Hey All,

What a crazy two days its' been.
We've all put in some crazy stretches in the last few days, and yesterday we were running around with our hair on fire.
We've been working hard since we went live to wrap up pre-existing issues, as well as the new ones reported by you all.
Anything reported in our bug and problems subforum goes straight to our internal bugtracker. We will always be listening.

From the entire team; thank you for your patience as we work through all issues found, reported, and ensure you all an excellent gaming experience.
We won't be doing anything else until all issues are resolved in a satisfactory manner, at the soonest moment possible.

Priority Issues

As mentioned previously, two priority issues yesterday, were as follows:
-- Poor Performance in virtually all viewing angles and situations (additional slowdown on the ground, likely due to increased objects density)

-- FFB Sticks buzzing and inoperability.

We've solved the FFB sticks issue, and this fix will be available with the next MiG-21 update.

We've partially solved the performance issues. Perhaps more aptly: we know where the issue lies, and we have begun taking steps to mitigate it heavily.
In addition to this "main" cause, we've stripped roughly 30,000 triangles out of the cockpit yesterday, without any visual fidelity loss.
I estimate another 30,000 will be removed today. This will represent an overall reduction of ~20% cockpit geometry.
We are also looking at various ways for texture optimization and consolidation.

We've also noticed several old textures that were not properly removed from their respective directories.
This can have additional VRAM load, and will also be removed.

LoDs (Level of Detail) meshes were not constructed properly, and this will be resolved as well.
Essentially; the sim grounds to a halt because even the most distant LoD is incorrectly exported as a high resolution mesh.

Liveries

The published livery list on SimHQ will be made available soon. Most likely, this will be done via a separate installer, prior to the first "big" patch. I'll keep you updated on this.
This pack contains 10-15 liveries, including countries such as Cuba, Egypt, Poland, India, Bulgaria, East Germany and more. In the future,
these liveries will ship with the main MiG-21 installer.

Backers

Apologies to all backers that had to wait for their keys yesterday. We were taken aback by the early release of the module, and thus had to scramble to send them out to everyone.
In the end, it was 12 hours of nonstop excel sheet filling, e-mail sending bonanza -- but hopefully most, if not all, of you should have your first key.

Those of you who are entitled to more than one key, will receive them ASAP. We'll be working through the list again and generating a new batch of keys for everyone that is entitled to a second one.
If you require one urgently (e.g. to fly with a friend), please feel free to e-mail me at nicholas .dackard (at) gmail . com. (no spaces).

If we've totally missed any of you (as we did already yesterday) -- please email me at the address above as well, and we'll sort you out.

I think that is mostly all for now.
Time to jump back into 3DS Max to continue improving performance and rolling in fixes for the next update(s).

We don't currently have an exact timeframe for the next hotfix/update, but we will try to make it as short as possible.
Apologies for all caused inconvenience.

Thanks,
Nick & Leatherneck Simulations