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IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover IMPRESSIONS

J

Joseph Merrick

Member
http://www.abload.de/img/cliffsofdover3fnho.gif


He-he. Actually, I'm really really seriously glad I noticed this earlier. The original plan I had was to go into Cliffs of Dover without having read any impressions or other bullshit the horrible IL-2 community had dumped into the 1C forum about the game. But I ended up on there a little while ago anyway, my box pre-order hasn't even shipped yet--how long could I possibly stay away hehe, it couldn't be that bad getting the temp on the amount of bugs and terrible performance anyway. The IL-2 community is one that is guaranteed to have a ton of people on ancient computers, so it would potentially be a lot of hilarity to observe on there. And then I notice the technical problems or activation subforum whatever it's called and a shit ton of threads about steam.

So at least now I only got dangerously close to having my heart explode out of my chest, and I'm pretty sure I managed to successfully cancel my pre-order, at least it still hasn't shipped yet. So it looks like I'll be ok. Think so. Because seriously if I had been sitting there the box just cracked open flipping through the manual and in the installer and the steam log in bullshit had popped up in the middle of it I would have died instantly. Shit is no joke man.

Fucking hell. I'm going to stop buying PC games completely. Seems so. 1C is releasing steam only games, Paradox is releasing steam only games. PC is fucking dead man.
 
K

Keyser Soze

Member
I don't think that graphic is flashy enough to effect people with epilepsy, but people should not posting fucking shit like this.
 
S

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
I've seen people say that they won't buy a PC game unless it's on Steam. I can see why. I throw the games on a portable hard drive and they just work. Everywhere. Some of them even put your saves in the cloud. Steam is one of the few DRMs that doesn't fuck you in the ass.
 
C

ClovingWestbrook

Banned
Joseph Merrick said:
http://www.abload.de/img/cliffsofdover3fnho.gif


He-he. Actually, I'm really really seriously glad I noticed this earlier. The original plan I had was to go into Cliffs of Dover without having read any impressions or other bullshit the horrible IL-2 community had dumped into the 1C forum about the game. But I ended up on there a little while ago anyway, my box pre-order hasn't even shipped yet--how long could I possibly stay away hehe, it couldn't be that bad getting the temp on the amount of bugs and terrible performance anyway. The IL-2 community is one that is guaranteed to have a ton of people on ancient computers, so it would potentially be a lot of hilarity to observe on there. And then I notice the technical problems or activation subforum whatever it's called and a shit ton of threads about steam.

So at least now I only got dangerously close to having my heart explode out of my chest, and I'm pretty sure I managed to successfully cancel my pre-order, at least it still hasn't shipped yet. So it looks like I'll be ok. Think so. Because seriously if I had been sitting there the box just cracked open flipping through the manual and in the installer and the steam log in bullshit had popped up in the middle of it I would have died instantly. Shit is no joke man.

Fucking hell. I'm going to stop buying PC games completely. Seems so. 1C is releasing steam only games, Paradox is releasing steam only games. PC is fucking dead man.
Click to expand...
All that I can say is :D
 
A

Alex Connolly

Member
I had to bow down to Steam for RUSE, Joe. But keep fighting the good fight. I'm locked out of my legitimately-purchased and imported copy of Homefront PC because it's "not released in my region" (Japan). No mention of a Japanese PC release, either.

And yes, jokers, I actually want to play multi Homefront.
 
F

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
Absolute garbage. Avoid at all costs. Seriously.

It disgusts me that anyone thought they could release the game in it's current state.

With every graphics option set to maximum, it looks like a game released 3-4 years ago on the PC. It doesn't look terrible, but it's not by any means pushing the envelope of graphical fidelity that can be accomplished on modern PCs.

I've been playing A-10C, the latest Eagle Dynamics sim for the past month on my current box. It looks amazing and runs at a steady 30-50 FPS with maximum detail settings @1680x1050 and 2x AA.


Here are my impressions of IL2:Cliffs of Dover:

I dicked around with the settings last night for about 4 hours trying to get this thing to perform with any morsel of visual fidelity. The only time it got to a steady 25 fps was over the English channel.

It also constantly hitches over land even at low settings every time it loads an object. This causes a constant stream of half second hitches that makes flying impossible.

For what this game is doing visually, there is absolutely no excuse for this performance. My rig can run everything released in the past year at 1680x1050 with maximum details at a steady 30fps. On top of that, almost everything released in the last year (or for that matter three-four years) looks better than this game.

It's an unoptimized mess.

Boot up Just Cause 2, then tell me you can't have an engine of this scope that looks amazing and runs at a fantastic frame rate on a mid-range PC.

My specs:

i5 2.77 quad
4 gig RAM
Win 7 64
5770 latest drivers
 
S

Sethos

Banned
FlyinJ said:
Boot up Just Cause 2, then tell me you can't have an engine of this scope that looks amazing and runs at a fantastic frame rate on a mid-range PC.
Click to expand...

Even Wings of Prey could be used as a comparison, that game looks amazing and the performance is just above and beyond fantastic, so completely smooth. The simulation aspect can be discussed obviously but purely from an engine point of view ...
 
F

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
Sethos said:
Even Wings of Prey could be used as a comparison, that game looks amazing and the performance is just above and beyond fantastic, so completely smooth. The simulation aspect can be discussed obviously but purely from an engine point of view ...
Click to expand...

I actually wanted to edit my initial post to mention Wings of Prey.

It is based on the same engine and code base of the original IL2. From that it was enhanced with multiple improvements, and it looks absolutely phenomenal. It also runs at 60fps @1680x1050 with 2x AA on my current box.

What the hell happened to the core IL2 team? They've been working on this game for eight years. After all that time, they not only made a game that looks worse than Wings of Prey, but one that plays at a frame rate ten times slower.

It boggles the mind what happened here.
 
J

Joseph Merrick

Member
Sethos said:
Even Wings of Prey could be used as a comparison, that game looks amazing and the performance is just above and beyond fantastic, so completely smooth. The simulation aspect can be discussed obviously but purely from an engine point of view ...
Click to expand...
Hehe. And the new MMO in that series could never fail as hard as Cliffs of Dover, even as an april fools gag. How far 1C and Maddox have fallen with this release (ubisoft not so much, I expect dogshit from them).
 
Z

Zenith

Banned
EJ-C1.jpg

c9be2636.jpg

shot032.png

shot369.png


What's with the lighting? Don't know what settings they're on but as they're taken from the beauty shot thread I assume high. Wings of Prey puts this to shame.

Anyone know the inside story about Oleg's departure? Can't find any mention of it on Il-2 forums.
 
J

Joseph Merrick

Member
Hehehe, is that the epilepsy filter in effect?

Zenith said:
Anyone know the inside story about Oleg's departure? Can't find any mention of it on Il-2 forums.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that naturalpoint guy was the only mention of it I found. Apparantly his name is not even in the game's credits (someone confirm this please)? Heh!
 
J

Joseph Merrick

Member
PjotrStroganov said:
What's this epilepsy thing?
Click to expand...
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=19418

Google translated post from Ilya on sukhoi.ru

"In our game there is a wonderful new feature that saves you all from epilepsy. It is made at the request of the Western publishers, Yubisofta.

Since epilepsy is caused by a rapid flashing of the facilities, and flight simulator is basically a genre of fast flickering objects, the epilepsy caused all: propeller, shooting, explosions, sun, flying airplanes, transportation machines, entry into the hangar, flying at low level, and etc .

Despite the fact that in the old IL-2 it was more an epileptic, new requirements were introduced only last year. We perelopatli entire game because of this unfortunate epilepsy.

The main protivopripadochnaya shell, which is above everything that was done two weeks ago, the total despair. It compares each previous frame with each frame and compares the brightness of the pixel by pixel, and if it is too large, averaging pixels to give pleasing epileptic-limits. This crap brakes at the ground, and does not work with cards SLI. Off with her we can not yet make it optional, too, can not yet.

Without it Yubisoft refused to publish the game.

But as the 1C in general all the same, cause you have a game fits or not, we are urgently looking for a way to cut it all on the Russian version. It is necessary to assure Yubisoftu and give them a check that off in Russia will not allow Western epileptic somehow disable this thing at home."
Click to expand...

There is supposed to be a on/off switch for it in the game now, no idea though (as I don't own the game and don't intend to ever play it, also good news for everyone keeping up-- my boxed copy cancellation was confirmed early today!)
 
P

PjotrStroganov

Member
Sounds like a problem the Wipeout HD team also had to cope with.


Anyway, after having read up on it, one can conclude they released a horribly unfinished game. But who is at fault? Ubi for pushing for a release or IC for not having their act together and taking their sweet time?
 
J

justin.au

Member
My brother bought this game and was playing it on his beastly computer (mine is no slouch, but his is better). On med-low settings the framerate was awful, and bordering on the unplayable. On max, the game was a slideshow.

How did they get it so wrong?
 
K

kamspy

Member
justin.au said:
My brother bought this game and was playing it on his beastly computer (mine is no slouch, but his is better). On med-low settings the framerate was awful, and bordering on the unplayable. On max, the game was a slideshow.

How did they get it so wrong?
Click to expand...

What region is it available in?

Are the perf problems related to single threaded design? That seems to be a common theme with Easter Euro stuff.
 
EviLore

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
Crap, that's terrible news :/

Hopefully it can be patched. Any impressions outside of the performance? Does it look to be worthwhile if they can address the performance issues?
 
D

Dead Man

Member
EviLore said:
Crap, that's terrible news :/

Hopefully it can be patched. Any impressions outside of the performance? Does it look to be worthwhile if they can address the performance issues?
Click to expand...
Indeed. Seems I'll be waiting a while, even if I could run it on my computer.
 
J

Joseph Merrick

Member
EviLore said:
Crap, that's terrible news :/

Hopefully it can be patched. Any impressions outside of the performance? Does it look to be worthwhile if they can address the performance issues?
Click to expand...
here's the patching roadmap from Ilya, http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=247765&postcount=1

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!
Click to expand...

so, 2-3 weeks for proper multicore and fixed terrain/buildings/trees performance.
 
S

Sober

Member
Damn, if we switched all instances of IL2 and 1C with Civ V and Firaxis, this is probably a copy and paste of basically any post from CivFanatics ...
 
EviLore

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
Joseph Merrick said:
here's the patching roadmap from Ilya, http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=247765&postcount=1



so, 2-3 weeks for proper multicore and fixed terrain/buildings/trees performance.
Click to expand...

I'm in for the long haul with this one, so a few weeks to clean up critical issues isn't the end of the world if that holds true. I accept that they're working hard on it and the circumstances are probably due to publisher pressure.
 
J

Joseph Merrick

Member
Sober said:
Damn, if we switched all instances of IL2 and 1C with Civ V and Firaxis, this is probably a copy and paste of basically any post from CivFanatics ...
Click to expand...
I doubt Civ V was in as bad shape as this seems to be? it's not like they took a different direction with this game, it's just really bugged.

EviLore said:
I'm in for the long haul with this one, so a few weeks to clean up critical issues isn't the end of the world if that holds true. I accept that they're working hard on it and the circumstances are probably due to publisher pressure.
Click to expand...
yeah, if it wasn't steam only I would definitely still have bought it. and considering the amount of support old IL-2 received. Ubisoft being complete buttplugs hopefully won't hurt them too much in sales and they'll be fine to do a few expansions as well.
 
S

subversus

I've done nothing with my life except eat and fap
That's not the answer from Shevchenko I was hoping for. Somebody has said that Ilya will post on 1C forums why they had such major fuck up in the first place but I guess that's it. I was pretty interested to learn if it is usual project mismanagement or publisher's pressure.
 
G

ghst

thanks for the laugh
subversus said:
That's not the answer from Shevchenko I was hoping for. Somebody has said that Ilya will post on 1C forums why they had such major fuck up in the first place but I guess that's it. I was pretty interested to learn if it is usual project mismanagement or publisher's pressure.
Click to expand...

after waiting 7 years, maybe a few more alarm bells should have rung when the announcement came that ubi was publishing the game and it would be available in 3 months.
 
S

Shawsie64

Banned
EviLore said:
Crap, that's terrible news :/

Hopefully it can be patched. Any impressions outside of the performance? Does it look to be worthwhile if they can address the performance issues?
Click to expand...

Absolutely.

Iv been playing for a few days and the FM is really good, all the little touches in the details are pretty amazing too.

Im running it fine on my rather humble PC too (planning on upgrading soon).

They are giving constant updates on the state of the current patches too, saying they have doubled the frame rates in a soon to be released patch.

When this thing is patched up and optimized its gonna be an amazing sim, cant wait :)

Also alot of people seem to be focusing on the graphics.. maybe its just me but graphics have never really been an issue for me and the comparisons to Wings of Prey aren't really fair when Cliffs of Dover has so much more going on with it under the hood.
 
K

kamspy

Member
multicore in 2011. How where they to know this technology would take off? We could be on 9.4Ghz Pentium 7s.
 
B

Billen

Banned
Such a shame they were pushed (?) to get this one out. Hopefully, they can get sales rolling within a couple of patches, which should also send a clear signal to the publishers that performance is what counts. As soon as they get it to perform well I will buy it.

But I sure as hell wont buy it as it stands now. I'll probably end up making engine sounds with my mouth while flying in Just Cause 2 instead.
 
F

fizzelopeguss

Banned
Zenith said:
What's with the lighting? Don't know what settings they're on but as they're taken from the beauty shot thread I assume high. Wings of Prey puts this to shame.

Anyone know the inside story about Oleg's departure? Can't find any mention of it on Il-2 forums.
Click to expand...

one is an arcade game that had a stylised look, the other is pure sim with high poly plane porn.
 
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