[Bertram W. Wooster]

Downloaded and installed the beta patch without problem. Correct version number is showing in title screen, app now appears to be running in true fullscreen mode and additional features such as quick mission pre-mission briefing screens are present, so I'm confident that the patch is installed and running correctly.

However, I am experiencing a couple of problem with terrain assets when I first load a mission - e.g. the free flight in a Hurricane over Dover quick mission. First, I can see all of the terrain textures loading during the first 10-20 seconds of the mission. Initially, my plane is flying over blank terrain which I can see slowly loading. From an immersion/playability standpoint, this visible texture loading really takes me out of the game. Second, even after all of the terrain textures appear to have completed loading, the vast majority of buildings are not displayed even after I have been flying around for several minutes. I can see the ground textures where the buildings should be displayed but no 3D building objects are present. Even if I fly away from the initial area for several minutes no 3D buildings show up in the new areas either. If I exit the mission and then refly, the terrain assets load very quickly and the buildings show up.

I suspect that the worker thread responsible for loading terrain assets is under so much load when a mission is first launched that it fails to load the building assets. On subsequent reflies, many of the assets are already cached and the loader is then able to load the building assets correctly too.

This issue occurs consistently and is repeatable and occurs across various in-game video settings e.g. buildings unlimited/high, building detail medium/high, terrain detail medium/high

E6500 @3.85GHz
4GB DDR2
ATI HD 4850 w/ 1GB vRAM
Win7 Premium Home 64bit