You definately should gain some major improvement on your rig. It seems that the "kegetys.dll" helper utility (with added lines to config file) and/or "-mod=xxx" launch parameters are not in effect.

Wow - what a great work by Kegetys!

The NoSSAO and noMipmaps really made a huge difference in performance..
(no mipmaps DO make the buildings uglier - but makes flying lov really smooth!)

The game is so much better now! (I actually manage to down a bf 110 today, after a long an intense dogfight - brilliant!)

S!

FoX. You got all installed as said? Then open Steam and go to Library. Right click IL-2:Cliffs OF Dover and select Properties. The first tab General has Change launch parameters box. Click it and add, for example, -mod=nossao and press OK. You have enabled the noSSAO mod. Same applies to other 2, just add -mod=lowtex for LowTextures and -mod=nomipmap for the MipMap fix. Leave a space between each parameter.

Help! the nomipmaps mod improves performance a lot, but crashes the game very often. Can it somehow be fixed???

Hello,
so, I tried again:
2 Launches with Launcher error at 95%
1 Launch with mission working but still 20Fps.

Here's a screen of my install:
http://belkansquad.free.fr/Config.jpg

hello gents
how to understand it "- Edit the Launcher.exe.config file and add kegetys.dll there similar to steam_api.dll"
can anyone explain it like for child witchout english ;) ?

S!

Seems you have it all done right. Checked the folder structure so the mod folders are not doubled?

do i nead make a MOD folder?

With the mods on does anyone get that big round shadow over your plane ?

Delete the 4 files in the directory

...\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\lowtex\$bob\textures\Terrain\Detail\

Do you mean the weird ring of shadow? It is affected by 'Land Shading' option; on high you have spotlight under plane, surrounded by ring of shadow, less so on medium, disappears completely on low. Is this definitely mod related? I'll have a quick test... brb.

Edit: just read Gromic's post. Will try that.

Edit: That did it. Thanks!

Hello,
reinstalled everything, rebooted, emptied bin, etc etc.
Same situation: 2 crashlaunches, 1 launch with no gains.
+

Just a question:If the team release a patch in a couple of days won't all this just be overwritten?

im afraid it will.

You can manually delete modsfolders and remove exe commands from steam.

Those folders are new folders, patch doesen't do anything to them.

Really enjoying this forum guys. :-P

Thanks to the maker of this Mod.

Must be embarrassing for a whole dev team to be beaten by one? "normal" guy. Jeez.

Thank you i will give it a try now :D

Mod
 

Really not sure if added everything right. But on completion steam would not start and said game was unavailable. Anyone else had this?:(

Well, it would be embarrassing if a normal guy would have come with a solution that made the game smooth with the great looking buildings...
I am pretty sure that 1C could have come with the same basic solution themselves...But then everyone would have flamed them for reducing the visual qualities...The real challenge is photorealistic + performance....;)

Salute !

@jflain : I got the same error, it gives that error message if you didn't add the kegetys.dll text correctly in the launcher.exe config file.

Its not as hard as you think.. and remember this is a 3rd party work around.. hopefully 1C will build in a setting check box disabled by default which you could simply check or not in the GUI.

The good news about this is that it makes the game run significant;y better.. not just a little bit. The people NOT seeing any improvement have probably NOT installed it properly :)

well, you are probably right so at this time Dev hasn't reach one of these goal...
no perfs and no photo real at all...

what about the real full screen? and V/Sync? and a real AA ?
what about the sounds??? hopefully Tiger33 already working on it...
and what about the rest?
FM seams to have same coding as the il2 one and there is no protection over it... what a good news for on-line play...
and more and more bug & unfinished things...
nice!!

i suppose no one here want to buy a new car without wheels, doors, engine, with the dealer saying "two more weeks for the doors, we are working hard for the weels and engine has to be removed because it's too heavy, we looking for a new one so it can take few time....."

it's look like a joke no??

you say that they are working hard??
well we pay for that no?
and for those like me how are playing since 2001, we pay at least 300€ / pers for the whole IL2 series.
just for remember:
IL2 (2001) 50€
FB (2003) 50€
AEP(2004) 50€
PF(fin 2004) 50€
Pe-2(2006) 50€
1946(2007) 50€

i really hope this game become a must have, so for the moment i'm very disappointing about all i see ...

The Devs are not stupid people. They are gearing up for the US launch and this information about ssao is very valuable to them because they can put in a very small amount of work and get a very large return on their time invested. If someone found out that a particular issue was breaking SLI and XFire, do you think they would ignore it?

The community here wants this game to succeed and be the foundation for future development and add ons. To do that the US release needs to be at least "well" received.. if the games performance goes up for the average user, it will be..

Just FYI

I used all the mods and with the nomipmap mod the game crashed always at 90% at the loading screen.

I knew its the nomipmap mod so I started testing and I found the problem for me:

I removed the file in ....\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\nomipmaps\$core\painters

LandDefault.tep

and now it works, but I dont know maybe someone could fix the file?

McDan out

And I for one do not want 1C and the Devs to STOP trying to achieve that goal.. thats what we all want.. but this MOD and other finds that people make will allow them to put out a product that is scalable and allows all the people they hope purchase it to have a good experience with it.. if that happens, reviews are good..and sales are good..and project continues into the future.. This is in everyones best interest. And while everyone is playing the game the Devs can be working in the background to optiimize and tune the game and implement new features they may not have had the time to get working or get working right.. its a win win.

I am not using mipmaps at all and I have not seen a single crash.. if you are crashing try not using that loading parameter and see what happens.

Same here!
But using the 2 other mods... hum... maybe 10fps more, not sure. :cool:

Excellent find, thx a lot!

For those who are experiencing crashes, try purging the cache in your documents folder. On Win7, this is in:

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\Documents\1C SoftClub\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\cache

Just delete all the files in that folder. They will be regenerated the next time you run CoD.

mods 1 vanilla 0

anyone else noticed that the g50 has disappeared after installing this?

no great loss, but.....

S!

How disappeared? Just flew it and worked just fine :)

edit: findings not true

from in the QMB?, cause it missing in mine and a squadmates.

S!

Yes, single player in QMB. Flew over Dover :)

well thats very weird, as myself and another don't have it anymore:(

I'm using Windows XP and no improvement :-x

Of course, nice work !!!!!:grin::grin:

I get the same error: "The game is currently unavailable. Please try again at a another time"
Now I've removed the new Launcher.exe and renamed the backup back to "Launcher.exe" but I still get the same error. So right now I can't play at all.

Hope I haven't ruined the game allready..

Skarphol

I seem to have misplaced the G-50 (I am the other that Fruitbat referred to) and it isn't there in either QMB or FMB and its not available to edit in the plane option either, very strange!

you just made my game much more playable.. MATE THANK YOU ;)

Only the edited Launcher.exe.config file will MIGHT be overwritten. The mod folders will not be.

Oh, I agree with you...At this point, COD is a dramatic disapointement compared to what was "promised" by 1C....Photorealistic ...Oleg's statement...More than 50 planes over London...Hightech engine with every bells and whistles...Super 3D clouds and dynamic weather...hum...
But beeing embarrassed by a quick fix that removes features so we can at least dogfight over water...? Like I said, if 1C had done that themselves,
then they would have faced a big embarrassement...;)

Salute !

I got a big improvement in every situation over water, land and down low strafing London. Still the occasional hitch as textures are swapped in GPU Vram but 40-45FPS strafing London in cockpit view is a huge improvement. I have 64FPS external view at building level in London. Over water Im at 100FPS consistently.

I now also have all graphics options set to max including unlimited buildings with roads and grass on & shadows off with no AA. No SSAO and No Mipmaps @ 1920x1080.

Experimenting with different settings with the game paused in London at building level with an external view, shadows is the heaviest overall impact on FPS performance, Roads and Grass are next followed by number of buildings. AA is a big FPS hit for cockpit view but not so much external, seems the AA is pretty much limited to the cockpit details.

All the other settings only vary avg FPS by 2-3FPS each compared to 10FPS+ improvement by turning off various check box options. The trees and building details seem to effect the smoothness of play but not the overall FPS too much at least on my system.

With SSAO off and some coding optimisation for texture swaps, Mipmapping and texture sizes from 1C I think the issues can now be quickly resolved for the majority of users!

System Spec
i7 950 @ 4.6Ghz
6GB DDR3 @ 2000Mhz
4 x 5870 GPU @ 1000/1300 (2 x 5870 + 5970)
2 x 128GB Vertex2 SSD RAID 0

Huge improvement on a Q6600, 2gb DDR2, GTX260 low end job. Using a lower res than desktop but getting playable 35-45 over land with shadows on, low trees and medium shading. Previously I was getting 7fps. still stutters a fair bit down low, but the 8gb ddr3 that I've got on the way aught to look after that.

One thing though, I notice land textures are very blurry at altitude. Would disabling some part of the mod fix that?

Good BE Hardware article that both describes and shows the effect of SSAO on various scenes and video cards.

I wonder why 1C thought this was a useful effect for a flight sim? Looks to me like its most suited to first person shooters.

http://www.behardware.com/news/10344...with-ssao.html

you aren't alone, it look like to me too....
very useful in COD:rolleyes:

The only area its really noticable in CoD is in regards to the grass, it helps makes them look like they are casting a shadow. Without SSAO the grass just looks like it pops out of the terrain. However its not worth the performance hit at all.

I know nothing about SSAO, but wikipedia indicates that the method has the following advantages:

• Independent from scene complexity.
• No data pre-processing needed, no loading time and no memory allocations in system memory.
• Works with dynamic scenes.
• Works in the same consistent way for every pixel on the screen.
• No CPU usage – it can be executed completely on the GPU.
• May be easily integrated into any modern graphics pipeline

If framerates increase when SSAO is turned off, doesn't this indicate serious issues between the game code & most GPU's?

stutter-clutter
 

This mod points in the right direction. I was actually playing this game for the first time a whole evening long and really enjoyed it. Its actually very immersive, when everything will run as supposed. Combat feels much more real than in 1946, at least for me...

About SSAO: TOW: Korea as an example was only playable after I shut it off. This one is very heavy on GPUs in general, and not worth the gain in IQ. I preferre good made mid-res textures....And for a flight-combat-sim its useless most of the time anyway.

The biggest hog for me now: Buildings seems to show allways full detail, even on the lowest setting. Sure its incredible attention to detail, and looks very good. But fluid skimming is not possible at the moment. Less is more...

LODS handling in general should be more aggressie IMHO. Not to the extend of 1946, but a bit more would not hurt....

Thanks a lot to all involved in polishing up this gem

Marcello

Hmm SSAO is an item listed in the NVIDIA control panel. however when I try to create a profile for it it says "not supported for this application" and in Global settings its OFF anyway.

Though pointing to COD launcher.exe results in the FC2 Launcher.exe icon appearing so whether its really looking at COD or FC2 who knows.

So maybe ? it can be done through the Nvida CP ?

NVIDIA link:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/7...occlusion.html

Hi,

just tried the NOSSAO mod and performance increased a lot on my rig.
Now i just have to get rid of stuttering and it is almost perfect :)

The AO setting in nVcpl for Heaven (Unigine) is greyed out as well, but, in the Heaven cpl turning of AO makes a huge difference FPS wise, but starkens up the image


it points to the DCS launcher, not il2

Why does it point to the DCS launcher ? When I set up the profile I pointed to the correct path for COD launcher.exe. Pain that you cant modify an entry and therfore see the path.

I might try renaming the FC2 launcher.exe and see what happens.

thanks kegety for this great mod (if he read this topic). He made in the past great mods for Operation Flashpoint and Arma too. Maddox team needs personal like him.

Re naming the FC2 Launcher.exe allows the COD Launcher.exe icon to appear in NVIDA CP. However the Ambient Occlusion setting is still greyed out and no selection is possible. Deleting the COD profile and relying on the Global profile and turning OFF Ambient Occlusion in that doesn't result in any increase in performance on my system.

Where does NVIDIA control panel get its info to know if the setting is available ? Does it interogate the exe file somehow or is it something that is simply listed in the driver ? ... implying that the latest driver would be required that has the COD variables in it ?

Thanks to all who helped me and for sure kegety.

Really great modders here. After install there is a huge improvement for me too.

Great!

Salute

Looks like I'm able to run CoD at low settings now even with my unsupported graphics card by using the lowtex and nossao mods. S!

Just have to try out some settings and places like London now :D

I don't like hitting the ground/water all the time just because of the lack of shadows. If there's any way to have shadows on, but self shadowing off (especially in cockpit), I'd like to know how.

But I can bet it will run like hell when I'll get me a new 6950 :D

Thank you Finland! (Kegetys)

About 10fps increase here.
Ables me to run the game with shadows now.

The no mipmaps is making the launcher to fail. Tried 10 times now...
Had to exclude that one.

With respect to Ambient Occlusion support in NVIDIA control panel it comes from within the driver. I just read on the Nvidia latest WHQL driver the following:

"Visual Quality

* Adds ambient occlusion support for one of the most popular games of the year: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Ambient occlusion improves the quality of lighting, shadows, and depth perception in many parts of the game. Learn more on GeForce.com."

They also say its around a 30-35% performance hit:
http://www.geforce.com/#/News/articles/starcraft2ao

So I guess 1C needs to "liaise" with NVIDIA to get COD listed then hopefully it can be simply turned off that way.

@ Ivank...

Thanks for the feedback.


Interesting that changing the .exe name allows the profile to stick... maybe it is a date thing?

I only made comparison to Heaven and (other) game settings, which all have the nVcpl AO setting greyed out... yet with Heaven the option is still greyed out but there is a AO on/off tick in it's cpl.

I remember Luthier mentioning they may well have to get with nVidia, (could this be why?) though disabling it made the images more stark... possibly also for (I suspect) Anti-Aliasing being applied to all those trees (which is a 10fps hit in itself).


I do recall finding the nVidia profiles a while back and saw they do have the (particular) .exe path listed, when being curious about DCS BS and FC2 both having the same .exe name, but for the life of me I can't find them now.

I made the most epic air battle , I had groups and groups of He-111's , 109 escorts and 30 odd spitfires attacking at 4am. With the rising sun , tracer fire and explosions and fps running an average of 89 it looked brilliant!

Excellent improvement with Kegetys mods, he's the man once again.

S!

No more "in bed with nVidia", PLEASE! Original IL-2 had that and was a pain to those who did not have a "green" card. Sure making SSAO an option would solve this and/or contacting AMD on this how they support SSAO.

Anyways, using lowtex and nossao mods now = bliss :) For those with problems, clear the cache before enabling these mods/fixes.

solving it effectively would be bliss... turning it off (with side effects) isn't

SSAO gives me problems with "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" (fps fall). It needs to be optional.

ssoa gives " little bit faked soft shadows" or in other words: a littel bit darker scenery with a great performance hit.

I compared the fps in first test flight on open water

without mod: 72fps
-mod=nossoa: 104fps

all settings @highest.
Now we need working antialiasing. It looks horrible with 2xAA or no AA on 22" monitor.

The nivdia control panel AO is a driver level AO that adds AO to games that originally didn't have it such as Source Engine games and some others. It doesn't toggle any feature within the game engines, it adds one, much like using AA on a game that doesn't support it within the engine, like il-2.

More recent games using dx9,10 or 11 have AO as part of the engine, like Crysis, Arma2, and now CoD. Most have options yo turn it on and off as it is a per pixel post processing filter, so as you increase Rez and add pixels you add more and more overhead.

Could some PLEASE explain where to put the mod folders? I have read the instructions, added the new dll, added the command line parameters and read and tons of posts, but it is not at all clear to me. Do the mod folders go in the game folder or the install folder? Are they one and the same?

Just a simple folder path would be much appreciated - thanks.

PPP

Tried out now with Medium instead of low models and shadows on. It's like 50 instead of 60fps, not that huge hit. In General London is now like the rest before which is almost fluid now. I might also try out some more options and 1280 res instead of 1024... :D

At least I'm able to gain my first experiences until I've got a better card.

http://home.arcor.de/eldur/bilder/cl...od-files-1.jpg http://home.arcor.de/eldur/bilder/cl...od-files-2.jpg

Launcher.exe.config:

Great mod. Now flying quick mission Bomber intercept over London without problems! Controls are responsive as they should be.
+1

Thanks so much, really appreciate the help, +1.

Will give this another try now. I'm hoping my initial install was wrong be because I noticed NO improvement at all.

PPP

Did all the mods as recommended and yes,there was great improvement. The game runs much smoother now. Intercepting bombers over the channel was great. Controls were responsive enough. it is still not perfect but definitely these mods made a huge difference on my machine. The game is playable.

The first time I tried it I failed.. I did not get the original Kefety.dll file (his sfsMOD from the original web link) Once you get that folder it has a readme that has the EXACT edit you need to make in RED text, you can just cut and paste it

Very nice!! trying with Windows 7 x64 and huge improvement!!!!!

Thanks for this,

Did some runs over London free flight with 8 110's and then another with 2 Tigers and although there was a little stuttering - things were fluid.

1680 x 1050
Intel E8400 @ 3Ghz
ATI 4870 1Gb Vid Card
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
SSD 120Gb primary drive and 1Tb 10k Secondary drive (COD Installed there).
4Gb Ram

running -mod=nossao -mod=lowtex in steam game start options.

All settings on High with 2xAA

:rolleyes:

Personally I think this mod is not really fixing anything it is mealy hiding/reducing the affects of the fundamental problem with how building LOD’s are handled and how building are loaded into the game.

There is no point in making the highest detail LOD available when you select “lowest detail buildings” there is no need to have building popup at close range followed by rapid LOD change until you get the highest LOD close by because building detail only affects the range that the LOD’s are seen rather than effectively just blocking the most detailed LOD’s and thus naturally limiting higher detailed 3d LOD modals, big texture and normal maps being loaded, if you only reduce the LOD range then you still have to load all the big textures and normal maps.

It would also have made more sense that if “flying” other than when one bailed out that the highest detail LOD was not available anyway as that detail is irrelevant >100mph >100ft

The only MOD which has a major impact is the nossoa MOD. That particular graphics shader is simply terrible in terms of the horse power needed to run it. In a perfect world, it would be great to be able to use it to get that last 5% of effect.. but not at a cost of 50% performance.. And thats NOT just related to this game, the developers of the effect warn that it will cost at least 35% performance hit..and they were not kidding :)

All the "MOD" is doing is turning off this particular lighting effect..its not altering or tweaking the game graphics engine at all.. It would be like a mod that turned off FSAA..

Just curious , is this mod / tweak for english users only? I'm just thinking for Russians especially it would need to be written in 'gobble-dee-gook' lettering. Or can they just copy and paste this into their russian written config file. Is theirs even the same?

and which LOD's do you think "SSOA" has a natural hit in performance on, complex LOD with large textures/normal maps thus have small texel size and more normals to be perturbed and more chances of more pixels being occluded to various degrees thus require more sampling?

Worked for me! Over London yesterday was 20 FPS @ 1280 x 800, now this at 1680 x 1050!
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...4-11_00001.jpg

It works for the Russian version as well..those files are in English

Over water I can smoothly fly at 1920x1080 and nearly maximum settings.

Over land I have a lot of stutters and FPS are a bit lower, flyable but for the stutters.

AMD X4 3,5
GTX 460 1Gb
4Gb RAM

However, in game fonts are now FUBAR and strange characters appear.

I didn't see any improvement. I don't think the mods are working for me.
What could I have done wrong? I've loaded it in like 3 times but it doesn't look any different to me visually.

In similar topic on sukhoi.ru, it was said, that option to disable AO will probably appear in next patch.

since im a pc-noob i don't wanna mess around the exe files and such. but i do hope that 1C can somehow without being hurt use the findings of kegetys and put it in a regular steam patch improving the game for everybody.

kegetys did some amazing stuff for ArmaA so i hope his magic can do some good with CoD!

to check if the mod loader was working I ran it up with the -debug switch, if it's working it will create a _debug folder in your IL2 game dir. Just put the switch in and run the game to the title screen, then quit and check for the folder.

If it's there it means it's working and should load mods provided you have the Mod dirs in the right place and named correct and the lines in the launcher.exe.config.


Then delete the folder and remove the switch.

-debug command does nothind new dir for me? either IL2 directories

I know my mods are working because i see shimmering if i use NOMIPMAP mod.

That would mean the mipmap mod is working.. I don't see any real difference with the nossoa mod running others than a huge FPS jump I think that just running the nossoa and the lotex mods are all anyone would need at this time.. the no mipmap mod seems like it might cause some stability issues for some people too..so why bother..

And ofcourse the location of the conf.ini is in
C:\Users\yourname\Documents\1C SoftClub\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\

Not in the root directory.. well actually the one that work ;)

Well that's it I am not going to buy a game that already been hacked. So I guess I'm done with spending money on IL-2

I had problems at first getting it to work properly even though I did everything according to the original post. Didn't notice any improvement at first try.

Then I read somewhere that the cache file in the game folder could be the problem.

So what I did was:

In steam - Right click on the game name under your Library, then choose -> Properties -> Local Files -> Defragment Cache Files.

Went from ~25fps to 65fps average in soloflight, pretty impressive boost I'd say.

Thank you Rocka, defragging cache is a very helpful tip.

Got a modest improvement (my NV 330 is not a strong GPU) but went from 18 to 27 in BF 109 cockpit view over the channel. Which is from unplayable to playable.

It hasn't been hacked, it's been modded.

I just installed nvidia beta drivers 270.51 and did defrag of game cache files and my average fps went up by 10...but....game is still not smooth at all and stutters badly....I was thinking...whats about sound options...only basic options there...

Using the same drivers too.

Not much to do about the sound atm I guess, except turning the (very annoying) voices off I guess ;)

Biggest fps killer for my rig atm is the shadows option (not the land shading though).
Hate to turn it off casue the game is so pretty with shadows enabled, but atm I loose about 20-25 fps and the stuttering becomes very annoying.

Well, no thanks I done with mods look at IL2 there are way too many mods and different version loaded on my machine. Its crazy.

I was hoping that at least that CoD would have been one size fits all.

I am soooooooooooooooooooooo done with mods.

Very disappointed after 7 years.

Il-2:CoD was created for mods according to Oleg. This was the original plan.
They promised however to limit online to authorized mods only.

Apparently, Steam sets it back to one size fits all, at least in multiplayer ?

Hacked? What are you talking about? If I told you to turn off Anti Aliasing in a game would you say I hacked it? Thats what this does, it turns off a particular graphics shader that is KILLING fps at the moment..