Friday 2011-02-04 Dev. update and Discussion

[luthier]

Originally Posted by Ironman69

One other quick question about sounds of CoD is if the recordings of engine noises we have now in-game are from actual recordings of real engine counterparts...ie. CoD's Daimler-Benz in-game sounds like a real Daimler-Benz? Does the complex sound engine need alot of CPU horsepower?

We couldn't record the real Merlin or a Daimler Benz or basically any real engine from BoB era due to a limited budget. There aren't any in Russia, and we couldn't fly out our sound engineer to the UK or Germany with all his equipment.

We do have the recordings of the real engines of course made with various Russian aircraft this summer. Using advanced SFX magic we transformed our samples to sound the way we needed.

Originally Posted by Biggs

with the rig you are using would you say the settings in the vid were "medium" or low? because if I didnt know any better I would have said they looked to be on the high end of the spectrum!... it looks that good!!!

All settings maxed out except no AA.

Originally Posted by nearmiss

It would be nice to have some explanation or discusson on AI performance

Anything you'd like to know, besides my answers below?

Originally Posted by addman

"They hadn't even seen us, I lined up behind one of them closed in to about 100 meters (!) and fired all my guns. It went down in smoke but the others didn't react so I shot down another one".

That's exactly the situation you can get with a low enough AI level. One or two updates ago we actually showed a Hurricane attacking some Italian planes. When I took the shots, I did exactly as described, except I got even closer. I shot down three out of six before the rest of the squadron reacted.

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

Hi Luthier, Thanks for the screenies I think they are the best we have seen so far, I understand that you have had problems with various features, but now these have been disabled within the game what kind of FPS can we hope to see if we turn on AA + AF in high res, does the game run smoothly at all times or are there any Black death track moments when the two planes collide. I can certainly live without all the features if the game is able to run real smooth. If you could just show us all some proper video (in cockpit, doesnt have to be fancy) and then give us the system specs it would help all of us who are waiting to spend our hard earned cash on upgrades or new systems just to run your game.

My system isn't good enough to run the game at full settings while flying over populated areas, especially over London.

That's actually the fault of the CPU. Even if we replace all objects on the screen with single pixels, it doesn't run any faster. There's just so many objects around you being tracked - buildings and trees - that constantly updating their location relative to you takes a lot of resources.

My card is mostly maxed out by textures of tons of different objects, againt in populated areas. Airfields are the worst in this respect. You're seeing a ton of high-res objects at the highest level of detail. The game uses dynamic texture loading, and you'd see various textures cycle through lower LODs, try to load a higher one, run out of memory, and swap back to lower detail.

We have specific graphic options for that which allow you to limit the number of objects on the screen and their detail. Going to medium object density is hardly noticeable, especially compared to Il-2. Going to medium object detail is even less apparent unless you're taking an up-close look at a truck or a building.


That's it, I'm out for the night. I might be back tomorrow!

[furbs]

thanks Luthier...the questions answered today are better than the whole update.
are the up and coming videos made on a high-end PC that can handle the load?
If it is can you post the specs the same time as the videos?

thanks

Your dual core and mid range graphics runs the game maxed out?

WoW. You can start scaling up already

[Dano]

Originally Posted by Hecke

Your dual core and mid range graphics runs the game maxed out?

WoW. You can start scaling up already

You might want to go back a page and read Luthier's post.

Originally Posted by luthier

All settings maxed out except no AA.

That's what he said, and the video was fluent. With that CPU. Above water, yeah, but anyway.

[Dano]

Originally Posted by Hecke

That's what he said, and the video was fluent. With that CPU. Above water, yeah, but anyway.

He also said:

Originally Posted by Luthier

My system isn't good enough to run the game at full settings while flying over populated areas, especially over London.

That's actually the fault of the CPU. Even if we replace all objects on the screen with single pixels, it doesn't run any faster. There's just so many objects around you being tracked - buildings and trees - that constantly updating their location relative to you takes a lot of resources.

My card is mostly maxed out by textures of tons of different objects, againt in populated areas. Airfields are the worst in this respect. You're seeing a ton of high-res objects at the highest level of detail. The game uses dynamic texture loading, and you'd see various textures cycle through lower LODs, try to load a higher one, run out of memory, and swap back to lower detail.

We have specific graphic options for that which allow you to limit the number of objects on the screen and their detail. Going to medium object density is hardly noticeable, especially compared to Il-2. Going to medium object detail is even less apparent unless you're taking an up-close look at a truck or a building.

[Skinny]

Originally Posted by luthier

My system isn't good enough to run the game at full settings while flying over populated areas, especially over London.

That's actually the fault of the CPU. Even if we replace all objects on the screen with single pixels, it doesn't run any faster. There's just so many objects around you being tracked - buildings and trees - that constantly updating their location relative to you takes a lot of resources.

Luthier, am I right concluding from the above that CoD (much like IL2) is mostly CPU bound, rather than videocard bound ? At least at "normal" resolutions (HD and below) and AA settings, IL2 doesnt care too much what videocard you have, you can increase resolution and AA and it barely makes a difference, even on my old 4870, but the CPU speed makes all the difference in the world, game performance scales almost linearly with CPU clockspeed.

Do you know how well the CoD engine makes use of 4 (or more?) cores, and whether or not that shifts the bottleneck towards the GPU again, or is even a Core i7 or whatever the main bottleneck?

[Trumper]

Originally Posted by luthier

We couldn't record the real Merlin or a Daimler Benz or basically any real engine from BoB era due to a limited budget. There aren't any in Russia, and we couldn't fly out our sound engineer to the UK or Germany with all his equipment.

We do have the recordings of the real engines of course made with various Russian aircraft this summer. Using advanced SFX magic we transformed our samples to sound the way we needed.

Am i to read into this then that we won't be hearing Merlins or D-Benz engines,how close is the synthetic version to the real thing?.
I wondered if the Merlin sounds could've been recorded from an external running engine on a test bed if access to the aircraft wasn't available.
Would the sounds be able to be modded/patched in the future if access and recording equipment were able to get access?
Thanks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fSEeu0hzLo