A thought about Cliffs of Dover....

Volksieg · #1 12-12-2012, 12:52 PM

Throughout this game's pitted history, I have hated this game and I have loved this game.... there have been moments where I could have pulled all my hair out and moments where I... well.... whatever the opposite of pulling your hair out is.

One thing I did notice, from day one, is that many with ridiculously powerful rigs were saying "There is nothing wrong with this sim! You need to upgrade your PC! You're idiots trying to run something as complex as this on a computer like that!"... and more and more of us "idiots" purchased the product and moaned, complained, tweaked, made do...etc Sure! It did have problems, even for the people with the supercomputers but, tell me, what game doesn't have problems when it first comes out?

I recently bought a new graphics card... the rest of my PC is still woefully inadequate but damn! My enjoyment of this sim has increased by at least 300% (Don't quote me on that... but my personal team of statisticians assure me that this figure is accurate.

)..........

So who is to blame for the demise of CloD?

Is it some dark conspiracy cooked up by 777 and those pesky ROF people?
Is it the doom mongers who took every opportunity to snipe?
Is it Luthier and Co?
Is it Oleg whose ideas where far too big?
Is it the fools like me who tried to run a sophisticated piece of software on inadequate hardware and then tied up the team trying to fix an engine to fit my expectations when they could have concentrated on small performance patches and DLC for the few who could run it with little complaint?

I'll tell you who I think is to blame....

The person/people responsible for tricking us people with crap PCs into buying the product in the first place instead of watching on with envy in our hearts as we saved up what money we could spare to finally join the lucky few!

Who was responsible for the specs on the box?

Whoever that person was..... THEY were the true and rightful deserving targets of our anger.

Whoever you are.... well done. You killed CloD.

JG52Uther · #2 12-12-2012, 12:56 PM

Strangely enough CoD runs fine on my PC. And even more strange, RoF runs perfectly on my PC, and its well under minimum specs there!

SlipBall · #3 12-12-2012, 01:02 PM

Same here, and I'm flying V1.00.13954...I will save it, and can't wait to see how it does 10 years out on future hardware

Volksieg · #4 12-12-2012, 01:04 PM

Dunno how you managed that with that graphics card. lol

What are your settings?

I think the problem is that people are greedy for graphics these days. It is a terrible headache for many, myself included, to go from something ludicrously beautiful like Crysis 2 to spending £40 on a game where you have to turn almost everything off.

People saw the specs and thought they could get away with having everything on high etc.... which, of course, they could not.

I learnt a valuable lesson with CloD, using my HD 6770, that graphics do not make a game! Gameplay makes a game! And what a lot of gameplay this gorgeous little beast (RIP) has/had!

I really do feel, now I've had the upgrade, that an awful lot of the "problems" with CloD were far more to do with our hardware and the expectations from system specs on the box than they ever were with the actual program itself.

Now I have the gameplay AND the bells and whistles and, it has to be said.... this sim was a masterpiece! A slightly shaky masterpiece, sure.... but, as my original point stated.... how great it could be running now if the dev team hadn't been saddled with trying to make the engine fit the expectations on the box.

Volksieg · #5 12-12-2012, 01:16 PM

Just as an afterthought....

I also made a decision the other day...

The worst thing a man can ever do is open the console and type "fps START SHOW"

The game seems an awful lot smoother when you don't have a bright yellow display yelling at you about every slight dip in performance.

It's a psychological thing. I do wonder how many of my other "velvety smooth" games have the odd dip but I don't even notice them at the time because I'm not staring obsessively at the fps constantly.

TonyD · #6 12-12-2012, 05:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JG52Uther

Strangely enough CoD runs fine on my PC. And even more strange, RoF runs perfectly on my PC, and its well under minimum specs there!

Out of curiosity I installed an X1950 Pro 256MB I had lying around in my wife’s machine (Athlon X4 3.1GHz, 4GB DDR-3 1333 at the time) and installed RoF - it ran very well on above-minimum settings. RoF’s requirements on their website are headed as ‘Recommended’ with no reference to a ‘minimum’ spec, and most would (correctly) interpret them as ‘Required’.

I think Volksieg has made an interesting point – a higher (or more realistic) minimum spec may have avoided a lot of the animosity seen here, but may have cost sales. This decision would typically have been made by the marketing department, perhaps with insufficient knowledge of the product.

SlipBall · #7 12-12-2012, 07:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Volksieg

Dunno how you managed that with that graphics card. lol

What are your settings?

I think the problem is that people are greedy for graphics these days. It is a terrible headache for many, myself included, to go from something ludicrously beautiful like Crysis 2 to spending £40 on a game where you have to turn almost everything off.

People saw the specs and thought they could get away with having everything on high etc.... which, of course, they could not.

I learnt a valuable lesson with CloD, using my HD 6770, that graphics do not make a game! Gameplay makes a game! And what a lot of gameplay this gorgeous little beast (RIP) has/had!

I really do feel, now I've had the upgrade, that an awful lot of the "problems" with CloD were far more to do with our hardware and the expectations from system specs on the box than they ever were with the actual program itself.

Now I have the gameplay AND the bells and whistles and, it has to be said.... this sim was a masterpiece! A slightly shaky masterpiece, sure.... but, as my original point stated.... how great it could be running now if the dev team hadn't been saddled with trying to make the engine fit the expectations on the box.

Absolutely right on

hiro · #8 12-13-2012, 07:28 AM

many factors killed clod, not the person(s) making up the specs.

Its common knowledge and common sense in the video game world, you never, never, ever play a game with a PC that meets minimum specs .

And regular requirements are thought as a minimum guideline. And its SOP to have a machine above.

Even on beast machines CLOD would lose frames, but on the same coin, if you had a powerful PC, alot of the bugs and glitches went away.

Many factors killed CLOD, and its been discussed in other posts.

And unfortunately it was several major factors that lead to this being the only game in the IL-2 successor series (I consider the 777+1C merger, ROF, IL-2 style), and it not being up to par.

Can't say it was one thing or blame one aspect, but several factors . . . That would be like saying Hitler was the cause of the Axis losing. Sure he played a role, but other factors (like Allies' efforts) also played larger roles . . .

Feathered_IV · #9 12-13-2012, 08:16 AM

Mission Creep killed the game. Everything else was a result of that. Damn shame.

startrekmike · #10 12-13-2012, 08:29 AM

When I first was trying out CloD, I had a Geforce 9800 GT with 512 of RAM, I could just barely run it on mostly low settings and it ran okay but the terrain looked like something out of a 1996 flight sim, it was simply not enough and I had a hard time seeing landing areas and targets.

After a while of that, I switched to a Radeon 7770 with 2GB of ram, that was the magic bullet and it seems to work much better now and medium/high settings (granted, I run at 1280-1024 due to my smallish monitor).

It seems like we are now getting to a point where the GPU needed to run this sim is becoming cheap enough for most gamers to own one, that might have been part of the problem for some players.