Russian version review

[PulpzillA]

Originally Posted by Insuber

Apologies if that has been posted already. From Sukhoi.re, a post by Luthier dated 25/03:

.....
25.03.2011 20:04
luthier
Producer Sow: BoB

Dear friends,

Thanks to you for the support. If you can, please accept my personal apologies for the problems at the launch of game. We worked full steam since long ago, and the last month was even more feverish, and we had a very little time for the final polishing of th product.

Anyhow, we are at work to fix the following in the next few days:

1. anti-epilepsy will be once and for all banished from the Russian version of game. This it will add to 10 [fps] in the older machines. You can even now disable this filter - instructions were given repeatedly.

2. we already discovered the reason for micros-freezes at the low altitudes. Fixing should be done in a reasonably small amount of time.

3. we continue to optimize game. Our chief programmer - optimizer has been ill for the last three days, but he has a solid job schedule, which would allow to improve the frame-rate within a sufficiently short time. We don't promise miracles, but flight above terrain will begin to differ less dramatically from flight above water.

4. texts are checked by correctors. Credits are already cleaned.

5. The remaining problems have for us a less high priority. We hope to let out a patch, which improves frame-rate and rolling tects, on the next weekand ruling texts, on the following week, and then take the time to solve other problems, to improve game, to add aircraft, and so forth.

Seems like they already know the cause of the microstutters.

[6S.Manu]

Originally Posted by PulpzillA

Seems like they already know the cause of the microstutters.

I guess it's the 32bit launcher.

It seems that VRAM makes the only difference in this release's performance, since you can have 3Gbs or 12Gbs of RAM and you don't have benefits.

[shadowze]

Disable one card and try it again

[Fansadox]

Just tried to play for a bit and my view on il2 COD is

Negatives
1 Is/was not ready to be released.
2 Buggy as hell
3 Stuttering all over the place
4 Colours way to bright on landscape

Positives
1 Nice menus
2 Models look awsome
3 Trees and towns are beautifull
4 Water looks really good

I tried playing on different graphics settings and my conclusion is that for an engine that has been made over the last few years it should perform way better then this. A highend system shouldnt be struggling to pump out good fps nowadays so either the structure in wich the code is written is either badly making advantage from all the hardware features or there is something seriously wrong thats holding the engine back (Epilepsy filter?)

My system : Core I7 920 @ 3.8Ghz / 6Gb ddr3 / GTX 480 / Win7 64

[Baron]

Originally Posted by Bryan21cag

Ok time to get really honest I have been self teaching my way around a computer for about 15 years but laziness combined with a lack of drive has contained my over all knowledge of how to build, repair, and just over all manipulate my own computers to a bare minimum. (I makem game runem someum timeum)

LOL I used to be so proud of myself when I would just copy and paste a boot disk one of my smart friends had made to make a game run for me (386 and 486dx2) and got another game to run on the same boot disk.

with that said i have been to my CCC panel and i can see both cards i think one seems to be running and the other sitting idle. i dont know if this is how they normally are when no programs are running or if the guy that built my computer for me just knew that i would never know if they were both actually working or not LOL

I just assumed that when two cards were in there and connected via the crossfire plug that they were both working.

I did not see any option that said to disable either card nor did i see one that gave me the option as to what i wanted each card to handle.

I apologize for my electrical ignorance ahead of time. I will gladly test any configuration that you guys are willing to walk me through

I think a may have confused it a bit. Disabling crossfire, i think, is done in CCC and the game/global settings. U know, where u set AA and AF and stuff like that outside the game. If its anything like NVidia controle panel u can hover the cursor over each setting and a text should pop up explaining what each setting does.

Running NVidia now so i cant check myselfe.

[Bryan21cag]

Originally Posted by Baron

I think a may have confused it a bit. Disabling crossfire, i think, is done in CCC and the game/global settings. U know, where u set AA and AF and stuff like that outside the game. If its anything like NVidia controle panel u can hover the cursor over each setting and a text should pop up explaining what each setting does.

Running NVidia now so i cant check myselfe.

Ok did some intensive testing today with lots of different settings

disabling sound did nothing except stop the sound the fps stayed the same and the stuttering also remained. Followed Adonys instructions for adding the removal of the Filter and it didn't crash but visually i am not sure i noticed a difference but this can be because im still not able to run on high settings due to the crossfire.

I tried disabling one card and it did greatly improve the fps but the stuttering remained and for some reason it messed up my color and i was unable to fix this until i did a system restore lol anyway both cards are back enabled now and i have tried playing the game with default settings across the board with just the filter off.

With default settings
filter off
over water
with only about 10 or less planes in the air including me the stuttering is at a minimum and the game looks and plays well enough to pass

this does make me feel good though as it seems that these are mostly all issues related to the fact that its only using 1 core 32 bits and one card poorly.

[Devastat]

Guys just update on my gaming experience on Cliffs of Dover.

Now I don't know what's happened, but after starting CoD again after a brake, I am suddenly getting a MUCH better FPS and performance from this game. I am currently playing on all graphics settings on HIGH level and I have an amazing FPS. I am over the SEA so I don't know would happen if I would fly over a city for example. Somehow I feel that I have managed to remove the antiepilepsy filter, perhaps the line in the conf.ini worked afterall?

I did test approaching those bombers again and it did start to stutter really bad again, the game became a slideshow, but as soon as the airplanes were more far away again the performance was really good. So it does give me a lot of hope towards this game. Also setting clock to 6am and watching sunrise I have to say that actually everything about this game is REALLY beautiful when you are flying on high altitude. So perhaps I was a bit too negative in my earlier review.

I'll go to sleep now do more testing tomorrow.

[Devastat]

Yep I am positive now, the anti-epilepsy filter is definitely gone from my IL-2 the performance is so good. Now there is still a lot of tweaking needed to be done for sure, but now I am starting to believing in this project, the experience of playing this game is totally unique. I just saw blue fumes flaming out of my engine and it looked beautiful at 5am in the morning, and I was in top of london and still getting a playable framerate, but offcourse not as good as over the water.. (all graphics details on HIGH except shadows disabled).

I don't know if I could get such a good framerate from the international version tho, as we don't know if it is possible to disable this filter from that version..?? Well nobody knows at this stage. But it runs so well now that I wont install the international version at this stage..

I have to say that not has any game ever given such an feeling of "being there" as this game. It does feel totally immersive, as if you were really flying the plane.
If someone could help me to find binding key for changing the seat, I cannot get into any other seats in my planes as the keybinding C (which is supposed to be default) doesn't work for some reason, so I cannot test any other seats except pilot seats..

Anyway time to go to sleep now, long day behind..

[JG14_Jagr]

I'm not sure thats it a good thing if the game stutters to a crawl whenever you are around other planes If I remember correctly the idea of the game is to look for and get close to other planes

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Devastat

Yep I am positive now, the anti-epilepsy filter is definitely gone from my IL-2 the performance is so good. Now there is still a lot of tweaking needed to be done for sure, but now I am starting to believing in this project, the experience of playing this game is totally unique. I just saw blue fumes flaming out of my engine and it looked beautiful at 5am in the morning, and I was in top of london and still getting a playable framerate, but offcourse not as good as over the water.. (all graphics details on HIGH except shadows disabled).

I don't know if I could get such a good framerate from the international version tho, as we don't know if it is possible to disable this filter from that version..?? Well nobody knows at this stage. But it runs so well now that I wont install the international version at this stage..

I have to say that not has any game ever given such an feeling of "being there" as this game. It does feel totally immersive, as if you were really flying the plane.
If someone could help me to find binding key for changing the seat, I cannot get into any other seats in my planes as the keybinding C (which is supposed to be default) doesn't work for some reason, so I cannot test any other seats except pilot seats..

Anyway time to go to sleep now, long day behind..

I think i've read somewhere that there's a massive difference in FPS if you restart your PC after installation. Most of the people who installed and started flying right away had terrible FPS, then the next day they report their FPS being higher as if by magic, just like the situation you describe.

Also, a lot of people report that much of the stuttering could be due to inefficient loading of textures and various other stuff. Some say that they get higher FPS if the re-fly the mission, or if they pause and cycle through the external cameras. Also, there is a blurry texture effect when a lot of things are going on in the screen (i noticed it on some youtube videos) that is very similar to what happens sometimes in FSX: it's like the game can't load everything fast enough, so it substitutes lower detail and low-res textures on the aircraft skins until it has time to render it properly.

All of this probably points to an inefficient loading routine, or maybe a need to optimize what loads before the mission and from how far away the land textures will be pre-cached. If for example my view distance is 30km and the game loads ground textures in 15km segments, it's obvious that i'll be getting a lot of texture pop-up.

Finally, i think that apart from the bugs that need to be fixed, there's probably a whole lot of undocumented tweaks that people currently have to discover for themselves, at least until the developers can provide an updated readme in a following patch to walk us through it all.

Overall, i remain optimistic. Some guy in the Russian forum posted a guide and said he can now get a consistent 60 FPS at acceptable detail levels with a more or less mid-range PC (i think). I don't exactly remember his specs but i think he had an AMD Phenom quad, an Ati 5xxx or 6xxx series card and 8Gb of RAM?

If he can get 60 FPS by tweaking stuff all by himself, i'm sure i'll be able to manage 30 FPS on my i7 920/Ati 4890 after a couple of patches and a small RAM upgrade (i'm thinking of going from 3GB to 6GB, purely because my win7 64 needs between 700mb and 1GB at idle). By the way, does anyone know how a 4890 1Gb compares to the DX11 cards if they both render in DX10 mode? Are the DX11 cards so much faster or can i expect just slightly slower performance since the sim runs in DX10 mode?

EDIT: Apparently, what the guy in the Russian forum did was open conf.ini and disable dynamic lights, among other things. That's the one thing i definitely remember about his optimizations.