Hey all, thanks for your feedback, I wasn't really expecting that. It's good to know others are finding ways to enjoy the game too. After struggling with the buggier aspects of it myself, I just couldn't contain my enthusiasm after I hopped into that quick mission to record some stuff and ended up having such a great experience.
Earlier on I took a Spitfire for a low-level cruise down the Thames too, to check out the performance in London after the patch, and found that much more playable as well, averaging 20-25fps. I've just never seen so much detail in an off-the-shelf flight-sim before. It's the sort of thing people have been waiting for years to see, and there it is.
Hopefully the developers can keep optimizing and improving the sim to the point where everyone can get their individual issues sorted out and can get on board and have fun with it too.
The challenge now for me is to decide which part of the game I play with, when I get time to play it at all. Making missions, making video's, playing missions or campaigns, playing online, or just flying around looking at the scenery, it's all there and available right now, more or less.
My specs are -
GTX580 (1536MB VRAM)
i7 920 @ 3.8GHz
12GB DDR3 RAM
2x150GB Velociraptors in RAID0
Video settings are maxed out, but I've still got to see whether that's playable in the heavier action scenarios I might find in single missions and campaigns. I expect I'll have to turn some settings down at times.
I have Audio set to 'Ambiosonic', which I think is the binaural setting, as it sounds different to Stereo when heard through headphones. It has a fuller sort of sound to my ears. I've been hearing engine sounds I haven't heard in the IL-2 series before, but that might be due to new content, not (what I'm assuming are) the binaural Audio settings themselves.
I guess my system could still be considered top-end in some ways, but I really don't think you need to go all out on the tech side to make 'Cliffs of Dover' play well enough to make it worthwhile. It's meant to be scaleable after all, and some of the best parts of it aren't really hardware dependent anyway.
I understand people want to maximize their settings as much as they can, I do too, but I think sometimes too much emphasis is placed on the hardware and visual performance side of things. As some of us know from first-hand experience, some of the best times you can have are with the not so best looking of things. Just something to keep in mind perhaps. I'm big on the visuals, but there's got to be more substance to it as well, and a lot of what you get out of it in that regard is dependent on what you put into it. IMO, 'Cliffs of Dover', like the rest of the IL-2 series, isn't really a sit back and have it all dished up to you sort of experience. To get the most out of it you've got to make an effort to learn how to work with it. I'd only consider it a failure if it didn't reward that kind of effort. But I think, even in it's current state, it does pay off in that regard.
Of course, that's no excuse for making things un-necessarily difficult, or leaving things unfinished, but it's a give and take kind of thing. I'm still looking forward to some pretty fundamental fixes and improvements, but there's already a lot of stuff that makes the new title worth working with.
Anyway, gotta go, have been staying up too late with it and am falling asleep at the keyboard again.
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