Growing Irate with this Game

[NLS61]

Originally Posted by nodlew

I don't have a "high-end" system but it is decent, runs Crysis 2 on max settings without a hitch. So I guess I'll put in a word for those of us who "meet the system requirements" and had high hopes for this game.

I'm an old hand at Il-2, which was a great game, but required a great deal of know-how and experimentation and legions of dedicated modders to make it not only a great idea, but a rich, varied, realistic, and visually gratifying game.

Awaiting Cod with bated breath, I expected not only improved visuals and increased user options, but an improved and more solid game engine.

After spending 3 days tweaking this game and tweaking my system, dealing with crashes and bludgeoning my head against an insurmountable performance obstacle to playing the game over the land--either with decent-looking terrain and buildings or horrible-looking terrain and buildings--I have begun finally to curse this game and the people who foisted it on us all in its awful state, dashing hopes and crushing spirits of innocent flight-simmers on multiple continents.

Yes, I see the improvements and I see the potential built-in to the game and these things make me optimistic that ultimately Cod will inherit and surpass the Il-2 legacy, but the campaign should be playable by people who meet the minimum requirements (what else are they for?) out of the box with some compromises in graphical quality--and even with those compromises, the game should look pretty good, good enough to play and enjoy, not like a lump of sh.....t.

Like most, the game for me is only playable on any decent graphics settings while over the water. This is fun, but not what is advertised. And even safely out of sight of land, with settings turned up as far as they will go, the models look absolutely terrible at any distance due to the screwed up AA. It's hard to get immersed when I'm thinking "yuck".

And how did they manage to make the machine guns sound so bad? Or the tracers look so crappy? Or the hit effects on enemy airplanes so unimpressive? And why are all of the AA guns operated by invisible men? And what's up with the cotton-ball smoke effects? What is this? 1995?

Of course, without the performance issues, I would have taken those things in stride, knowing mods would sort them out. As it is, I'm peeved.

Performance, one hopes, can be improved by patches, and also, mods. So, in two years I expect the flight-sim community will have polished this turd until it gleams like a P-51 rolling off the factory floor.

In the meantime, I guess I'll be flying FMB missions out in the middle of the Channel and cursing under my breath.

Well normaly i think every body is intitle to a rant some time.
So you had yours.
Now how can we help with out your system specs?
And then I think Ubi is to blame for thinking up the minimum specs.
In defence of them normally the posted minimum will be only enough to successfully start a game up

Niels

[nodlew]

Windows Vista™ Ultimate (6.0, Build 6002) Service Pack 2
System Model: Inspiron 530s
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4600 @ 2.40GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.4GHz
Memory: 3326MB RAM
Nvidia 9800 Gt


Yes Hooves, I tried the kegetys mods and they did improve things, so now I can play over water with things looking pretty good. The campaign remains unplayable no matter what I do.

Robotek, as to what I should be "grateful" for, I think that is for me to decide.

Minimum system requirements are not the minimum system requirements to "start a game". They are the minimum requirements to "play a game". And if they are not, this is the first I have heard of it, and I have been playing computer games since PONG. I wrote a program for the TRS-80 in high-school, so don't play word games with me, sonny boy.

The minimum system requirements are there to tell people the range of computers capable of playing the game and they are a marketing tool in that they cause people within, even if tending toward the bottom, to spend money to buy the game. Successful computer games are made to function on a broad spectrum of hardware. Games that are made only to work on cutting edge systems miss out on a huge market share, probably the largest, which is people with mid-range systems.

Anyway, as you can see, with my system I in fact exceed the minimum system requirements.

[Helrza]

gday newlod. take a look at some settings ive posted in this thread:

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=20870

We have quite similar systems, so hopfully these might help also refer to the other thread i posted in my 1st post and use that with these settings let me know how u go. My mate has my old 9800gt and is runnin it good also

[Bewolf]

There also is a new beta patch due for release today, with further tweaking and optimization, including settings that were addressed by those mentioned mods. I'd download and check it this eve.

[Oldschool61]

Originally Posted by nodlew

Windows Vista™ Ultimate (6.0, Build 6002) Service Pack 2
System Model: Inspiron 530s
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4600 @ 2.40GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.4GHz
Memory: 3326MB RAM
Nvidia 9800 Gt


Yes Hooves, I tried the kegetys mods and they did improve things, so now I can play over water with things looking pretty good. The campaign remains unplayable no matter what I do.

Robotek, as to what I should be "grateful" for, I think that is for me to decide.

Minimum system requirements are not the minimum system requirements to "start a game". They are the minimum requirements to "play a game". And if they are not, this is the first I have heard of it, and I have been playing computer games since PONG. I wrote a program for the TRS-80 in high-school, so don't play word games with me, sonny boy.

The minimum system requirements are there to tell people the range of computers capable of playing the game and they are a marketing tool in that they cause people within, even if tending toward the bottom, to spend money to buy the game. Successful computer games are made to function on a broad spectrum of hardware. Games that are made only to work on cutting edge systems miss out on a huge market share, probably the largest, which is people with mid-range systems.

Anyway, as you can see, with my system I in fact exceed the minimum system requirements.

When they gave out the minimum specs I dont think they really knew what would be required as the game was so far from optimized that it was in all likely hood a guess.

Also what resolution are you running at??

[nodlew]

Thank you all for your helpful responses.

Helrza, I believe I have already copied and pasted your conf.ini settings (changing the process aff mask, of course)--I think I've tried every tweak currently proposed by anyone. The game is just barely playable with low terrain settings when launching from airfields near the coast, but stutters are still an immersion-killer, so I prefer to just play as far away from land as I can get at the moment, hoping that patches will make the campaign a more pleasant and less painful experience.

Oldschool, my native resolution is 1440 x 900, so that's the res at which I've been playing the game. Wide-screen, there is only one lower res really available to me, which I briefly tried. I don't think it made any detectable difference to performance, and the degradation of visual clarity was pretty bad. Maybe I should try that again.

I've disabled Aero, tried multiple page-file changes, used a flash drive to "Ready Boost" my OS, defragged the game and the HD, OC'ed my GPU (can't OC my CPU in any way with this MOBO), installed the performance mods, disabled all unnecessary services, created exceptions for the game folders and the .exe in my anti-virus, tweaked the NVCP no end, although I don't think NVCP has any effect on the game at present, tried all possible Options graphics combinations, tried setting process affinity and game priority in task manager, and installed the latest Beta drivers from NVIDIA.

I've been somewhat haphazard while attempting all of this, and I am sure there is a specific combination of all the above that would be ideal for my particular set-up, but like IL-2 1946, apparently, it is going to take a lot of research and experimentation to hit upon it. And the knowledge base for the research only exists as yet in a primordial form.

Good news about the patch, Bewolf--at least they are coming out quickly. Hopeful about giving it a try.

I don't think the process affinity mask is working for me. I have it set to 2, which should cause COD to run on my 1 core, leaving 0 for the OS. But tabbing out of the game, Task Manager shows Launcher.exe to be running on both cores. Setting affinity in task manager to use only core 1 causes the game to load missions very slowly, and I do not see any improvement over land. I see no difference setting a higher priority in TM either and that seems to cause audio sputters.

Does anything in NVCP work at all? What about Anistropic? Something I read about the game not being in true Full-Screen mode, and about that breaking driver imposed AA has me befuddled about all of that. Anyone know?

[TonyD]

Originally Posted by nodlew

...

Does anything in NVCP work at all? What about Anistropic? Something I read about the game not being in true Full-Screen mode, and about that breaking driver imposed AA has me befuddled about all of that. Anyone know?

Since the game runs in a 'pseudo' full-screen mode, AA doesn't work as it should. I have found that AF works, in that it gets ride of those black lines (texture joints) seen in the sea when the land detail is set to anything below 'high' (thanks, supernaturalist)

[Edit: no need to force AF anymore with the new update - lines are gone ]

[Oldschool61]

Originally Posted by nodlew

Thank you all for your helpful responses.

Helrza, I believe I have already copied and pasted your conf.ini settings (changing the process aff mask, of course)--I think I've tried every tweak currently proposed by anyone. The game is just barely playable with low terrain settings when launching from airfields near the coast, but stutters are still an immersion-killer, so I prefer to just play as far away from land as I can get at the moment, hoping that patches will make the campaign a more pleasant and less painful experience.

Oldschool, my native resolution is 1440 x 900, so that's the res at which I've been playing the game. Wide-screen, there is only one lower res really available to me, which I briefly tried. I don't think it made any detectable difference to performance, and the degradation of visual clarity was pretty bad. Maybe I should try that again.

I've disabled Aero, tried multiple page-file changes, used a flash drive to "Ready Boost" my OS, defragged the game and the HD, OC'ed my GPU (can't OC my CPU in any way with this MOBO), installed the performance mods, disabled all unnecessary services, created exceptions for the game folders and the .exe in my anti-virus, tweaked the NVCP no end, although I don't think NVCP has any effect on the game at present, tried all possible Options graphics combinations, tried setting process affinity and game priority in task manager, and installed the latest Beta drivers from NVIDIA.

I've been somewhat haphazard while attempting all of this, and I am sure there is a specific combination of all the above that would be ideal for my particular set-up, but like IL-2 1946, apparently, it is going to take a lot of research and experimentation to hit upon it. And the knowledge base for the research only exists as yet in a primordial form.

Good news about the patch, Bewolf--at least they are coming out quickly. Hopeful about giving it a try.

I don't think the process affinity mask is working for me. I have it set to 2, which should cause COD to run on my 1 core, leaving 0 for the OS. But tabbing out of the game, Task Manager shows Launcher.exe to be running on both cores. Setting affinity in task manager to use only core 1 causes the game to load missions very slowly, and I do not see any improvement over land. I see no difference setting a higher priority in TM either and that seems to cause audio sputters.

Does anything in NVCP work at all? What about Anistropic? Something I read about the game not being in true Full-Screen mode, and about that breaking driver imposed AA has me befuddled about all of that. Anyone know?

Just remember that anything you turn on to clean up the eye candy (AA or AF) will have an impact on your fps. 4X AA can lower your fps by 30-50%. As well as increasing your resolution. Im starting to think that most people here dont realize what effects fps. EVERYTHING effects fps especially resolution, AA, AF etc etc. AA and resolution have the biggest impact.

Originally Posted by Oldschool61

Just remember that anything you turn on to clean up the eye candy (AA or AF) will have an impact on your fps. 4X AA can lower your fps by 30-50%. As well as increasing your resolution. Im starting to think that most people here dont realize what effects fps. EVERYTHING effects fps especially resolution, AA, AF etc etc. AA and resolution have the biggest impact.

I have avg fps of 65-85 depends how many planes and what is near bit still game is not smooth at all, specially above the land...so its more about optimisation of the sim than our hardware

[nodlew]

Well, I'm back following my one week ban for telling one of the site administrators what I thought of him (wasn't a COD guy, and was unrelated to this game). It was definitely worth it, but from now on I suppose I will simply treat the individual in question as if he does not exist. Everybody wins.

Thanks all for your responses and advice in the meantime--I have read and utilized most of it. The latest patch has definitely improved things for my humble computer. By reducing the texture quality to High or Medium and turning the Land Shaders down to low, I'm able to actually play missions over terra firma that are smooth enough to enjoy, although I still get some stutters. I think one thing that improved performance for me was to turn AA off completely in NVCP. I have it set to 8x in the game options--something I might reduce, although I don't see much difference between 8x and 1x or any lower setting on my computer. I'll have to test it more.

The patch definitely makes the game possible to play and enjoy and really begin to appreciate all of the details at work.

Breathlessly awaiting the next patch, hopefully with the most glaring bugs repaired and perhaps greater performance enhancements.