Tested some of the stuff mentioned in the changelog and they work.
Ground handling physics: The Blenheim can now take off without swinging so violently to the right. Advance throttles to +1.5 boost and as soon as you got some speed to have some airflow over the rudder you can advance them the rest of the way, keeping it lined up with with rudder.
It still needs a bit of differential braking at the start of the run but nothing like it used to be when we had to constantly tap the brakes, kill our airspeed prolonging the roll and blowing the engines.
Bombsights: I only tested the Blenheim since i had already started with that one. It works fine now. I was at 8000ft and went for one of the airfields near Calais.
Setting boost at +1 to +1.5 psi gave me about 180mph indicated. Manual says that 200mph IAS at 8000ft is 225mph TAS, i was doing 20mph less IAS so i just set reduced TAS by a similar amount and set it to 200mph in the bombsight. I think there is some wind in the stock quick mission because my bombs drifted somewhat to the left, but other than that i hit the target just fine. If i had some wingmen with me we would have properly carpet bombed the place.
In terms of performance, i got a couple of artifacts in the cockpit during red out and the elongated "needles" of land protruding into the sea are still there some times, but i'm running older drives so that might be it (forgot to update them and when i remembered it today i was in too much of a hurry to fly the new patch
).
I don't measure my FPS but i didn't feel any noticeable hit. It might be a bit lower overall but it certainly feels much smoother and more consistent now, which is something i prefer anyway: i'd rather have a constant 40FPS with less stutters than 45 FPS with stutters.
In any case, it feels much smoother to me and i also raised the trees amount a notch without any noticeable effect on performance, not to mention it sounds and looks very good too.
Suggestions: If possible, a separate selection field in the graphics options for the player's aircraft textures in the future.
I'm running texture size at medium and that works well for the landscape and other units, but tends to blur a lot some parts of the cockpit in some aircraft or other parts of the model when viewing them from within the cockpit (external views still look fine, it's some of the cockpit views that get blurry and not all of them either).
Examples are the wing markings on the 109s that denote the step/no step zones for the ground crews and the cockpits in bombers, especially gunsights and bombsights.
Definitely a big step in the right direction. What i really would like to see for the next patch is focusing on the more gameplay-oriented features, like streamlining the control logic for all aircraft, correcting some non-working instruments and finalizing the radio commands.
By the way, the placeholder list of commands is impressive. I had a bit of fumbling around and if you make them work for the next patch it will be awesome. Among others, there are commands to have your crewmen:
report altitude (useful during landing)
report airspeed (useful during takeoff)
handle flaps/landing gear
tell the gunners to hold fire (if you want to sneak in without giving your position away due to tracers)
etc.
I'm much more excited about these features and now that it seems the graphics and sounds are up to a standard considered acceptable by most (baring the final AA and SLI/Xfire optimisations), i hope that you will have some time to address the actual gameplay side of things: the aircraft look and sound terrific now, let's start flying them and having them do what they were supposed to do
Thanks for your continued efforts, i'm definitely looking forward to what you have in store next
