Friday 2010-09-24 Dev. update and Discussion

[MOG_Hammer]

Originally Posted by zakkandrachoff

hope oleg are talking about trees! are very complex. so much resources for trees taken from the videocard. or options low quality trees at least.

in 2008 talk about clouds have its own turbulences and dynamic weather system. That stuff take so much resources of the cpu and memory.

I can't think of any other think right now that oleg concerned

Trees have been made with SpeedTree modeler, used also in some Unreal Engine released game. That tree modeling software can produce very realistic trees without impacting too much on your cpu and vid card. Leaves actually are well placed textures. And you know that SpeedTree can even model weather effects on trees such as wind, tornados, tropical storms? Modeled trees are not much more taxing then everything else modeled in the sim. Even the grass on the ground in CoD is moving. Forget about flat grass, now you have quality rendered 3D grass, seeable when on the ground. Your average AAA game made nowaday pretty much use it extensivelly without impacting performance much.

Why everyone talks about CPU and memory when everything that you see is done by your graphics card? CPU in mostly used for calculations of things not related to graphics, such as map positions, AI planes position, alt, heading, bullets shot, AI itself, flight behaviour of the aircraf, particle systems for fire, tracers, bullets, explosions, network online gaming. They are then transfered to the graphics engine to be displayed on your screen. Texture placements, models, colors, lighting, shadows, bloom, and the likes are all managed and generated through your graphics card. One example of a good optimisation on a system is to produce less particle, but having better quality textures to render them. A graphics card is light years beyond CPU for calculation speed performance, nowaday.

Since it is a new game, released as a next-gen computer game, yes you may have to upgrade your setup. If you already happen to run on a dual core processor on a 775 socket and have access to PCIe 2.0 16x, and have enough DDR2 memory (4 GB is a good spot), then only a good new videocard would be needed to run all the eye candy that the sim provides. It is not much of a investment, you could have a GTX570 for around 350$ as I'm writing this.

There is a good reason why they don't make games that could work flawlessly on outdated legacy hardware, the reason being that most games developpers today will try to make use of the new technology, to create more and more realistic sims. There is a point, a limit a system can take. A game of that quality could not run at full settings with outdated hardware. So there is an obvious choice to make. And the only way is up.

SO yes, in conclusion, you will need a good REAL gaming computer. I happen to run the good ole IL2 1946 on a system pretty much up to date and still some time the sim can bring that system on its knees. I am running it on a AMD Phenom II x4 965 3.4 ghz processor, 4 gigs of mem, EVGA GTX570 SuperClock (let me tell you that vid card is ludicrously fast), SB X-Fi Titanium Fat4l1ity Pro, Windows 7 Home Premium Fr. I know not everyone can have a system like that (although it's not that costy, since I build my own computers), but pretty much everyone today have at least half of a decent system. Sometime only a small change can bring a system up to specs for today's gaming. Remember, IL-2 is before everything else a video game, released by a company that also create a lot of games besides flight sims. They have to follow the market if they want to stay in business.

Personnally I would dislike having to buy a game with yesterday's standards, with outdated graphics, when I continually try to keep up with newer hardware to meet the recommended requirements of today's games, including flight sims.