Official Fulqrum Publishing forum - Can we get some Official comment on the news from Russia?

From the manual, chapter "Options - Video", page 17:

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoD Manual

Model Detail. Uniform setting applied to all moving objects in the world,
including aircraft, cockpits, ships, bombs, trucks, tanks, flak guns, etc. This
setting will have a strong effect on performance, while having perhaps the
most drastic effect on the visual quality of the game. Turning Model Detail
all the way down will make Cliffs of Dover look like a flight sim out of the
early 1990s!
We therefore do not recommend reducing Model Detail more than a notch or
two for anything but the lowest-end machines.

So it's not a bug, it's actually an intended super-low detail mode. What use does this have? Well, off the top of my head i can easily think of a couple:

1) Better market penetration among people with below minimum spec PCs. I don't know how much a regular wage is in the outskirts of Irkutsk, Siberia, or how easy it is to get a good gaming PC shipped there, but since team Maddox is also selling within Russia and they are a well known studio in their country, they are bound to want to accommodate that market too. And they should.

2) Movie making. We know the game can handle a medium amount of aircraft on the air but not a huge one. Assuming we want to make a movie with super-massive bomber formations we have two options:

a) Make multiple runs of the recorded track and get multiple takes from the same or multiple sorties, working with the camera angles and editing to fool the viewer into thinking there's 100 bombers plus assorted escorts and interceptors in the air

OR

b) Throw together a mission in the FMB that does have 100 aircraft simultaneously occupying the same part of airspace. Turn everything to that super-low detail mode to boost your frame rates and play through it like you normally would, then save the track.
Now you have a single source file to work with that contains everything you need, much easier and more streamlined for editing.
With the detail still super-low, you can watch the track and select/modify your camera angles just like in IL2, then save it with a different name so that it "keeps" the camera changes.
Finally, you set everything to full detail this time and let the game's direct-to-video non-realtime renderer to export it to .avi or whatever format it supports during the night while you sleep, we all know that exporting directly to video creates footage that doesn't suffer from rate rate loss.

This way we can make movies with more aircraft and higher visual quality than our PCs can normally handle: use lowest detail with '90s graphics to boost FPS during flying of the mission and track editing, then use maximum detail for exporting the track to a video file.