The Draw Distance Problem

[TheVulture]

Steve,

You expect people to set their hotkeys in a text file.

How much more difficult is it to read graphical preference values from an equivalent text file?!???!

Best regards,

Thomm

One difference is that with graphical settings, people want to be able to tweak them to find the combination of graphical quality and frame rate that they like, and that is exceptionally painful to do if you have to quite the game, edit the file and restart the game every time you want to make a change. And similarly, you may want to change the settings for different scenarios; my laptop can probably handle platoon vs platoon with decent quality models and textures, but on a US reinforced company assault on a big map, it is everything set to minimum (and still a poor frame rate), since my laptop is well below the minimum specs initially announced for CM:SF.

This applies doubly in real time multi-player where exiting to tweak graphics settings isn't an option, but being able to change performance on the fly can be useful to keep your frame rate up when things start getting gnarly.

[Thomm]

The Vulture,

What you write certainly makes sense, but I understand that the issue is not so much scaling down stuff, which CM:SF automatically does (regardless of the settings, IIUC) but rather extending parameters for high end machines.

Furthermore, what would you prefer: having to exit the game to adjust settings or not having this possibility at all.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Wiggum]

Furthermore, what would you prefer: having to exit the game to adjust settings or not having this possibility at all.

Thats the point, having such a option is always better for all players !

[Battlefront.com]

The thing you guys don't understand is that the game currently protects you from making combos of settings which could, in theory, crash the game pretty hard. "Just give me more draw distance" has serious ramifications in terms of VRAM, processor speed, and impact on other elements such as the quality of graphics and their own draw priorities. Having players randomly screwing around with these settings invites massive support headaches for us for what we think is probably little practical improvement over what the game is capable of doing right now for you with the hard coded choices.

As with most things in life, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The better the setting options for the player, the more time we have to spend coding them to work as expected. The more time we spend doing that, the less time we spend doing other things. There's no free lunch here by just tossing some variables into an INI file.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

Wiggum,

Thats the point, having such a option is always better for all players !

Not true For "power users" this might be the case, but for the average gamer having things work without strange and unpredictable side effects is what they want. For something like this, which has a potential for causing quite a bit of harm, less options is often better for most people.

Now, it's also true that burying "unsupported" tweaks in INI files is a decent compromise from our standpoint. We don't have to code new UI and all kinds of safeguards. We can, in theory, say "be careful for what you asked for" and let you guys spend hours of frustration trying to eek out a tiny improvement that may only work for a particular scenario and lockup your system on another. And it even gives us the right to say "if it crashes it's your fault" and not get sucked into supporting the feature. In theory

In reality no matter how much we tell people that they're on their own it will come back to bite us, in some form or another. "I'm getting lockups when playing XYZ Scenario. Here are my system specs" is a pretty straight forward support request. Do you guys understand how rarely people mention "oh BTW, I'm using some crazy MODs that are hundreds of MBs in size and also have played around with your custom video settings". So what may seem to be a routine, and troubling, problem that we have to sort through turns out to be something the user has done all on his own. We get enough of these already and really don't like the idea of adding more to our plates.

And then there is the cost to other game features that comes about through all of this. It DOES impact what other features you guys get, INI or not. So the question is how does this feature request rank with everything else? Given the large potential for problems and the likely little overall gain from it... it should not be a high priority for us.

Lastly, with CM: Normandy we will have the variables for the existing settings optimized for the new setting. Therefore, draw distances and what not will be different because we've changed some fundamental parts of the game's underlying graphics code. You guys might find there no real need to tweak things, which would be very good for everybody

Steve

[cool breeze]

Firstly, take no offense BFC, im not trying to place any blame.

And secondly, I second that thing about graphics settings making potentially serious crashes. Last time I ran CM:SF my computer exploded!

8O

I place the blame squarely on the man who said he fixed my computer a few months prior.

[Battlefront.com]

No offense taken I'm with you guys in terms of "more options are better" from a customer standpoint. Believe me! The problem is I'm one of the guys that has to deal with the practical ramifications, so I'm not as quick to jump on your bandwagon

We'll see how things go with Beta testing and make adjustments from there. Perhaps we'll offer some more end user flexibility, perhaps not. It's too early to tell. But for CM:SF 1 we're not going to be futzing with that stuff for sure.

Steve

[Lethaface]

Steve, thanks for the clarity at least!

Although I'm slightly disappointed about all that VRAM staying unused (that has cost me a dear amount of hard earned $), I now know there is no way I can change it and will have to wait for the next game. Which is sort of a relieve

[Battlefront.com]

As I said, we'll take a fresh look at this before we release Normandy. It could be that some assumptions made based on older cards is no longer true or less likely to cause problems.

Draw distance, however, is mostly a function of processor speed, not VRAM. The more stuff that has to be drawn, and the higher the resolution of those things, the slower the frame rate. Which is why I think some of you are over-estimating what tweaking will accomplish.

Steve

[MikeyD]

Let's remember CMSF is a desert war title. It wasn't optimized for inappropriate heavy woodland. Don't complain when your apple doesn't taste enough like an orange. When we get to western Europe I assume trade-offs will be adjusted accordingly - denser foliage and ground clutter at the expense of... I don't know what.

With the modules especially the scenario designers have been tempted to do more, to go bigger. A couple scenarios in particular you really are brushing up against the limits of game/PC capability. A short while ago I went into my ATI graphics card options screen and turned off anti-alasing. The game breathed a huge sigh of relielf, framerates and draw distances improved immediately. For most PC you can either have one or the other - a pretty screen or a smoothly running game. But at the edge of the game's capabilities you can't really have both.

[Flanker15]

I was playing some Empire total war today and really think that CMx2 could benefit from a similar system having forests and trees stay visible in a very low quality form at long range. Not so much to do with visual pretty (which it does add too) but mainly the tactical gain it adds of being able to tell where the trees are without running around the map (having maneuvers fail because there was a forest in the way that didn't render).

[bodkin]

I was playing some Empire total war today and really think that CMx2 could benefit from a similar system having forests and trees stay visible in a very low quality form at long range. Not so much to do with visual pretty (which it does add too) but mainly the tactical gain it adds of being able to tell where the trees are without running around the map (having maneuvers fail because there was a forest in the way that didn't render).

I was wondering about this myself, I play ETW and have smooth graphical representation of forests on large maps. I understand BFC hasn't the resources of Sega but maybe a low res depiction of distant objects is something they could think of implementing in the future.

[Thomm]

CM:SF certainly does this already.

In fact, it obviously does it so well that the engine still has reserves that are not used on high-end machines, because the settings are too conservative.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Lethaface]

"so well" i a little overstated IMO, since I see trees popping up on every map which features them. Or the pavement for roads for something else.

And yes I am on a high end machine.

I feel there is no need to defend BF.C on this, since there is not anything really wrong. It would be nice to have a larger draw distance, but priorities were different and that is how it is, no hard feelings from me at least

@MikeyD, stating that it is a desert game is appropriate. However 'Trees' were available in the editor from day one so blaming this problem on the scenario designer is in my opinion not fully 'appropriate'

The game does run very fine for me, having in-game AA enabled and 'ATI Adaptive Aliasing' enabled. Ah well then at least I get some value for the investment in my PC, hehe

[InFireBaptize]

The thing you guys don't understand is that the game currently protects you from making combos of settings which could, in theory, crash the game pretty hard. "Just give me more draw distance" has serious ramifications in terms of VRAM, processor speed, and impact on other elements such as the quality of graphics and their own draw priorities. Having players randomly screwing around with these settings invites massive support headaches for us for what we think is probably little practical improvement over what the game is capable of doing right now for you with the hard coded choices.

As with most things in life, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The better the setting options for the player, the more time we have to spend coding them to work as expected. The more time we spend doing that, the less time we spend doing other things. There's no free lunch here by just tossing some variables into an INI file.

Steve

Steve, i disagree with you. If you give us control of these settings and game keeps crashing then we can restore settings or worst case uninstall/reinstall should resolve the issue. Arma2 is a perfect example of micro managing the settings and community members help each other troubleshoot problems.

There is a reason why we have in game video settings, like arma2, we can change view distance and if it effects game play then we have the option to reduce it.

I was not trying to compare CMSF to arma2, two different game types but if arma2 pulled it i'm sure everybody else can!!

Regards,

P.S. I'm new new to battlefront and i like CMSF, i wouldn't have bought the game if it wasn't for the simulation part of it, i hope in the future many things will be changed and limitations will be thrown away.