Il-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover Roadmap

[luthier]

Hi everyone. I’m very sorry to see that some of you are having technical difficulties with the game. It pains me personally to see that these problems are preventing you from enjoying everything the game has to offer.

The team has been working at a frantic pace since mid-summer. I personally have been working 12+ hour days 7 days a week pretty much non-stop, with only a short breather around Christmas. Optimization has always been our top priority; for example, the game you are playing now is roughly twice as fast as the version shown at Igromir.

We are continuing to work at the same pace now, after the release – no weekends in sight. We are working very hard to make the game better, and we hope that even those of you who are unhappy with the state of the game are still able to see that it is worth the wait, and that you have faith in our ability to improve on your experience.

Here’s what we are working on at the moment:

1. Performance increase. Over terrain, the two things that slow things down the most are trees and buildings. We are currently in final stages of testing optimized buildings that almost double the FPS over London on a test machine.
Tree optimization is a little farther away. You will probably see changes in how trees are rendered, they’ll take longer to appear over terrain, but once again, performance increase should be significant.
If everything tests correctly over the weekend, both of these should be released by early to mid next week.

2. Enhanced multicore support. The mode that we unfortunately were not able to finish in time is sending all render to a dedicated CPU core. The mode is working but somewhat buggy. It easily doubles the FPS, and the performance boost is especially noticeable in larger missions with lots of stuff going on.
This is probably at least two to three weeks away, and we will probably do a short public beta of this major change before it’s made live to everyone.

3. Multiplayer. There is something in steam filters that prevents game servers from being found. This is only happening with live retail versions of the game. This apparently isn’t caused by us – hopefully it’s just a simple oversight somewhere and the fix will be a simple flick of a switch.

4. FM and ballistics. We have already addressed the issue where rounds appeared to leave aircraft sideways. This was caused by the difference between physical and rendered position of the aircraft, i.e. the rendered position lagged behind the actual aircraft position.
Our aircraft programmer has a huge bucket list of things to check, which he’s going over at a rather brisk pace.

5. Resurrecting SLI support. This is our next biggest priority; it’s done by the same programmer now in final stages of optimizing buildings. We are really hoping this will be a quick task, but I don’t have an ETA at this point. It’ll either be a couple of days, or a much longer undetermined amount of time if we have to submit versions to card manufacturers and ask for their input.

6. Bug fixes and support. We are reading this forum a lot and some Russian-language forums, and working very hard to address all issues as they are being reported.

7. New stuff – larger online maps, some new aircraft such as the 109E1 and E4 etc – are all in the pipeline too, but obviously we need to solve the bigger issues first and then deal with the freebies.


Thank you all for your continuing support! Just FYI, I’m constantly doing 20 things at once, so if I don’t respond to your question it doesn’t mean I didn’t read it! I’d love to spend more time on the forums talking to the community and answering questions, but unfortunately I just cannot do it as much as I should at the moment. Please bear with us, we do really want to make all of you very happy!