Saturday, April 9, 2011

IL-2 Cliffs of Dover - First Patch is Out

At the time of this entry Cliffs is still an untamed beast with a voracious appetite for stunning visuals who tries to chew too much at a time but ends up choking on the most basic features.


The screenshot above is taken from a low-level flight last night. The level of detail of trees, roads and towns is fantastic, but imposes a heavy toll on performance. I wonder how relevant for a combat flight simulator is to have such level of visual detail in the country side.

Please find below a few more screenshots.









Cliffs was officially patched yesterday with allegedly performance-enhancing modifications.

Cheers,
at

6 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 9, 2011 at 12:22 PM

    Agreed. It looks good (though speaking as someone who was born and lived in Surrey as a young kid in late'60s, early '70s the terrain does not somehow look right - I think BOBII from a height looks more authentic, much like ROF vs OFF), but the apparently dreadful performance and insane levels of ground details sound like a case of lousy prioritisation.

    Anyway, fingers crossed it gets fixed. Planes look fab. I'd love to fly the Bf110 and the Ju88 with those graphics. If they can get the number of planes and AI up to the levels of BOBII then it'll be truly great. Can never have too many BoB sims in my book.

    But I'll stick with DCS A10C until the most egregious aspects of performance get worked out, and there is more feedback on what the AI is like. I for one prefer BOBII to IL2:1946 for offline play, due to AI and campaign. In fact all the furore over COD has just made me reinstall BOBII version 2.11 - I look forward to delving into it again.


    Fingers crossed they manage to fix it.

    Hartford688

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  2. Route ClearanceApril 9, 2011 at 1:33 PM

    Would you recommend this, JC. I haven't heard a lot of positive things about it.

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  3. DimitrisApril 10, 2011 at 8:43 AM

    Hey JC, what hardware are you running this (and DCS A-10C) on?

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  4. JCApril 10, 2011 at 9:31 PM

    Thanks for your comments, gents.

    @ Hartford: I didn't know you were from the UK. :) I never got too much into BoB but I have to give to you that it is the best out there. I hope they fix Cliffs ... There are many things that are a step in the right direction. Pity they went loco for the visuals. :(

    @Bryan: it depends how much you are into WWII air combat. If you are casually playing sims of this period, I definitively say wait. :_

    @Dimitris: ey, man! I play this on an underwhelming Lenovo laptop with an Intel i7 and a radeon HD something ... 4 GB of RAM.

    Cheers,

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  5. UnknownApril 11, 2011 at 3:27 AM

    Too detailed ground objects is a waste of processing power. Processing power should be devoted to briging in more planes in the air.

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  6. JCApril 11, 2011 at 2:29 PM

    Hi Jomni,

    Agreed. There are things that are worth keep an eye on: you now can hide on clouds. It's a new ball for IL-2.
    Cheers,

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