AH2 On-line test results.

[Falcon]

Pyro/HT,

A hour ago my squad came on-line to test AH2. Most of us had stuttering problems and such. Here's my results.

1) I had to tweak my settings alot between hops to get the stutters go away. I had to put the texture size to 128, put the sliders to 3/4 to the right and to uncheck all of the boxes. It didn't really stop the stutters until few minutes into a flight.

2) Will the panning padlock be in AH2? Snap view padlock didn't really work right. It wouldn't track the locked targets right. Before the flames start, I'm disabled. I need this thanks. BTW I unchecked the snap view padlock box under flight. It didn't enable the panning padlock.

3) My frame rates were good despite the stuttering. They were high 50's in flight and 40's when shooting.

4) Here's my computer stats (btw my stats earlier for the framerate tests was kinda wrong)

AMD 2.11 GIG NFORCE 2 Computer
1 gig of ram (DDR)
GEFORCE TI 4800 SE 128 MB
120 GIG HD (7200 RPM)
XP HOME w/SP1
Saitek cyborg 3d gold USB with SST software
DX9.0B

In all I think AH2 will be cool as h*ll when it goes live.. But it needs work still IMHO.

Falcon

[Bullethead]

Yeah, we had as many as 8 folks furballing at once, which was the biggest fight I've yet seen in AH2.  And it wasn't very playable.  While I can handle 1-on-1, this many planes totally choked me unless I turned textures down to 128 and had the sliders all the way to the right.  This gave me 50-60 FPS just flying around by myself, but once I got in the battle it dropped to the low 20s, with frequent stuttering and vanishing planes.  And when I fired my own tracer, it became a total slideshow.

BTW, I second Falcon's motion to have the panning padlock.  I don't use padlock at all myself, but Falcon really needs it due to his disability.

P4/1.7
512MB RAM
ATI 128MB Radeon 9600 Pro
WinME
DirectX9.0

[Oddball-CAF]

Gents,
I'm posting the below just for general input on Aces High 2 as I saw it from our Cactus Air Force Squad Night last evening.
We had decided that a squad-wide review of the current state of AH2 was in order to see where we stood as a group.
Below is my post copied directly from the CAF "Operations Shack", our forum.

Processor AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2600+ MMX, 3DNow, ~2.1 GHz
Memory Kingston DDR400
Page File 142MB Used 1104MB Availlable
DirectX Version DirectX9.0b (4.09.0000.0902)
ATI Radeon 9600 AGP (0x4150)
DAC Type: Internal DAC (500 MHz)
Approx Total Memory 128MB

First off, I apologize to you all for this not being a flight vs flight Squad Night as I'd originally intended it to be. The fault is entirely mine. When I got online, guys were already in the air and messing about, trying to play with the new engine, and I just got caught up in things and started furballing.
Anyway, above are the basic hardware/sofware specs for my box.
I got this info from running "DXDiag". Unfortunately, I couldn't copy and paste the specs. If anyone knows a better way of doing this to get the hardware info and in which cut and paste can be used, please post it up.
Prior to flight, I set my video settings to the following:
Display Object Size: 1/2 Way
Texture Size: 512
Level Of Detail: 1/2 Way

Reaction time as Strider stated in accessing/adjusting the various options if very slow for some reason. Not a problem, but indicative to me that something isn't quite "right" in the coding for it.
Initial frame rates on take off and ingress to the furballing South were anywhere from mid-thirties to 40. Quite playable, but I was by no means
thrilled with the graphic quality given the above initial settings.
The "stutter" which occurs when a new plane comes into view was quite evident at a Texture Size of 512. And it was not until I had dropped it down to 256 that it became less of an issue. However, even at 256, it was still occuring.
Falcon dropped his to 128 and was -still- seeing this stuttering effect.
I never went that low as I was too busy fartin' around with other issues such as staying alive.
As to flight modeling, I noticed that of the two planes I flew, an FW190D9 and a Spitfire MkIV, that things were quite smooth. It wasn't until I began pushing the performance envelope, ie: tight turns, approach of stall speed, etc, that I
noticed a distinct difference in reactions for these planes. Small amounts of stick input had a VERY large effect during these maneuvers/speeds. This is probably rectified with a dampening adjustment, but I did not have the time/inclination to deal with it right then and there.
Gunsights cannot, for some reason, be imported and used from AH1. My "dot gunsight" would not appear no matter how many times I selected it. No idea why this is so, but I personally don't like the obstructions the standard gunsights provide.
I experience 2 complete "DTD" (Dump To Desktops) in four hops. I find this very alarming and can only hope it has something to do with the fact that no optimization at all for Radeon cards has occured to date. (Skuzzy stated today that HiTech had purchased a new ATI card for his personal rig for this very reason.)
As well, I asked Skuzzy directly if there was a FAQ or page availlable in which HTC states specifically what the current intent of HTC is with regards to strats, and was told there is no such info availlable.
All I could find on the web was an old wargamer "interview" that was a year old and which was basically "fluff".
Not having the time to pore over countless posts in the HTC forum, I'd like to see a bit more info provided as to "official" word on what we can and can't expect from this. Personally, I think what we are seeing here is more appropriately described as an "Alpha"; and that actual "Beta" testing will be occuring when the AH2 arena opens up for real in conjunction with AH1.
ie: it won't be until a couple of hundred people are online at once with this engine and playing, that tinkering and/or implementation of whatever "strats" HTC has in store for this engine will occur.
I'll be revisiting AH2 after optimization of Radeon cards has occured. Until then, I see no reason to personally invest further time with it given its current state.
Regards,
Oddball