Corbeau

A vectored thrust unit as described would be neat, and I think workable tactically if you can fit enough armor onto the front.

I play with foliage off for preformance reasons, but it bothers me that I have an advantage for doing so. I know that the bots are certainly not hindered by foliage though. Personally, I like the idea of making nearby foliage transparent.

This is the problem for aircraft in a lot of sci-fi: once beam weapons are viable, aircraft die as soon as they cross the horizon.

Okay, I tried it again with the caching off. It worked. There wasn't even much in the way of lag/choppyness/delay at the beginning of each game. And ion tanks still rule. 4:1 ratios are sweet.

Well, I downloaded the latest Catalyst drivers from the ATI site. Unfortunately I have no way (that I know of) of being sure which type of card it is beyond being a 9600 (which I'm fairly sure of - I'm also reasonably sure that it's the 128 MB version). No effect. I got into a game once for about 8 mins, and it was awesome. Even racked up a positive kill ratio (ion weapons - gotta love 'em). Then the round ended, and I found myself staring at the loading screen again. An interesting note: it gets through caching the textures without too much delay, but it takes forever for the program to cache the objects. I got up, made some lunch, and came back. It was 60% done loading the objects. So I eat lunch, and it finally finishes. By this time the server is not responding when I get ingame. The new drivers had no effect on the load time. Shadows and foliage are some of the first things that I turned off, and I've also set the terrain detail to the minimum and unchecked anything dealing with textures that I could find (including High-Def textures). The next thing I'll do is turn off texture caching... though if it still has to cache objects then I'm still sunk.

System specs: 1.83 ghz Athlon with 512MB of RAM, running WindowsXP SP2. Graphics card is an ATI card, I think a 9600 with the highest MB rating I could find (higher than 64, IIRC!). So I guess that I'm not that far above the minimum requirements on the graphics card. Still, hmm. I'll try updating my drivers, and see if that works.

I'm new around here, and have been quite impressed with what I've seen of Dropteam, but I've run into an issue while attempting to try out the demo. The problem is that the load times are absolutely ridiculous for some reason. I could practically pick of a random book and read through a whole chapter before the game gets done caching textures and objects. Of course, once it does get done the server won't respond (I suspect because I've been dropped due to inactivity). The odd part is that the first time I start the demo I can usually get into a game. But the load times get progressively worst after that, and I typically have to restart the program to even have a chance of successfully joining a game. I believe that I handily beat the system requirements, and I can't believe that this is normal for the program. So I'm wondering what's up? What's the likely cause for this problem? I'd really like to give this game a closer look, but I can't manage it if I have to fight the program in the process.