Ok, Honestly...how Is Clod

[JensenPark]

really...how is it?

Not going to get it till it is CD available in Canada...which is fine as I'm busy beyond stink right now...so I can wait.

So want to know: how is it honestly?

After 7 to 8 years in development (remember, this is about 3 times as long as it took to develop the A Bomb with slide rules...and about the same time from scratch the US sent a man to the moon with computers that have a millionth of the power of a standard phone these days) you'd think it was Halo like gaming.

But from what I can (bother to) read, it seems quite buggy and nothing special.

Would like to hear what you guys think.

Sure, a patch will fix some stuff...but you'd think after so many freaking years in development it would be ready to play.

[Mayhem]

Well, to be honest with you, if it was from any other company, strictly base on the current state of it, I don't think many people would be paying attention to it at all. Let's just say that if the Apollo 11 mission had gone like this, Neil Armstrong's corpse would still be baking to a crisp on the moons surface by day and freezing solid at night in a viscous repeating cycle. Sort of like when you over thaw meat in the microwave and then throw the extra back in the freezer for later.

[Jediteo]

My impression is that is is truly an excellent game buried underneath a pile of bugs, but once they start ironing it out it should be just great. The engine management and level of detail is just astounding, but it plays like a beta. Give it a few months and it should be quite awesome. Take off in a tiger moth in the evening and fly along the south coast is quite a simming experience, however when you get to the actual larger missions a host of bugs appear. Still it's quite fun, and multiplayer needs a bit of testing.

[BadAim]

Don't listen to these heathens, they're not true believers. Clod is perfect! If we were intended to play it at anything over 13 FPS lord Oleg would have delivered it to us that way.

Jedi, Mayhem. I find your lack of faith .....disturbing.

[fruitbat]

somebody said over at 1C,

"i wanted to be transported back to the 1940's, instead i ended up back in the 90's with my first pc."

my take.

One would have to be blind not to see the amazing potential that the game has to offer in the future. Complex engine management is superb, as are the damage models.

One would also have to be blind not to see at the moment, that its only potential, and the game is no where near ready as a 'game' yet imo, and no amount of eye candy ohhhh ahhh cockpit shadows is going to change that.

if you want to simulate the BoB at the moment, get UP3.0 in a few days, planes run on the correct boost, right variants of said planes, map that doesn't look like its from the simpsons, can have large formations, all with nice aa and at high res, and most importantly, smooth playability.

I'm pretty sure down the line, it will be the finest WWII sim out there, and far surpass il2, but it isn't there yet.

give it a year or 2.

[Mayhem]

somebody said over at 1C,

"i wanted to be transported back to the 1940's, instead i ended up back in the 90's with my first pc."

That's just hilarious! Whoever said that really needs to switch careers to Game Reviewer.

my take.

if you want to simulate the BoB at the moment, get UP3.0 in a few days, planes run on the correct boost, right variants of said planes, map that doesn't look like its from the simpsons, can have large formations, all with nice aa and at high res, and most importantly, smooth playability.

I've been looking for words to describe the maps and you have captured their essence most eloquently.

give it a year or 2.

Agree wholeheartedly, the problem is by then my currently very capable machine will be considered yesteryears shite. Thank goodness for good ol' IL-2

and the active mod community.

P.S. don't let FT see that last comment.

Edited April 8, 2011 by B16Enk
FT Sanity test added ;)

[DD_Arthur]

I think JP, the above sums it up nicely. Don't bust a gut over this thing as it's nowhere near ready for release yet. One day, if they're still in business it'll be beautiful. Just not yet. By a long way.

You're going to visit BadAim? Nice one. Looking forward to pictures. One day, probably when they've sorted CloD I'd like to visit you both too. Good luck my friends

[DD_Bongodriver]

Hi Guys,

I have to say that after the steam patch I am playing this thing on max settings and having really fluid dogfights........I'm still crap but it is to all intents 'fixed' for me, still a bit choppy over dense cities but the frames are steady if low.

I don't think my rig is spectacular

core2 quad 3.2ghz

GTX 470 1280 DDR5

8Gig ram

Win 7 64 bit

[fruitbat]

it all depends on your gfx card, anything less than a 4 series nvidia or ati equivalent, its just not worth it and performs horribly. Also, if your on winXP forget it, needs DirectX10.

I've tried the new patch on my system, i7-940 quad@3.5Ghz, 6 gig DDR3@1333 and a GTX280, and the gfx card just isn't good enough for the currant (and probably for ever) optimisation.

i have to fly at these settings to get decent fps over land,

even then, although the fps is saying 50, i still see texture crawl down low, which ruins any illusion of speed for me.

and to be quite honest, at those settings, my il2 modded looks miles better.

[Sid]

The patch, please confirm that others have v. 1.00.13954 - I appear to have an extra zero in mine on the GUI.

I have smoother flying with the patch although I have no change in FPS. Guns are less hesitant now when the trigger is pulled, I had a slight pause before.

I don't think I will benefit until SLI comes in and I can boot up the second GTX460 and multicore use is introduced for my quad core.

[DD_Arthur]

Hey, you've got an anti-aliasing option! Does it really work? Also, do you think checking or not checking the epilepsy filter option makes any difference? I'm starting to think it's just a placebo. Then again after installing the patch the bloody thing won't run at all without massive graphic corruption. '

Edit; Sid, yes you have correct patch. Thats the numbers I get too.

[delta7]

The guys have summed it up well. This had great potential but is not a finished product.

Its like someone had a project to do a great graphics simulation of the 1940s and then tried to tack a game onto it and it does not work.

The whole thing is bug ridden. Do not buy it in the current state and save yourself money and frustration. I have only once before given up trying to get my PC and a game to run ( Arma2) and I even got that to run after a year of patches and tweaks .

I can see a lot of similarities here, potentially a great simulation by a small developer with great community support but it will take time to get it in an acceptable state.

[fruitbat]

Hey, you've got an anti-aliasing option! Does it really work?

to a degree, it isn't 8x thats for sure, more like 2 or 4 max.

[Shadrach]

I am not quite there with it yet but getting closer. Although the AA dosen't look like it makes much difference it has a massive hit on frame rates for me. Turning down from 8x to 2x made things way better with very little if any loss in visuals. I have everything on max except for no grass and buildings amounts on high and buildings details on low. This gives me 30 - 40fps with the game now looking quite good. I still get a fair bit of stuttering but I think that is down to my running it off an oldish IDE drive rather than the Sata drive which the kids seem to have made thier home. I need to get another drive or perhaps try setting up one of them there ram drives. I have also set the affinity mask to 15 which doubled the cpu usage from 14% to 30%. This still seems very low so I think Oleg's guys have plenty of room to improve things. In fact there will be more benefits for me through code optimization than any more hardware upgrades. As it stands it is running much better now than IL2 did on the hardware I had when I first started playing that.

I got:

Asus M4N98TD EVO NF 980a SLI AM3 Motherboard

Phenome II 965 Quad Core

Asus Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti

4gb DDR3

For about £450 which was probably more than worth it just for the improvements it made playing IL2 1946.

[DD_Arthur]

What operating system are you running Shadrach? Win7, Vista or XP? 32bit or 64bit?

[Sid]

Hey, you've got an anti-aliasing option! Does it really work?

to a degree, it isn't 8x thats for sure, more like 2 or 4 max.

Running AA through the nvidia control panel is working well for me. I've set it to off in game and have set it at 'SLI x 8' in the nvidia panel. It has reduced the jaggies better than the game AA does but hasn't got rid of them. Doing more testing.

[fruitbat]

Hey, you've got an anti-aliasing option! Does it really work?

to a degree, it isn't 8x thats for sure, more like 2 or 4 max.

Running AA through the nvidia control panel is working well for me. I've set it to off in game and have set it at 'SLI x 8' in the nvidia panel. It has reduced the jaggies better than the game AA does but hasn't got rid of them. Doing more testing.

been running it through that it all combos already.

before i ran it through nvidia control panel, it didn't stick at all.

short story, aa is broken in clod at the moment.

[Shadrach]

I'm running Win 7 64 bit. Another slight glitch I had was that as I started CloD I had a message saying the desktop theme was incompatible and was being changed. Eventually I changed it permenantly to windows classic. Not sure if it helped the game run any better but it seemed to load noticably faster.

[DD_Arthur]

I could'nt get Nvidia control panel to find the game. Only the Steam Exe. How are you two managing it?

[fruitbat]

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\ launcher.exe

[Sid]

Hey, you've got an anti-aliasing option! Does it really work?

to a degree, it isn't 8x thats for sure, more like 2 or 4 max.

Running AA through the nvidia control panel is working well for me. I've set it to off in game and have set it at 'SLI x 8' in the nvidia panel. It has reduced the jaggies better than the game AA does but hasn't got rid of them. Doing more testing.

been running it through that it all combos already.

before i ran it through nvidia control panel, it didn't stick at all.

short story, aa is broken in clod at the moment.

Coming to that conclusion too....game always defaults to 8x and looks the same no matter what I do

Looks nice though

[Jabo]

I've switched it to 8x in game and 16xQ in the nvidia control panel. Looks ok to me but what do I know...

Jabo

[fruitbat]

I've switched it to 8x in game and 16xQ in the nvidia control panel. Looks ok to me but what do I know...

Jabo

thats how i have mine set, but heres no way its running at 16xQ on my machine.

1c forums are full of people saying that aa isn't working properly. It is working to a degree, but not fully for some reason.

[rox]

+

Engine management and damage modelling are amazingly detailed

Flight modelling and physics, and taxiing feel more reallistic than IL-2 (then again, I'm not a pilot so what do I know)

Loadout options are awesome, setting individual convergence and belting for each gun...

Cockpits are absolutely beautiful, many things are clickable, but many are not too...

You can do almost anything on a plane that I would expect you to be able to do in real life, the list of available controls is very long

The game really does look very beautiful on a system that can handle it

-

Obviously very poorly optimised

No SLI/Crossfire, multicorecore, force feedback, XP support.

Anti aliasing works only at the lowest settings.

The sounds sound like they are from a 1995 game.

No volume control whatsoever.

The landscape colors are pretty but kinda ridiculous compared to real life.

Bugs everywhere, from a very buggy multiplayer and saving loadout options, to floating AI planes and the completely bugged and unworking G 50 cockpit. I landed right on the cliffs, stopped, and then got literally thrown over them by an invisible force.....and there was a railway right on the edge of the cliffs, parts of it missing as the cliffs wiggled inland.....

I *think* gunnery is bugged in the way that your bullets do not go where you are aiming, and you really have to shoot by following the tracers as shooting where the gunsight points will very rarely score hits, and I'm pretty sure this is not a "feature".

I don't know if any of these got fixed by the newest patch, I'll find that out tomorrow.

I think that in 2-3 months it will be pleasantly playable, and in a year or more it will start becoming the gem that it has the potential to be. I plan on buying a CD version then, I'll stick with the russian version in the meantime. You can get the game and it will be fun for a day or two, but it gets tiring because of all of the issues soon....I have no doubt that when problems get sorted out it will be the greatest WW2 flight sim for a long time...

[Sid]

I've switched it to 8x in game and 16xQ in the nvidia control panel. Looks ok to me but what do I know...

Jabo

thats how i have mine set, but heres no way its running at 16xQ on my machine.

1c forums are full of people saying that aa isn't working properly. It is working to a degree, but not fully for some reason.

Is that using the 'Enhance game setting' or 'Override the game setting'?