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First Impressions of 1.04


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Great patch!

Just jumped into a quick "Allahs Fist" which was a FPS killer before. Much smoother now.

And I greatly appreciate that an M1 doesn't immediately seem to spot anything on the LOS (in elite) when on the move.

My M1 went into a fast move and so Syrian received there own fair share of first and second shots :)

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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Kevin Kinscherff ,

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />I wonder what was the technical breakthrough that increased FPS. If it's not secret it would be interesting to know.

What we did was identify that one of the biggest reasons for slowdowns was the 8x8 grid being drawn in the distance with one texture for each 8x8 spot. This is the way to get maximum detail, but it is slower. After it became clear to us that people would be willing to take a small hit to the graphics to get a larger boost in speed, Charles recoded the engine to use a technique that FPS and RTS games use. That is...

Instead of drawing a unique tile for each 8x8 spot, large sections of the map are drawn using a portion of a much larger texture. The portion shown matches the terrain type, so you still can see what the different terrain types are, but the detail is reduced because you're not seeing a "custom made" tile for that one spot. The thing is that it's hardly noticable at medium range, not noticable at all at far range. Therefore the graphics quality tradeoff isn't as much as we initially thought it would be, but the speed boost is MUCH better than we hoped for. In other words, we didn't use this technique earlier because we thought the tradeoff would be noticably worse graphics for a small increase in speed. We're very glad we were wrong about both :D

Steve </font>

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Originally posted by Garm:

I am also quite happy with this patch. But I just played the scenario "Hammertime" and saw something which seems to be a bug (although I have seen this in earlier versions of the game, too). Two squads of mine where rested & ready I wanted to move them. I tried several commands (move, quick, fast) but after a second or so, the movement indicator disappeared and the squads where not moving at all. Does anybody know this problem?

My fault! redface.gif

I saved it with an older version of the BETA version of 1.04. Now saved 'Hammertime' with 1.04 and uploaded a revised and hopefully 'oddness' free version 3 at CMMODS.

Cheers fur noo

George

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It's sods law that I had to go back to work as soon as I got the patch but I've just had a chance to play a scenario from start to finish using v1.04. I chose "Al Amarah" because it's a scenario I am very familiar with and has lots of infantry fighting.

Wow, what can I say! This version is an enormous improvement. It's like a new game. First of all, I could play on Best/Best with 2xAA/4xAF and get good FPS. Second, as others have said, infantry really "kick ass" now. Before, my men would get slaughtered as soon as they got in range of the enemy. Now, they instantly pick good fighting positions and start laying down fire. It was just so amazing to watch.

I has several squads assault the town, moving in waves across the shell-holes and rubble whilst coming under fire from the rooftops. The weight of fire flying around - WITH NO ORDERS FROM ME - was phenomenal. The men really fought hard for the town on their own AI initiative.

Once several squads were in amongst the buildings I had one go onto a rooftop at the end of a block and duke it out with some Uncons on the roof at the other end. Again, without orders, my men started chucking grenades in huge numbers whilst grenades hurtled towards them from the Uncons. It was exactly what I would have expected to see in a real firefight.

The Uncons also seemed to be popping up and going back into cover all the time, in a very realistic and quite unexpected way. They would pop up, lob a grenade, fire a few bursts and then disappear below the parapet every few seconds. truly a very memorable moment!

Great job - this game has just been reborn, and IT'S A BEAST!

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Originally posted by wunwinglow:

One little point, I had a Stryker pretty close to the edge of the map. I ordered the troops inside to disembark, which they did, but the tailgate hatch went over the edge of the map, and the vehicle was then 'locked'! It would take the orders, but just stayed put.

Tim

Oh yeah, that's the "gamey flank exploitation prevention" feature ;)
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Thanks for the continued commentary!

Mazex,

Great work... Below is a quote from a post I made some 10 days ago when Nvidias drivers where blamed for the bad fps.
The drivers are still buggy and they are still responsible for poor performance :D You should have been getting 20-30fps even under the old system since slower systems were getting that, but you weren't. As I said, the nVidia problem is still there and still causing some problems, it just isn't nearly as bad as it was for most of the people previously affected. However, the degree of improvement was not uniform, so we're still looking into ways of figuring out what the nVidia problem is.

The terrain rendering has always been slower than we watned it to be. The point about featureless maps being not much faster than ones with lots of stuff on it has been noted for a very long time. It worked, and generally worked fine, so we spent time doing other things than rewriting code that basically worked. Version 1.04 was the first time we had to revisit this issue and make improvements (took about 2 weeks). And we're glad we did :D

Steve

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short said, i think this is a great patch! WEGO is realy an option now.

i even go and restart the campain tomorrow, now i feel the game is ready to be played and the campain is the right point to start.

there are still some minor things but really much has bin ironed out nearly compleatly.

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This new patch is AWESOME. The frame rates have improved noticably, and the US forces have just become even more difficult to fight against due to AI tweaks. I have been designing a medium sized QB map with all the frame rate killers for a laugh (tall grass, large grain fields, type D trees - LOTS of them) and after loading up the patch this morning, I returned to it and it was a blast. It played smoothly and the AI controlled US forces are almost invincible, opening fire at long range with everything and forcing me to change my tactics on that map.

Now that the game is more or less working, I'm looking forward to the first module.

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Yeah... grass was a really nasty speed killer, so we made some changes there to keep it looking nice but not be so harsh on the framerate.

I'm really glad to see you've noticed the targeting improvements. As the release notes say, the change was in the logic for ammo conservation. The TacAI was being too cautious with ammo, which had the effect of not shooting at marginal targets (due to type or conditions). This is just one of those things that most people thought would be a big deal to improve, but was in fact a couple of variable tweaks. So instead of it taking weeks, or months, as some of you may have pictured it took only a minute or two. Oh boy we wished all things were like that! :D Then some time to test and rebalance... and you see the results.

9/10ths of the battle to improve a simulation is to figure out VERY SPECIFICALLY which areas need tweaking and generally what those tweaks should acheive. "The TacAI sucks" doesn't help much smile.gif so it took a while to figure out exactly what the problem was. Our testers were focused on tons of things for the past few months, therefore it took a wider examination to determine we needed to do something and what that something is. As soon as we made the tweaks the testers gave it a big thumbs up, which made us confident that you'd like it too ;)

Steve

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Still have the stuck unit problem. While playing the first campaign scenario I ordered a squad to move into one of the building inside the fort but they were "stuck" in the vehicle. I canceled the order and reodered (several times) different movement orders. They went from spotting to moving but never left the vehicle. I could see them moving inside the vehicle pretty cool really.

Eariler I split the squad into an anti-tank team and had them re-enter the vehicle. I ordered them both out. The anti-tank team made it out but the rest of the squad never got out.

Other than that the game runs great considering by old 2.6 ghz processer, 512 RAM and 64 mb video card. Needless to say I have all the bells and whistles turned off.

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Yep 1.04 definetly made the game for the better, FPS and otherwise. Still few issues affect me.

- Scrolling with keyboard buttons still seems clunky. It works fine for a moment while scrolling in one direction, but when changing scroll direction, sometimes it just stops scrolling all together. Other way to describe it is as being non-smooth.

As one would expect with "high CPU priority ON" the scrolling is worse. But its not that much better with "high CPU priority OFF" either.

- Played through few training campaing missions and noticed that when infantry is being loaded/unloaded multiple times in a row, they sometimes refuse to board vehicles anymore.

- Got a hard crash after about 30mins of playing.

- Gameplay and UI feel akward still. Maybe its just lack of playing the game, but I really hope WWII version will be bit easier to play. Stuff like not being able to move waypoints and such really make playing this game a pain.

System:

AMD X2 4600+ @ 2.8GHz

2 x 1GB DDR400 mem

X1900XTX with 7.9 CCC

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Like most it seems, i am seeing a massive increase in FPS with a Nvidia 7900GS (256 MB), using the latest beta drivers. Game runs at highest possible settings in 1600x1200 and it is as smooth as silk with virtually no lag. Pre-1.04 i was running with the same settings, but with choppy camera panning and horrible mouse lag.

Units seem much more responsive now after giving them orders, and actually seem to take up better positions and engage the enemy.

There still appears to be issues with pathfinding and LOS/LOF (which BFC have said they will address in 1.05), but overall, i am very pleased and impressed with what BFC have done in 1.04.

Nice work!

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Well it is much better now with 1.04 but... I noticed that in a mission "Abu susah" I ordered one infantry squad to disembark. they went panicked and took cover from nearby trench... they took losses and some time later there were only 3 men ok.... but the dead soldiers were vanished.... does the fallen soldiers vanish like that?

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Originally posted by Ritter_85:

Well it is much better now with 1.04 but... I noticed that in a mission "Abu susah" I ordered one infantry squad to disembark. they went panicked and took cover from nearby trench... they took losses and some time later there were only 3 men ok.... but the dead soldiers were vanished.... does the fallen soldiers vanish like that?

Routed soldiers vanish, you first see an "!" above them then they vanish. Is this what you saw?
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