Cliffs of Dover Video Thread V1.0 [Closed]

[W0ef]

Originally Posted by airsheep

how could you manage that your crosshair is in the middle of the gunsight?
after playing some minutes with this game my crosshair is going down , just like the pilot is "slides down" in his seat...so I can see only the top of the crosshair and it is a bit annoying because i cannot aim properly

Shift-F1

Nice vid by the way wilburnator

[airsheep]

Originally Posted by W0ef

Shift-F1

Nice vid by the way wilburnator

I know that option, but i mean after a few minutes my crosshair is moving down and I can do nothing ...

[badfinger]

I don't think I would have missed it, so a question about the vids.

Has anyone recorded a plane being shot up, from inside that plane? Can we see and hear damage, as it happens, from the POV of the crew? Or, is that even possible?

binky9

[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.

[pupo162]

well Les, thank you

i guess that wit htime and mroe powerfull CPUS 1600 planes as a limite sounds really reasonable. i cna only believe such a enourmous ammount to be needed to SIM a massive USAAF raid on germany. i remenber reading that something like 1000 bombers and 1500 escorts were used.

CLod would need a 500 limit to be able to sim the BOB i believe. ATM i cnat handle more than 50 or so.

[Les]

Originally Posted by pupo162

well Les, thank you

i guess that wit htime and mroe powerfull CPUS 1600 planes as a limite sounds really reasonable. i cna only believe such a enourmous ammount to be needed to SIM a massive USAAF raid on germany. i remenber reading that something like 1000 bombers and 1500 escorts were used.

CLod would need a 500 limit to be able to sim the BOB i believe. ATM i cnat handle more than 50 or so.

From the quick search I did, the biggest raid on London involved about a thousand German planes (400 bombers and 700 fighters), but I don't know how spread out they would have been in space and time, or how many British fighters met them, so to recreate something like that in a video made using 'Cliffs of Dover' could indeed just require using a couple of hundred planes, which is do-able now.

But to make it playable in real time...it's probably possible to work out what sort of theoretical system requirements you'd need based on how much I had to slow down the game to get decent frame-rates using my current system. Very roughly speaking though, as I had to slow down the game by at least a factor of four, you'd need a system approximately four times faster than what I'm using (GTX580, i7920). At the current rate of hardware development, that's still some years away yet, probably 5-10 years. Which, funnily enough, would fit the projected life-span of the new IL-2 series itself. It fits in too with how long the hardware took to catch up with the previous Il-2 series. So, yeah, if all goes well, we'll finally have the hardware to run the game at decent frame-rates with a realistic amount of planes some time towards the end of the game's life.

[Freycinet]

Thanks for your nice comments about my videos a few pages back. I'm putting another one up tomorrow...

[JG14_Jagr]

Originally Posted by Les

From the quick search I did, the biggest raid on London involved about a thousand German planes (400 bombers and 700 fighters), but I don't know how spread out they would have been in space and time, or how many British fighters met them, so to recreate something like that in a video made using 'Cliffs of Dover' could indeed just require using a couple of hundred planes, which is do-able now.

This is a reference about Allied raids..but can be used as a comparison...

Some of the largest raids employed 1000 bombers to strike targets in Germany. This bomber stream could be as long as 100 miles (161 km) and as wide as 1 mile (1.61 km). At 180 mph (290 km/h) over the target an air raid could last from 35-45 minutes.

[DoolittleRaider]

With regard to numbers of aircraft needed to be seen in a COD mission emulating raids of the Battle of Britain time frame, I should think that no more than a couple of hundred would suffice. If the Luftwaffe flew a maximum of 1500 "sorties" on some 'maximum effort' days across the breadth of southeast England against geographically separated targets, and over a duration of several hours, clearly no more than a few hundred would be at any specific location-in-space and time.

The USAAF attacks on Germany in 44 and 45 did number in excess of 1000 bombers, and perhaps an equal or larger number of fighters, but that stream of bombers and escorting fighters would likewise have been spread out in time-and-space. Thus, again, even an emulation of an air battle over Germany in '45 would not require more than a few hundred aircraft to be 'spawned' in a COD game/flightsim at any one point in time.

Therefore, I think that the investigation into 'smoothness' of the simulation in handling 1600+ simultaneous aircraft is interesting only in theoreticals. Of course, if it can be shown (tweaked) that such a massive number of aircraft can be generated smoothly, that bodes very well for extremely smooth, non-stuttering air battles of a realistic 300 aircraft or so.

imho

[Les]

Originally Posted by JG14_Jagr

This is a reference about Allied raids..but can be used as a comparison...

Some of the largest raids employed 1000 bombers to strike targets in Germany. This bomber stream could be as long as 100 miles (161 km) and as wide as 1 mile (1.61 km). At 180 mph (290 km/h) over the target an air raid could last from 35-45 minutes.

Hmmmm, tempting. And with the right choice of shots it could even be watchable, if not jaw-dropping. But without the kind of planes that were actually involved, able to fly at the right altitude, over the right kind of locations, it would have to be a fantasy scenario at the moment, and would take a lot of effort to do even then. Too much for me to do in any case, but it certainly gets the imagination going.