[Les]

Thanks for the compliments on the video's.

For those who are interested, I upped the plane count from 1004 to 1610 and found the results unuseable.

It's not that the plane's don't spawn or the overall frame-rate is too low to make a recording. What's happening is that there will be 11-14 seconds of smooth on-screen motion, then the game will freeze for about 2 seconds, before resuming, but with all the objects suddenly jumping from where they paused, to where they would be if they hadn't paused.

When you then speed that recording up to get normal looking movement again, those jumps that were happening every 11-14 seconds are now happening about every second or less, which is just unbearable to watch, with objects skipping in and out of sight and movement in general just stopping and starting too much.

I've tried lowering the resolution to a ridiculous degree, using windowed and full-screen modes, patched and unpatched versions of the game, all the things I can think of to stop that hitching effect, all to no avail. It looks to me at the moment like it's not GPU or CPU dependent, but has something to do with the game itself, but I don't know enough about that to be sure.

If the pausing every few seconds were spread out evenly, it wouldn't be a problem. If the game slowed down at a constant rate you could just keep putting more planes in until your frame-rates were just too low and things stopped moving altogether. But this cyclical pausing kills it way before that.

I also went back and had a look at some footage I recorded using only 1004 planes, and can actually see the same hitching effect happening in that too, just not as noticeably. That suggests to me the current maximum plane limit is in fact about 1000, while somewhere between 1004 and 1610 the pausing becomes unbearably noticeable.

Considering the frame-rates I was still getting even with the pausing, I'd guess that without it messing things up, I probably would have been able to load up at least a couple of thousand planes at once, using my current system (GTX580, i7920@3.8GHz).

So, yeah, maybe if others try it they'll get better results, but for me, that's about it. I wouldn't say I've done the definitive study on the subject, but I wanted to find out what the maximum plane limit was, for me, at the moment, and I did.

I imagine I'll keep loading up the 1610 plane mission every time there's a new patch just to see if it does anything for the pausing, but otherwise, I'll just have to settle for using what's available. Which isn't too bad. Once you get more than a couple of hundred planes in one spot, it's hard to tell how many are there anyway, and adding more is just a matter of how messy you want things to get. I might make some more video's, as some of the best stuff I saw while testing wasn't recorded, but it's a pretty labour-intensive and time-consuming process, so I don't know when I will, or if I will at all.

I will say this though, forgetting about the unrealistic tech-demo type set-ups I've shown in the video's I've made using this technique, the potential is there for others to use it to show, in ways we've never seen before, among other things, something of what large-scale aerial battles were actually like. The tools and resources are there just waiting to be used. It remains to be seen what people will do with them. All I know is I've had fun and seen things I've never seen before while playing with them.