Clouds : How do they work ?
#1

Since I recently upgraded to a 22" widescreen monitor and I'm now running Il-2 at 1680x1050 resolution, I've had to make a few sacrifices to maintain decent FPS, and he hardest nut to crack so far has been the clouds.

I don't understand how they work in the Il-2 engine, it just doesn't make sense...

I use Flushy's cloudmod and Rus_Andrey's MOD and here is what I found after a little testing :

In-game option 'normal' and 'detailed' clouds don't make any difference in visual quality or FPS...

Sometimes I can look at a cloud in max zoom with several multi-engined bombers in view and get 50+ FPS, but some other times just one bomber (my own) while not zoomed in, with a cloud in the background, and I'm down to 20 FPS...

'Dark' or 'Light' side of the clouds doesn't make a huge difference, but I tend to get better FPS while looking at the dark side of the clouds.

Looking straight up from my cockpit with a cloud over my head, I get at steady 60 FPS (my maximum), wether it is light or dark...

Transparent areas give erratic results. One time it'll get my system on its knees with single-digit FPS, the next I'll get 50+ even with a heavily populated Slovakia town showing through.

Finally, I get a very decent 35-50 FPS when on the ground. It starts being problematic only when I'm airborne.

So, does anybody have an idea how clouds work in this game ? Has any modder looked into it to see if there wasn't a way to completely re-design the clouds system ? With Rus_Andrey's mod and if the clouds weren't such a big hit on FPS, we could have fully overcast skies and a lot more weather phenomenon finally modelled.

While I'm here, is there an option I can tweak in my conf.ini or GPU control panel that would make those clouds less of a pain in the butt ?

Cheers

Nico
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#2

BTW, my specs are Intel Core 2 Quad @2.4Ghz, 9800 GT @ 512Mb and 2Gb RAM, which should be able to deliver more than those lousy 20- FPS I get at times. 8x AA and AF, VSynch and triple buffering on, OpenGL, Pefect Mode, Water 4.

Cheers

Nico
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#3

PorcoRosso Wrote:Since I recently upgraded to a 22" widescreen monitor and I'm now running Il-2 at 1680x1050 resolution, I've had to make a few sacrifices to maintain decent FPS, and he hardest nut to crack so far has been the clouds.

I don't understand how they work in the Il-2 engine, ....

While I'm here, is there an option I can tweak in my conf.ini or GPU control panel that would make those clouds less of a pain in the butt ?

Cheers

Nico

hi!
well i know that the clouds are multiple quadratic msh files, that when you manipulate DATA.cld file you can change the the msh files demensions and number that they appear in the sky, the original cloud texture file in game is 256kb and 256x256 and the flushys moded texture file is 4mb and 1024x1024 so it means 4 times more load for your GPU , so i recommand you reduce the fluhyes texture file to 1024x512 or 512x512, you will lose some clouds quality but much better FPS. reduce also K_FADE in Rus_andreys DATA.cld file from 3.0 to 0.9
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