WW2OL - Yes another 500 post thread - Revisted

[Fishu]

Originally posted by Vulcan
Next major gripe, the damage model. If you guys think AH is bad, whoa horsey, you ain't seen nothing yet. I am of the firm belief CRS has some old croney reading tarot cards out the back to calculate damage. I have ambushed allied armour, like Chars and S35's, hit them with the Stugs 75mm AP from 200 yards, 6 times, and the buggers have driven off like nothing has happened.

Infantry is ... interesting. Most uses I saw of infantry were, ummm, one way missions. Basically storm the enemy town, grab the CPs, rush the bunker. If we die oh well grab another Opel and do it again. In fact 'organised' in WW2OL seems to only refer to this - either an organised FB killing run, or an organised Bunker rush. I saw no use of infantry in say like OFP ways, ie patrols, combined armour moves etc. Which I found a bit disappointing. What I also found annoying was the netcode sucks when it comes to infantry. The update speed is bad, so bad it makes proper infantry and squad combat 'flakey' at least. Trying to track guys with SMGs is a joke.

75mm AP only penetrates like 40mm at 200 meters and Char B1 has wee bit more armour and S35 has pretty good armour as well.
So you would have to learn how to deal with them in order to kill them.
With the Char B1, you must aim for the "grill" on left side or side/rear turret to kill gunner.
S35 again needs to be hit in the side between engine and crew compartment, or side armour around the engine.
Frontally has to shoot at the drivers viewport or bottom front hull where is rounded armour.
S35 has same turret as Char B1, so side/rear turret shots works too, but with lesser guarantees.

Infantry *do* have some excellent use.
They're one of the best tank killers in the game for the Axis side.
If gets to sneak up on allied armour and puts satchel in the correct spot, they're dead easier than with the tanks or guns.
Other fun use is to go distract attacking enemies - set aside road in bushes and wait some truck full of inf drive past you and throw a grenade on it or shoot the tires.

Whats more delightning than to see a Laffly truck full of infantry spin out with a tire blown up and hit a tree by the road

Grenades works very good on armoured cars as well.


netcode indeed could update more often.
It's such a pain to see them moonwalking and zip zapping around

[Revvin]

Well I've just about given up on it now, got my profile set up but I won't be staying on there it's still soo incomplete. My frustration reached new heights today again over Gent. Ignoring the immersion ruining flashing building tops I engaged in a fight with a 110 that suddenly appeared infront and below me. My framerate jumped from 35-18-2-15-28-15-3-9-12 and it just got frutrating. Climbing up again my framerate improved and I looked for my prey. Again he was below me but his icon appeared then dissapeared and I manouvred into a position to pounce. In and out went his icon and with the limits of the graphics engine planes without icon are almost impossible to see. I dived down as I saw his icon, got in close and he pulled up, I watched him by looking up and forward but his icon again dissapeared then re-appeared. I climbed to relative safety again to reaquire. Again he was below me icon flashing on and off seemingly at will. I dived again and the mixture of poor framerate and the icon dissapearing on and off made me again break off the attack and climb to safety. Turning to track him my framerate dropped again then again until in frustration I headed home remembering all the times past my squad night AAR's in WW2OL were filled with myself and squad mates 'KBF' killed by framerate.

[hardcase]

Revin, what is your systems specs..cpu vid sound ram and what Settings are you running in ww2ol. Just flying into Gent, loading the ground stuff and the ac stuff does bad things to the fps if your cpu/card cant punch em fast. I get the drops but nothing as low as yours. Post the info, might be able to find some fps. It is always best to load a big city first before engaging some bad boys.

HC

[AKWeav]

Actually not just their icon winks out, the plane does too. I've been close enough for a really good firing solution several times and the con vanished  just prior to my popping a cap on him.

I raised that very same issue several time on their bbs. Apparently there is a 64 person limit, though why the enemy closest to you is the one to disappear is beyound me.

The very issues you raise, are why I canceled my account with them two days ago.

[hardcase]

banana, did you take a mission near or at a contested city? You would be tuned to both Mission and Objective and should have had a bunch of text scrolling by and rides or missions galore. If you didnt take a mission and didnt tune to the Side Default Frequencies..ie..55 is Brit Air, it can indeed become kinda lonely for a newbie or a returnee. If you decide to give it a try, give a holler on my ID, if I am there I will give you some guidance. Try to team up with a squad. Most are more than willing to take the new under their wing.

HC

[hardcase]

AK, i would like to see a toggle to select what you see. As a furballer I would turn off all ground incons and take my chances getting shot down not seeing that pesky AAA gunner.

HC

[Wotan]

they have terrible system for selecting what to render in areas that exceed 64 players. Your experience is typical almost with everyone elses who I have read post about the airwar on this board. The Con in front them dissappears while you can still see ground units rendered. The air war there is a complete waste of time.

Nothing has been fixed from the last 100 plus post thread. Pistols still are the weapon of choice, grenades still kill the entire tank crews, inf still crawl underneath a tank and kill all the crew with their pistols by clipping. The 64 limit is still fediddleed.

Good to see thre rats are well on their way to making the game better.........

As I said before I am a gluton because I keep re trying the game and still see the same ole crap. To be fair though 3 of my squaddies are digging it. For the tank war though. But they switched to the allies.

[Vulcan]

A few updates from me as well.

There invisible 'bugs'. I was inf @ Anhee with about 12 other guys. One guy was running round in circles screaming Char Char firing into the air. I decided to go over and have a look. It was wierd he was running around shooting at a nothing. In fact I walked right through where he was shooting. Then guy #2  near us pipes up and says to guy # 1 "yeah theres nothing there". Then guy #3 whos on hilltop in an 88 says no theres a char there. Then all of a sudden whack whack whack I'm killed by the invisi-char's front Mg. Our of 12 people 3 could see it 9 couldn't, at mixed distances.

Yesterday had a similar thing again. I sat and watched our aircraft over our firebase, and not 50 yards from tracer fire eminated from NOTHING. I'm hearing more of invisible units from other players. Some have also hinted some level of cheating goes on using speedhack. Sad news.

I believe the invisible units relate to the server. Which seems to be shocking at times. When searching for missions the server can take literally minutes to display them. And then the vehicle spawn choice list takes just as long to come up. CRS pop on every now and then to reset the server. More bad coding.

Then theres the uber-Luger. I reported this last time. Well hello, I made it to captain and got myself binoculars. While regrabbing flags in Gent I spotted a brit sniper looking over one of the flags. As a sapper I only had my trust luger, so I thought what the heck. Well one 300 yard shot later one dead sniper. Yes the Sniper-Luger is still there.

Framerates, I also suffer here. I have a XP2100, GF3Ti200, 512Mb DDR SDRAM, and my framerate goes all over. Its pretty simple, watching the HDD its when the game loads up objects. For example, the first time you spawn at an FB, you can watch your fps crawl while your system loads the terrain textures and models nearby. I've tweaked my swapfile as per the postings over there, it made minimal difference. This game NEEDS 1Gb of RAM. End of story. Well screw that.

And more on the comms system. I was part of a mission to the Anhee-Flav FB. I had plenty of ammo left after it was blown without resistance. So I scooted over to Flavion. The guys I was with went back to Profondosomething. Anyway, I couldn't talk to other axis players in Flav. Why, because radio has origin (where u spawned), target, and mission channels. There is no Ch#3 like in AH. What a handsomehunk setup.

Nope, CRS won't see me (and a lot of other trial users) paying, why:
 - the overmodeled undying Panhard bug
 - the 110 flame bug
 - the uber-luger
 - the Damage Model run by a Californian 0900 Psychic
 - terrible fps
 - bad comms system
 - some serious
 - server problems (lag, invisibilty, menu lag)
 - possible cheating
 - non-historical setups, ie Spit and soon to be Hurri IIC in France

[Revvin]

I mention my specs previously AMD 1.2GHz (266FSB) 512MB GeForce3 latest Nvidia drivers from their site an a SB Live 5.1 soundcard. Tried various settings of detail and graphics, for the above sortie I was in 1024x768@32 Bit.

What do you mean 'load' a big city? you mean fly by it first and let the system load textures etc? or is there a config file you can edit like WBIII? If it's the former the you have to blow your advantage to fly over the city? that's not a very good system.

[hardcase]

A flyby to load cities, nothing you can to in settings. etc. I lose my icons in air it seems when they dive toward the ground and pull up. Usually when we are co alt they seem to stay just fine. Every bug you have seen has happened to every Rat also.  If they were at a point of just fixing bugs, then you would have BF 42. Rats have to add stuff, find bad stuff, fix bad stuff, add stuff, upgrade visuals and audio, add stuff, fix stuff. The cycle is never ending. Fixing stuff..there was a time that having 64 ppl in a fight was a rarity. As the sim improves, stuff that could wait, can't now. ...ie..there is a bug, tied to the physics loop of 50hz. The first person to get 50fps consistently got the bug when flying. The fuel cycles empty to full at 50 FPS or better. It is an annoying wind sound that sounds like a bad rifle firing. I have had it for a year or more. Was it front burner stuff, no. Has it moved up, yes. The sim also drives the bug squishing.

HC

[Vulcan]

Revvin the framerate issues in WW2OL relate specifically to it loading textures and possibly models for objects in game. The first time you hit an object load it slows your framerate down. If you have sufficient memory it will hold it. If you move to another area and that memory is required for another object then the framerate goes down while the new object is loaded. If you go back to the original object whammo it gets loaded again instant fps hit.

If you have 1Gb of memory you can hold more of this in ram, hence it cures most of the problem (except the initial object load).

An object could be a town, city, port, or vehicles even. One dead giveaway enemy is near is when you look in a certain direction and your system furiously hits the Hard drive.

One good example of this is 'preloading' @ FB's. When I first spawn, I spawn as a riflemen. Why? Well, you can't tell easily if an FB is camped, and it often takes a minute or two after spawning for the game to finish loading textures. In the meantime you've spawned and are sitting the looking like a handsomehunk unable to do anything because the FPS had dropped to 0.6. Then despawn, choose your tank, and spawn again. 2nd time around instant spawn and you're away.

Basicalyl WW2OL gives new definition to bloatware.

[hardcase]

Sure, half scale map of Europe with increasing number of villages, towns, cities, roads, bridges, castles,air bases, fire bases,vehicles and all the other stuff in there, does make loading stuff problamatic. Either, it loads totally in your system..and that is a huge map and you access from your several gigs of ram, or you load it in as needed. BF42 probably can load its entire game map in ram and chug along easily on 256 megs. Essentially you're a playing in one "Zone". WW2OL doesnt have that luxury

How is this bloatware?

HC

[Vulcan]

Most of the textures are extremely repetitive. From treelines, to buildings.  If you are repeating textures then your statement relating to the size of the map doesn't hold any water. Take a medium to large sized town, most of the buildings occur several times. Essentially WW2OL is a mass of flat surfaces with textures applied. Theres nothing wrong with that, I think its quite appropriate for the game.

Compare it too say OFP which is very similar (uses a lot of texture mapping to flat surfaces), huge maps also, doesn't require 512Mb even, let alone 1Gb. It acheives good framerates and has to do all the thinking for the AI as well.

WW2OL coding is bloated, end of story, theres no denying it.

[K98k]

Killilng at short range for inf, you should aim at their pelvis. Guns are Battle Sight Zeroed for 200 meters.

Aim at his pelvis to hit what?  

Using PMC 170 grain power soft point (the cheap stuff:)) for target shooting and the most you'd have to compensate for a target at 100 meters would be about 3 inches.  War issue was much hotter than I'm shooting too and would probably be even less.  Regardless I'm pretty certain an 8mm bullet ought to bring down a target regardless where ya hit it.

btw I'd also like to add I use a K98k and a K43 original German WWII issue firearms each having 200 meters as minimum settings in otherwords anything inside that and kentucky windage applies.

Does it make me an expert? heck no! but aim for the pelvis? c'mon