Il-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover Roadmap

[Strike]

Originally Posted by luthier

Hi everyone. I’m very sorry to see that some of you are having technical difficulties with the game. It pains me personally to see that these problems are preventing you from enjoying everything the game has to offer.

The team has been working at a frantic pace since mid-summer. I personally have been working 12+ hour days 7 days a week pretty much non-stop, with only a short breather around Christmas. Optimization has always been our top priority; for example, the game you are playing now is roughly twice as fast as the version shown at Igromir.

We are continuing to work at the same pace now, after the release – no weekends in sight. We are working very hard to make the game better, and we hope that even those of you who are unhappy with the state of the game are still able to see that it is worth the wait, and that you have faith in our ability to improve on your experience.

Here’s what we are working on at the moment:

1. Performance increase. Over terrain, the two things that slow things down the most are trees and buildings. We are currently in final stages of testing optimized buildings that almost double the FPS over London on a test machine.
Tree optimization is a little farther away. You will probably see changes in how trees are rendered, they’ll take longer to appear over terrain, but once again, performance increase should be significant.
If everything tests correctly over the weekend, both of these should be released by early to mid next week.

2. Enhanced multicore support. The mode that we unfortunately were not able to finish in time is sending all render to a dedicated CPU core. The mode is working but somewhat buggy. It easily doubles the FPS, and the performance boost is especially noticeable in larger missions with lots of stuff going on.
This is probably at least two to three weeks away, and we will probably do a short public beta of this major change before it’s made live to everyone.

3. Multiplayer. There is something in steam filters that prevents game servers from being found. This is only happening with live retail versions of the game. This apparently isn’t caused by us – hopefully it’s just a simple oversight somewhere and the fix will be a simple flick of a switch.

4. FM and ballistics. We have already addressed the issue where rounds appeared to leave aircraft sideways. This was caused by the difference between physical and rendered position of the aircraft, i.e. the rendered position lagged behind the actual aircraft position.
Our aircraft programmer has a huge bucket list of things to check, which he’s going over at a rather brisk pace.

5. Resurrecting SLI support. This is our next biggest priority; it’s done by the same programmer now in final stages of optimizing buildings. We are really hoping this will be a quick task, but I don’t have an ETA at this point. It’ll either be a couple of days, or a much longer undetermined amount of time if we have to submit versions to card manufacturers and ask for their input.

6. Bug fixes and support. We are reading this forum a lot and some Russian-language forums, and working very hard to address all issues as they are being reported.

7. New stuff – larger online maps, some new aircraft such as the 109E1 and E4 etc – are all in the pipeline too, but obviously we need to solve the bigger issues first and then deal with the freebies.


Thank you all for your continuing support! Just FYI, I’m constantly doing 20 things at once, so if I don’t respond to your question it doesn’t mean I didn’t read it! I’d love to spend more time on the forums talking to the community and answering questions, but unfortunately I just cannot do it as much as I should at the moment. Please bear with us, we do really want to make all of you very happy!

This is all the news I could dream of right now! Made my day! Thanks, I gotta go play some more

[Trumper]

Luthier ,please take the time you need, don't go making you or your colleagues ill,life is much more important.
Have a break ,it will make you feel better and probably in the long run make the work quicker and more successful.
The last thing anyone wants to hear is you or your colleagues have been made ill.
If you stick by the resolve to keep perfecting the sim that should be good enough for all here.

[Triggaaar]

Originally Posted by luthier

The team has been working at a frantic pace since mid-summer. I personally have been working 12+ hour days 7 days a week pretty much non-stop, with only a short breather around Christmas.

I can believe it. I've said in other threads, so sorry to repeat, but the game looks great, the potential is obvious, and I'm confident you'll have it working well in the next few months.

I am very disappointed we’ve lost the work you did on the propeller, and I imagine you’re more upset by it, and I’m just going to dream that one day you find a way of working something back into the sim.

Thanks again for what’s going to be my favourite game of the next 10 years.

[Flying_Nutcase]

Thanks for the update Luthier. It's really helpful to know what's going on behind the scenes.

[Wolkenbeisser]

Thanks Luthier

I belive you and your team can sort out the problems. You're doing a great job. I have faith to you and your team. But...

But what I DON'T get (I really don't understand this, please someone explain this to me!) is: HOW can someone release a game which stutters that much (up to a second every two seconds!) on a fast machine like this:

W7 64
i7 X980
GTX 480
12 GB Ram
Fast Vertex-SSD-HD with nothing installed except Avira and IL-2 CoD

And don't tell me, that you did not see the problems in advance. I'm sure you tested your game. You should have waited with the release the three or four weeks you're now using to correct.

Until now I can not play the game at all. I'll give it another try in a few weeks. Until then I'll play the old IL-2 1946 4.101

[jimbop]

Originally Posted by Wolkenbeisser

Thanks Luthier

I belive you and your team can sort out the problems. You're doing a great job. I have faith to you and your team. But...

But what I DON'T get (I really don't understand this, please someone explain this to me!) is: HOW can someone release a game which stutters that much (up to a second every two seconds!) on a fast machine like this:

W7 64
i7 X980
GTX 480
12 GB Ram
Fast Vertex-SSD-HD with nothing installed except Avira and IL-2 CoD

And don't tell me, that you did not see the problems in advance. I'm sure you tested your game. You should have waited with the release the three or four weeks you're now using to correct.

Until now I can not play the game at all. I'll give it another try in a few weeks. Until then I'll play the old IL-2 1946 4.101

It's playable for me now although not on high - see here. Still really looking forward to a patch, though!

[_Watchdog]

Originally Posted by luthier

Here’s what we are working on at the moment:

1. Performance increase. Over terrain, the two things that slow things down the most are trees and buildings. We are currently in final stages of testing optimized buildings that almost double the FPS over London on a test machine.
Tree optimization is a little farther away. You will probably see changes in how trees are rendered, they’ll take longer to appear over terrain, but once again, performance increase should be significant.
If everything tests correctly over the weekend, both of these should be released by early to mid next week.

Well that is interesting, for even if I have terrain turned to LOW I still cannot get playable framerates.

2. Enhanced multicore support. The mode that we unfortunately were not able to finish in time is sending all render to a dedicated CPU core. The mode is working but somewhat buggy. It easily doubles the FPS, and the performance boost is especially noticeable in larger missions with lots of stuff going on.
This is probably at least two to three weeks away, and we will probably do a short public beta of this major change before it’s made live to everyone.

So I can expect my framerate of 9FPS to go to 18FPS, is that an acceptable increase? What sort of multicore support are we talking here? Surely you are adding support for no less then 4 cores considering every man and his dog has at least a average quad core running their system.

3. Multiplayer. There is something in steam filters that prevents game servers from being found. This is only happening with live retail versions of the game. This apparently isn’t caused by us – hopefully it’s just a simple oversight somewhere and the fix will be a simple flick of a switch.

4. FM and ballistics. We have already addressed the issue where rounds appeared to leave aircraft sideways. This was caused by the difference between physical and rendered position of the aircraft, i.e. the rendered position lagged behind the actual aircraft position.
Our aircraft programmer has a huge bucket list of things to check, which he’s going over at a rather brisk pace.

What about rounds that don't appear to leave at all? I can hear the audible sounds of bullets firing, but there are no visible effects that indicate that you have actually fired your weapons.

5. Resurrecting SLI support. This is our next biggest priority; it’s done by the same programmer now in final stages of optimizing buildings. We are really hoping this will be a quick task, but I don’t have an ETA at this point. It’ll either be a couple of days, or a much longer undetermined amount of time if we have to submit versions to card manufacturers and ask for their input.

This is my biggest bugbear. Is it simply SLi support or are you also concentrating your efforts on Crossfire support also? In addition, where is the native support for multi-monitors? More and more people are playing with multiple monitors, yet programmers and developers (such as yourselves) aren't including native support for multiple monitors. This game looks absolutely terrible with multiple monitors, with the cockpit being all blown up and enlarged. It would be great if we could see multi-monitor support included by the developers rather then the likes of individuals and groups such as the Widescreen Gaming Forum. It's funny, my 5970 will chew through Crysis pretty well with 3 monitors, yet it cannot handle Cliffs of Dover, struggling to achieve 9FPS with all setting on either medium or low.

Thank you all for your continuing support! Just FYI, I’m constantly doing 20 things at once, so if I don’t respond to your question it doesn’t mean I didn’t read it! I’d love to spend more time on the forums talking to the community and answering questions, but unfortunately I just cannot do it as much as I should at the moment. Please bear with us, we do really want to make all of you very happy!

FYI, I believe I have a right to be disgruntled, considering I am not running a 3 or 4 year old system. My system stats are;

Intel 980X OC to 4.1GHz,
6GB of 2000MHz Ripjaws,
AMD Sapphire 5970,
256GB A-RAM SSD,
Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate

My system runs pretty well with every game on the market, yet I cannot play IL2 Cliffs of Dover. Why is it that games are rushed to market and are never actually finished? We pay our hard earned dollars for these games only to received something half finished and in some cases never actually finished (Operation Flashpoint 2 - Dragon Rising ring a bell).

I am crossing my fingers that the next patch delivers on some of the promises made here, however I would like to see more support offered towards Multi-GPU and Multi-monitor support. Yes, lets make sure the game runs smoothly first, but then we need to make sure it looks good as well.

[bongodriver]

WOW......why are people having such a negative reaction? I too have a fairly good system and have the fps problem, but I am completely calm, I don't mind having spent the money because at some point I would have done it anyway, so it isn't working well for now......so what.......they will fix it, in the mean time play any of the other games you enjoy which had early teething troubles, my life hasn't come to a standstill because COD is buggy for now, but I have to admit I have ended up spending alot of time on this forum, exchanging views and oppinions with a wide variety of wonderfull people.

please people....chill out! have faith that this will be fixed just like every other game (can anyone name a game that never ever needed a patch?)

[[RS]Boomer]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

wow......why are people having such a negative reaction? I too have a fairly good system and have the fps problem, but i am completely calm, i don't mind having spent the money because at some point i would have done it anyway, so it isn't working well for now......so what.......they will fix it, in the mean time play any of the other games you enjoy which had early teething troubles, my life hasn't come to a standstill because cod is buggy for now, but i have to admit i have ended up spending alot of time on this forum, exchanging views and oppinions with a wide variety of wonderfull people.

Please people....chill out! Have faith that this will be fixed just like every other game (can anyone name a game that never ever needed a patch?)

+100000000

[etzi]

You can not imagine why there are the negative reactions?

Do you have a loss of reality?

The game was released too early! I don´t say, that's the fault of 1C. Rather, I see the problem at Ubi.

I just hope that the IL2 series will not become a total loss.

Ubi has done it already in Silent Hunter 5, ruining the series.

Somehow CoD is actually the same, as if I buy a new car, that the first year only runs in first gear and I can only enter through the window.