And some more:
Loaded a custom mission with me in 109 taking off from LeHavre and a flight of Defiants coming in lazily over the channel. I made this mission initially to test cold-start and CEM.
First thing I noticed is this:
This is how the airfield-icon looks like on high zoom. No idea what all the dots/numbers mean, but I thought it interesting enough to grab a screenshot..:)
I expected the game to crash during loading, but it didn't. Found myself in the cockpit alright and after a quick look around to check the improved video-settings I now used, I started her up.
While flying low over LeHavre wasn't perfect, it was certainly playable. Rubber-banding was back at this low altitude, and while it is annoying and an immersion-killer, it doesn't prevent you from flying in a controlled manner. General FPS were pretty good and stable at this alt. EDIT: Oops.. just realized I din't take shots at low alt. These two were of course taken while I was a bit further up in the air.
Anyhow: I gained some altitude and checked out my surroundings. Gotta say that the game looks a lot better down low with some eye-candy switched on. The smaller the villages, the less pronounced the rubber-banding BTW. Once I had left LeHavre it was smooth sailing all the way with record-braking FPS.
Even when I found the flight of Defiants (pure luck, they weren't shown on the map for some reason) and did a quick attack, the game was so smooth that it actually ruined my guns-pass and made me ram one of the Brits
. I was expecting stutters any second and so I didn't fly in an appropriate fashion to avoid collision.. well, at least that's my excuse..
And another thing I noticed was that the game ran super-smooth and with high FPS on time compression. Could be due to the fact that there weren't many other planes around, but it was definetly noteworthy.
This shot was taken at max time compression. FPS were high and stable and the action was totally smooth instead of jerky and stuttery.
Note: Shots taken with all three mods active. If there's a significant loss in visual quality compared to the unmodded version, I sure can't spot it.
S.