FOr you fellas interested in an objective online report.
I happened to be one of the few 300 late last night that actually was able to play online - for 1 1/2 hours straight. Here's the deal, once you get online, there is hardly a smidget of a hiccup, the problem appeared to be registering and getting logged on.
I flew a Spitfire from Cambrai to the front and strafed two tanks before running into a tree! I didn't kill anything, but the "atmosphere" was good enough to keep it entertaining.
I then jumped into a Mark IV A13 Cruiser tank and traveled about 10 miles to a small battle in some unknown town along with 5 other tanks. Put 8 rounds into a Mark IIIF before he even saw me shooting from the bushes. The objective was a bridge and town beyond. I went up to the bridge and observed to my amazement infantry running towaqrds me in open terrain. I proceeded to use the coaxial mg and strafed killed 3 soldiers. My goodness it's hard to kill soldiers. They are so small targets from 300 meters. We then meticulously inched our way across the bridge keeping an eye out for hidden anti-tank weapons hidden in the bush up along the hillside that backdropped the town. We didn't even run into anything. Proceeeded across the bridge and observed a few other infantry sneaking and hiding behind buildings within the town. We made our way up the hill, and into the outskirts of town. I couldn't see a dang thing out of my gunner position so I switched to commander view and ubuttoned the copula. I tuck out my head and immediatley heard little whizzes past my head. Before I could get buttoned back up my commander got hit and died. Got back into driver position and found the little bastard hiding in between some crates. Finally got him with a well placed HE round. I could hear the firing from a distance as my other buddies were taking action and shooting at something I couldn't see. That was about it, the town was clear, and we ran into hardly any resistance. I couldn't imagine what would have came of us if we ran into some enemy tanks.
As far as warping I saw none at all. It's very stable once you get online. And for the guys who kept saying wait and see what happens to your fps when you get online, they are partially correct. After the patch added new things to the graphics and terrain, my framerate dropped to around 30-40fps at 1024x768x16. During online flight my fps would drop occasionally to around 20 fps when entering a town area. But it remains pretty stable. It is very flyable and usually remains at 30 to 40 fps average. When flying high and in the clouds I get 50 - 70 fps. Down low when you go to strafe some enemy units with detailed terrain and trees, I would suggest a hefty system. I hit the high teens, like 17 -19 fps. But I really can't see where online play affects my framerate at all, or very little, I think it's just the numerous units that the system has to keep processing and especially when loading in new units or new terrain. For land combat, it feels very smooth.
A very enjoyable experience with the edge of unpredictability. Heck, I was scanning the skys for an aircraft or two, but never came. The neat thing is, next time, there just may be an aircraft ot two diving down on you. The world is HUGE and has that feeling of being an open, unpredictable combat environment. Personally I doubt anyone is going to go into rambo mode. It just takes too dang long to get into action oriented territory to go recklessly putting yourself in harm's way.
My rig is an Athlon 1.5ghz, Geforce 2 GTS, 256 MB RAM.
fscott
[ 06-07-2001: Message edited by: fscott ]
