Graphical aspect preference ROF vs COD and other stuff

[flyingblind]

Well, I finally managed to download and install the RoF freebie. Don't think the problem was 777's end but for some reason the download always seemed to have a corrupted file or two which prevented installation. After a week or so of frustration I finally cracked it and it is now up and running.

Haven't really flown it yet just loaded a quick mission and let it run on auto pilot to see what it looked like. I have to say it didn't look too bad at all. It seemed quite smooth on pretty high settings, the only compromise being HDR medium, although I hadn't got a fps counter running. The colours seemed fine to me and the towns looked better than I expected and I prefered the trees and grass to CloD. The ground textures seemed very bland like flying over parkland rather than countryside and the reflected glare off the planes seemed way overdone.The rivers and ponds look better and the grass is better but from what little I have seen of the clouds in RoF CloD is way ahead there. When you crash in RoF and it has gone quiet I could just hear a skylark which was brilliant. The sea in CloD is supurb although I haven't seen Rof sea myself except in video and screens and it seems poor by comparison. The load up screens and interface are far better in RoF but they don't matter so much when you are flying. I was also impressed by the look and DMs of the planes in RoF.

On the whole I think the whole look, atmosphere and feel of CloD is just more interesting and natural and to be honest if IC and 777 are going to spend another year or more of resources on developing a WW2 flight sim I wish it could have been spent on the CloD engine rather than the RoF one. But I am sure there were good sound economic and other reasons why that wasn't going to happen.

The question mark over the RoF engine is whether it can have really large maps and the level of detail, especially cockpits and the number of objects as CloD. Plus all the potential that exists in Clod for scripting missions. If it can't then in my view it will be a bit of a flop but only time will tell on that.

I also re-installed IL-2 1946 over the weekend and got it up to the fully updated HSFX mode and whilst I hadn't done all the tweaking I could do it trailed in third by a long way compared to the other two. In fact that really is the secret of all these sims - getting your system and game settings right.

Happy New Year everyone!