000101 = Decimal 5
Processor 1 and 3 selected. The load is distributed across processor 1 and 3.

Bitmask: 00000000000000000000000000001111 = Decimal 15
Processor 1, 2, 3, and 4 selected. The load is distributed across all processors, 1, 2, 3, and 4.

This is a post from MaxMhz a while back in response to a question as to how to increase performance on my quad core rig. Please note that forcing Il2 to run on anything above 2 cores does not give me any better performance, HOWEVER running on two cores instead of one core gave me much better performance on the Black Death track, a 36% increase in the minimum frame rates actually.

MaxMhz


Posted Apr 26, 07 20:25
You could try ProcessAffinityMask=15 - that would spread the load over all four cores in your quad processor... ProcessAffinityMask is a bit-weighed value with each bit representing a thread/core
four processors would be binary 1111 (decimal 15)

The drop in FPS is probably caused by all the secundary explosions caused by pieces flying around from the primary impact. That takes a huge amount of processor power.


I hope this stuff helps.