It's official!

[Ian Warren]

Mark, in the hands off a good pilot , that Moth could have survived and really frustrated the hell 109 driver , the ruskys did the same with there Po2 s

[Kahu]

WARNING!!!! Dont buy this game yet it is cr@p!!! full of bugs, shame on you UBISOFT & CO for releasing this BETA rubbish

[AndrewJamez]

QUOTE (Kahu @ Mar 31 2011,5:31 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

WARNING!!!! Dont buy this game yet it is cr@p!!! full of bugs, shame on you UBISOFT & CO for releasing this BETA rubbish

Haaa, ive read a bit about it and thats enough. Apart from all the staggering B,S reports coming out i have managed to confirm that it only supports single core processors. What an absolute joke. We have all been fed B,S for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the past 5 years. I feel completely betrayed.

[AdrianPetford]

My copy arrived today much to my excitement. I had bought the £50 (c. 105 NZD) Collector's Edition on DVD as I avoid using downloaded products and their associated crapware wherever possible, only to find when I loaded the disc up that the game still requires use of Steam and registering a Steam account to work. So much for only needing an online connection to activate the game. Steam then proceeded to download a few hundred meg extra and after ten minutes I was finally ready to play.

Straight in, quick config of video and audio options as per my standard IL-2 install, into single player mode and one of their quick free flights. At last! The loading bar inched to the right as my anticipation grew. 6 years. Finally. Crashed at 95%.

Rebooted, same again. There was nothing in the manual so I looked on an IL-2 forum (!). Apparently under XP SP3 there is insufficient memory to load terrain with grass so this has to be unchecked in the options. Good job I'm not a new user and know the right places to look for such information.

I loaded it up again, finally looking forward to a flight. At last I was in a plane, but my joystick (Saitek Cyborg Evo, a very popular joystick family) was useless. Only the hat switch and throttle would work, nothing for ailerons, elevators or rudder. My long awaited debut flight in Cliffs of Dover was a Spitfire turning over gracefully in mid air and flying into the ground.

Back onto the forums again. If you have more than one USB device plugged in, it treats whatever it is as Joystick 1 (even if it isn't a joystick), the next as Joystick 2 etc etc. This had happened to me so I had to manually remap the controls. As hardly anything seems to be mapped by default anyway, it'll be a long and tedious process to get everything even to the same state as the original IL-2 was out of the box in 2001. Plus you can't edit the conf.ini file manually without disabling parts of Steam (again I had to find that out from a forum).

Once I was actually able to fly, I picked their single player free flight over the sea as I thought it would be a good test without having to render buildings, terrain, autogen etc. The screen was nothing more than a green mush with a circle of water (admittedly very nice looking water) directly under the plane! Forums to the rescue again. You have to set Forests to very low (?) to remove this error. But I was over the sea!

I've now, after most of the day, got a working sim. It does look very impressive with excellent aircraft modelling, cockpits with shadows, very good water and ground detail rendering but unfortunately the performance is so appalling it's unusable as a combat sim. With just me in the air and a simple flight over the sea I got 18-20FPS. The sightseeing trip over London managed 1FPS before dropping back to 0 (!) and causing the sim to die.

I have a fairly high end system (i7 overclocked to 4.0GHz, 6Gb RAM, GTX 295 with the only bottleneck being Windows XP 32) which runs IL-2 1946 at 1920x1080 at a permanent 60FPS and even FSX manages 60FPS in some situations. Even though I knew the new IL-2 would be hardware heavy, I expected far better than this. I dread to think how other users with mid range machines are faring.

The game clearly isn't ready or fit for purpose, the marketing campaign has been poor and surely sims should be trying to attract new users as well as those adept at tweaking? I would've been totally lost as a new user facing all the issues before it would even run. I expect I would have just thought the game didn't work or wasn't compatible with my system and abandoned it.

Apologies for the negative post but it's been a frustrating day after such a long wait! I have no doubt that, given time and patches IL-2 Cliffs of Dover will end up as a great sim as its venerable predecessor did, but at launch it is a disaster I'm sad to say. I doubt I'm even going to be able to use it without at least a couple of further patches.


Ade

[Naki]

Ouch! - that counts me out as a customer in the near future anyway. My PC wont handle it, plus I will wait for the hundreds of patches...maybe I wil have another look at ROF.

[AdrianPetford]

QUOTE (Naki @ Mar 31 2011,9:02 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ouch! - that counts me out as a customer in the near future anyway. My PC wont handle it, plus I will wait for the hundreds of patches...maybe I wil have another look at ROF.

Interestingly enough Naki, in my travels around searching for fixes today I read a lot of feedback from ROF users about their sim at launch. Apparently it was in a very similar state (mess?) as COD is now, but ROF has developed to become one of the most realistic and highly acclaimed sims ever created. So there is hope. I love Great War aircraft so was very interested in ROF myself, until I saw it needed a permanent connection to some crapware system to play. Now I've been forced into getting Steam I might give it a go though if it's available on that.


Ade

[SgtPepper]

I've been looking forward to this but have decided to wait until I upgade my machine later this year.

Apparently when the original IL-2 first came out it was the same, no one could run it unless low settings were checked, now I could probably run it on my 2 year olds count and spell barbie laptop.

[AndrewJamez]

If they get it using all cpu cores and HT as well as binning that stupid epilepsy filter things might be quite playable on a midrange i7. I watched interviews that raved on about using the latest in computor tech bla bla bla. They were clearly lying. Maybe they are still using the origonal core code for a couple of decades like micro soft did. Its appaling. A mid to high range i7 machine with a high level GPU is little short of a super computor. THese guys need there heads read.

[Kahu]

QUOTE (AndrewJamez @ Apr 1 2011,4:48 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

If they get it using all cpu cores and HT as well as binning that stupid epilepsy filter things might be quite playable on a midrange i7. I watched interviews that raved on about using the latest in computor tech bla bla bla. They were clearly lying. Maybe they are still using the origonal core code for a couple of decades like micro soft did. Its appaling. A mid to high range i7 machine with a high level GPU is little short of a super computor. THese guys need there heads read.

There is an option to turn off the epilepsy filter Its a start

[AdrianPetford]

QUOTE (Kahu @ Apr 1 2011,8:06 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There is an option to turn off the epilepsy filter Its a start

Yes, to be fair that issue was fixed very quickly, within 24 hours of the European release. Apparently more patches are due next week which will address SLI and multi-cores. It seems that 1C are very much on the case and in it for the long haul as before, which are some grounds for optimism.


Ade

[ZK-MAT]

Been watching the threads on here and on KiwiSim and this is definitely something that I will be NOT rushing into. Is a shame

[SUBS17]

QUOTE (AdrianPetford @ Apr 5 2011,8:56 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I have a fairly high end system (i7 overclocked to 4.0GHz, 6Gb RAM, GTX 295 with the only bottleneck being Windows XP 32) which runs IL-2 1946 at 1920x1080 at a permanent 60FPS and even FSX manages 60FPS in some situations. Even though I knew the new IL-2 would be hardware heavy, I expected far better than this. I dread to think how other users with mid range machines are faring.

The game clearly isn't ready or fit for purpose, the marketing campaign has been poor and surely sims should be trying to attract new users as well as those adept at tweaking? I would've been totally lost as a new user facing all the issues before it would even run. I expect I would have just thought the game didn't work or wasn't compatible with my system and abandoned it.

Apologies for the negative post but it's been a frustrating day after such a long wait! I have no doubt that, given time and patches IL-2 Cliffs of Dover will end up as a great sim as its venerable predecessor did, but at launch it is a disaster I'm sad to say. I doubt I'm even going to be able to use it without at least a couple of further patches.


Ade

What are you doing using windows XP with an i7? Dude you need windows 7 64bit installed to get the best out of your rig.(dx11/10) Windows XP won't recognise more than a couple of gigs ram so the sim thinks thats all you have the other thing is this sim is just released most likely like Lockon was with bugs because of publisher deadlines thats how this stuff works because combat flight sims are immensely complex so it does take a while to patch them up. Good news is though that the devs are quite good and they'll sort it just got to wait I'm impressed though at your complaint because believe it or not this is a next gen sim so it'll take full advantage of 64bit and all that other cool stuff. Pro is awesome graphics, full 64bit features, con everyone needs an upgrade. Better that though than just getting another iL2 addon.

[Venge]

UBIsoft has been disappointment after disappointment for me lately. A game that has single player option yet requires full time net access has been annoying to say the least. In Silent Hunter 5 it would actually boot me out of my game if my net temporarily dropped for whatever reason. However the biggest beef I have with UBI is the unfinished state of their games at release. It has been just shocking last few years.
With their (UBI) games I now have a hard and fast rule I stick to, never buy them until they are in the bargain bin and UBI has had time to released a few patches and the player base has modded the game to a playable state.

I was hoping this release would not be the typical cr@p standard I have come to expect from UBI but apparently it looks like it may be. Hope not though, was looking forward to this one.

[AndrewJamez]

Maddox games really need to split off from UBI, they should have done it by now.

[scrubcutter]

QUOTE (AdrianPetford @ Apr 1 2011,8:15 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Interestingly enough Naki, in my travels around searching for fixes today I read a lot of feedback from ROF users about their sim at launch. Apparently it was in a very similar state (mess?) as COD is now, but ROF has developed to become one of the most realistic and highly acclaimed sims ever created. So there is hope. I love Great War aircraft so was very interested in ROF myself, until I saw it needed a permanent connection to some crapware system to play. Now I've been forced into getting Steam I might give it a go though if it's available on that.


Ade

I just downloaded the ROF demo (took awhile, was 3.5 GB!!!) last night and totally agree with what you have said Ade. I am a fan of combat sims having started with the original MS CFS in '98 and through to IL2 PF/AEP and LOMAC prior to starting into FSX for my first non-combat FS. I was awaiting SOW COD as were many others with anticipation for years since it's first announcement, and finally lost interest. WW1 era has never particularly interested me, however after getting my TrackIR up and running in the demo last night, I am now going to buy and unlock the full version, as I was impressed with several aspects, including FM realism, graphics, weapon ballistics (I am qualified to comment on that aspect!), damage modelling, multiplayer, ability to upgrade fleet, etc etc.

I resisted the urge to jump into it when it was released, as I knew it would be full of bugs, (MS CFS3 was cr@p when it was launched, but apart from being a bit arcade, it is a vast improvement on what it was thanks to patches and addon-on from Shockwave ) and it now appears to be a pretty solid program, which runs really well on my system. Most of the criticism of it is levelled at the limited areas and aircraft, plus the alleged steep learning curve for novice sim pilots. Personally I think it is a worthy addon for any serious sim pilot, as the FM is IMO as good as the majority of default, freeware or payware aircraft in FSX. As for the learning curve, sure it was hard work, but I got 2 kills on my 2nd short mission with difficulty set to max, and with my FFB G940, which made the experience a sweat inducing slog! BTW, I don't consider myself a particularly good sim or real-life pilot, therefore I'm highlighting the fact that it is a relatively easy crossover for anyone with MSFS experience a reasonable hardware setup.

This era is not for everyone I'm sure, it wasn't for me, however I believe that the realism aspect far outweighs the failings. It was a toss-up between ROF, COD or the new DCS A-10 (a personal favourite aircraft of mine), but I will be sticking with ROF for a while I think. I would much rather test out my dogfight ability with weapons and damage modelling than trying to recreate it in FSX, although there are ssome merits to this as well. I also learned very quickly that I have a lot of training to do to foot it in multiplayer after getting shot down multiple times by real live opponents

Also for any prospective ROF buyers, 777 studios have an Easter sale 19-26 Apr for all addon aircraft. Fighters are going for as little as US$2.99, which is pretty good. There have been some complaints about the spartan hangar you get with the default ROF package, but I would counter that and say that I almost never fly FSX default aircraft, only freeware and payware, so I can't see the issue. ROF would be my shoot-em-up choice until COD is sorted out

[Ian Warren]

Mark , had my Al my bro in OZ telling me to get and why i don,t have it yet ROF , been a while since done any combat simming myself but WWI would be interesting to check out , ill be real fired up after the Omaka WWI guys there .

[scrubcutter]

QUOTE (Ian Warren @ Apr 21 2011,1:23 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Mark , had my Al my bro in OZ telling me to get and why i don,t have it yet ROF , been a while since done any combat simming myself but WWI would be interesting to check out , ill be real fired up after the Omaka WWI guys there .

yeah mate,Omaka was the motivation for ROF because there just aren't that many good WW1 models available for FSX apart from the DR1 freeware. I'll chuck up another thread with some screens on it. Pretty average, as I am only a couple of hours into it so all new territory for me.

What day you going to Omaka? I'm planning on being there for the Sat at this stage.

[Venge]

Ya, I was lookin forward to IL2 CoD so kind of in the mood for a combat flight sim. May have a look at RoF myself. I see it supports TrackIr which is a huge plus in my opinion.

[scrubcutter]

QUOTE (Venge @ Apr 21 2011,8:31 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ya, I was lookin forward to IL2 CoD so kind of in the mood for a combat flight sim. May have a look at RoF myself. I see it supports TrackIr which is a huge plus in my opinion.

Sadly not 6DOF though. If it is I haven't worked it out yet. Only had a the game a couple of hours

[Ian Warren]

QUOTE (scrubcutter @ Apr 21 2011,9:19 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What day you going to Omaka? I'm planning on being there for the Sat at this stage.

T-minus 5-4-3 about now ... Sat Lunch time BBQ at Doug,s place or even again BBQ after the Sat show , directions

http://nzff.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=...p;#entry8281704

Going to be a great airshow