[zapatista]

Originally Posted by kendo65

Zapa, I try to maintain a neutral stance in your long-running dispute with Tree and Furbs .

just remember that all those years of swiss neutrality only ever ended up producing a Cuckoo clock clock as its greatest feat

Originally Posted by kendo65

Given your characterisation of so many of the issue as 'easy fixes' I have to ask why they haven't been fixed 18 months after release?

you already know the answer to this untill the main faulty core of CoD was fixed (gfx engine), none of the other issues mattered much, and there are several reasons for this:
firstly, because many of them are secondary elements to the gfx engine itself (lod model visibility, tree shimmering, clouds etc), so its a waste of time fixing things in the old game engine while the new one is being developed.
secondly: because there was no financial reward in spending most manpower on fixing the old problems while all hands on deck were required to stop the axe falling on the whole project, for that survival a soonish BoM was essential (and still is)

Originally Posted by kendo65

Are you really saying that smoke in a flight sim is an optional extra for the rich?

i was mostly responding to the big issue of dust clouds during takeoff/landings issue, and the high level eye candy for some smoke effects we saw during early development, most of these effects are very high demands on system resources to see them in all their glory, and only very few here have reported playable frame rates during some of these effect. of course we need decent (but relatively low detailed) smoke and dust effects, but unless you have a very high end pc and they make a major leap forward in code efficiency those better effects are probably a luxury we cant afford for most of us.

Originally Posted by kendo65

Just a personal reaction here, but I'm really tired of people passing off missing features of the sim with lines like that. I know it's not a tree sim, it's also not a cloud sim, or a weather sim...but they'd be nice to have!

sure, i'd love to have them to, and you can add to that a decent dynamic campaign engine and some complex and detailed AI ground vehicle routines providing supply lines to forward troops and airfields etc (already discussed by oleg during development)

sadly the more realistic priorities right now are to get some improvements in AI behaviour, some decent frame rates for mid end pc's on medium settings, better flight models and performance for allied/axis fighters, control and gauges errors fixed, and have the LoD visibility problem solved. that is what my perspective is based on, if we get those elements solved, and sadly there is no indication luthier recognizes the priority these fixes should have to stem most complaints and provide us at least with a functional product.

and that is why i see behavior like furbs and "the foliage one" to be so self defeating and contributing to the current problem. instead we should make a concerted effort to have a list of priority fixes created for luthier (with specific detail on the exact problem, for ex quantify the distant LoD model visibility problem for various FoV's etc). instead some seem focused on this destructive merry-go-round of indulgent self pity and false indignation at a lost few $ you would never worry about in other circumstances. its not as if this was a planned faulty release that was conceived in some evil scheme, what is being done to fix it in the last 12 months is the best the small current programming crew can do to fix things while still trying to ensure the survival of the series, and if anybody here has any hope of getting a decent ww2 sim we better wake up to this.

and i really do believe the major crisis in game performance is over. since the last beta patch i can actually run the sim on my mid livel pc (dual core i5 @ 3.5, 5770 1gb gfx card and 8 gb ram etc), which was impossible at initial release time. that improvement only occurred with last months patch, so it seems appropriate for luthier and Co to now further polish its performance while starting to address the main bugs that hinder game play and normal use.