Patch Alpha – Report 1

Hi everyone,

First of all, we’d like to thank everyone who’s sent their crash logs and suggestions to the team. Your help is extremely valuable, and we really do appreciate it. We know how dedicated and thorough our fans can be, and it always raises our spirits to see all the effort and time you put into helping us make our sim better.

As most of you know – and we should have mentioned it when releasing the patch – all of Russia was on official holiday for four days. Most of the programmers took some much needed rest and are just now starting to sort through the bugs. Over 500 emails with reports and suggestions were sent to Luthier’s email over the holidays. He sorted through every single one of them and relayed everything to the appropriate team members, but if your email contained a question or a suggestion that requires someone else to investigate, it may take a little while to get a response. Ilya wants to apologize to everyone now if you do not receive an immediate reply. Your email does get read, and gets looked at very carefully, especially if it contains crash logs or dumps.

With that, we do have to respond to a few of the more common responses to the alpha patch.

1. “Why are my graphics busted?”
We did not reduce any graphics in the game! We did not resize any textures, redo any models, or anything like that! Also, in its current state, the graphics engine does not produce different FPS depending on texture resolution. You can very easily check the fact by watching the FPS counter as a plane’s external texture loads while the game is paused.
We’re simply ironing out some quirks with the texture manager in the current pre-release version of the patch. It’s been rewritten in order to reduce stutter. It no longer freezes the game when a large number of new objects have to get loaded with their textures, but it’s still imperfect. Lower res graphics are a temporary non-intended side effect.
We never ever tried to improve performance by decreasing the visual quality of the game.

2. “Fix your damn game! “
This is, after all, an alpha patch that was released with many known issues clearly listed, and the main purpose of the release was stated as locating and fixing crash bugs. We’re sorry it’s been frustrating. The remaining crash bugs are hard to catch, which is why we’re actually glad it’s been crashing for you. Yes, I said glad.
It’s been crashing for us too, and in a way that makes it impossible to catch the exact culprit. The crash needs to happen in a very specific rare way to point out the root cause. We need to get that specific crash report to fix it. We’ve got a few hundred crash dumps to look through now, so chances are, one of them should contain the smoking gun.
And, returning to the common thread in some of the responses – we are fixing it! That’s exactly what we’re doing right now! And you are helping!

Again, we do apologize if you are one of the people for whom the game crashes a lot. Remember – this is a pre-release test version of the patch, and you are not required to use it at all! Please roll back to the previous more stable version if you want to continue flying while we continue working.

Now we’re going back to work. We’ll release a status update by Saturday.

After reinstalling the patch I've grown to like it...the real plus is no longer need to cut the grass

Good to see a report, though christ knows how long its going to take to fix the loooooooooooong list of bugs, old and new.

Could have fooled me.
I must suck.
Time for selfinflicting spanking.

Before you start flagellating yourself, B6 did indicate that the graphics issues are due to having to ' iron out bugs in the texture manager' not due to something they intended.

The problem is Boknonist, they said at Christmas the patch was in final testing and the beta was within reach, so most of the ground work must have been done and the problem must have been seen, so why 5 months later haven't they sorted it? It just goes on and on and on.
I haven't been able to play CLOD once without there being a major bug or CTD in 14 months.

I was told so many times just after release, dont worry they are going to start adding features soon, stop moaning, yet here we are 14 months later still in a alpha state with nothing added and no plans to either.
The clouds even in the IL2 cotton ball stage cause single figure FPS drops, how the hell are they going to ever manage dynamic weather?

I stumbled on to this guide from Steam support, might be a help to someone here. CTD

Oddly enough, my reaction is - what a cool developer (open patch process, Sunday updates, facing fans head on).

Of course, this is a subjective impression - no one else needs to have it.

Completely understand Furbs, I was only responding to theOdens post, not trying to justify 14 months of frustration in any way.
I was very upset myself when I first installed the release version when it came out, completely unplayable. A couple of patches later and it was working ok for me, enough to have a lot of fun online, if not in SP. It is because of this I have had faith that it will be sorted. That plus the fact that their future income depends on them fixing the engine for future releases.
If I was getting constant CTD's as you and many others are, I would be just as frustrated I'm sure, and if this and the many other bugs aren't sorted once and for all then I will be just as upset , be sure!

Boko

I imagine that most of the machines they test on are similar to each other with a few exceptions and in a small company they probably don't have very many to test on, variety-wise of course the community is going to have every conceivable set-up and therefore will have different problems based upon their hardware. This can only be a good thing.