better clouds and trees in next patch ?

[Vengeanze]

Luthier:
Since Cliffs of Dover has more shrubbery in it than perhaps any other flight sim developed so far - hundreds of thousands of trees around the player - enabling collision for the trees grinds the game to a complete halt, especially as they need to be tracked around every plane on the map and not just the player's. Making collisions less precise leads to equally poor results, when planes may fly through a tree but crash into seemingly empty space.
We know this is extremely important. The solution is there, but it still eludes us.

[robtek]

As long as there is a option to turn trees off, there can't be a collision model without imbalancing the sim for online-gaming

[furbs]

Wrong, it can be a server side option, just like clouds in IL2.

[Madfish]

That's why I'm saying: lower settings shouldn't result in disadvantages for others!

Simple solutions? Add low quality trees for the low end settings. Don't just make the trees vanish!

What's next? People disabling buildings and flying through them? Or people disabling plane models and flying through bombers? Seriously, if the tree belongs there make it collidable. And if necessary add the old IL-2 1946 trees for that as they certainly were collidable and not rescource intensive.

[Blackdog_kt]

I think the consensus is that before trees are made collidable it must be possible to have everyone seeing the same amount of trees in an online session. In that sense, a "game should conform to max settings" proposal isn't very feasible when a percentage of people still have performance issues.

I mean, we can't tell people they have to fork out $500 on upgrades before they are allowed to fly online with us and then complain that we fly on empty servers

Online play will focus on the lowest common denominator until everyone can catch up, just like it was in IL2 with server admins and mission makers fine-tuning the amount of flak for frame rate reasons. I'm not trying to be confrontational here, just saying that i expect things to progress much in the same way they did with IL2, it will be a steady but slow pace and that's largely out of our control.

After all there's no use for someone paying the hosting expenses for a dedicated server box if people won't fly on it, hence they will probably strive to make it possible for people with less than stellar rigs to fly with them too.