Keeping Track Of The Ground War

[DD_Friar]

As you will have noticed by now, with my name keep croping up, I am in the middle of building my first seow for release to my squadron (www.dangerdogz.com).

We fly closed pit on these occasions, my question is this..

With seow being quite big on the effects of the ground war, it seems a shame to have tanks taking out tank, engineer units getting close to bridges, convoys being moved to strategic positions etc for it all go un noticed.

Would anyone like to suggest difficulty settings that would enable a review of the ground action but keep sneaky peeks at eneny positions restricted.

Are multiple cameras sagging on fps.
Would an hours track recording by the host be a burden on disk space?

Any suggestions more than welcome.
Salute

DD_Friar

[EJGr.Ost_Chamel]

Two hints from me on that:

Are multiple cameras sagging on fps.

The host should have a rig that is at least in the mid range of system performance. Most important seems to me the size of the memory - 2 GB (or more) are preferable. As IL2 can't use more than one core, the CPU should have a good perfromance per core - multi cores are not necessary.
If the host system meets these requirements, a few static cameras shouldn't influence the frames very much.

Would an hours track recording by the host be a burden on disk space?

I would estimate, that such a track woud have a size of about 50 MB. So for modern disks this is no problem at all.

And ... have a look at your conf.ini. In the section [HookView Config] there is a parameter "MaxLen=XXX.X". This influences the range how far you can zoom out in the external views. I have set this to 30000.0 and I can view big parts of a map (in a track, after the mission) by switching through the external views of the units and using the range to search around on the map.

Greetings

Chamel

[102nd-HR-cmirko]

Two hints from me on that:

Are multiple cameras sagging on fps.

The host should have a rig that is at least in the mid range of system performance. Most important seems to me the size of the memory - 2 GB (or more) are preferable. As IL2 can't use more than one core, the CPU should have a good perfromance per core - multi cores are not necessary.
If the host system meets these requirements, a few static cameras shouldn't influence the frames very much.

102nd_COOP_ded is an automatic (dedicated) server which runs on 2.4Ghz P4 and 1 Gb of ram - we had a problem with our second mission (it was a lagfest for almost all players - 32 ) and after that we did some tests -

here are the conclusions - main problems with big coop missions seem to be users computers - when we had test with users who had fast/powerful computers we didn't have a problem on server with 160 ground unit chiefs - and over 40 human/AI planes - cpu was 99% all of the time but there were at least 250Mb of ram available all the time.... - and the mission was smooth

there were only marginal improvements in that same mission without any AI ground movement and the memory was only slightly less used (I'm talking all about the server)

since then we limited ground movements to 60 AI chiefs maximum, and 36 Human/AI planes per one mission - we had two missions and all players had a normal virtually lag free missions.....

Host is set for automatic track recording of this campaign and we rely on opponents honor no to do extra reconnaissance you can find typical tracks from this missions which last 90 min on this link
http://161.53.204.25/MP4/Tracks/

S!

[DD_Friar]

thank you gentlemen, much appriciated.
the hookview setting is very interesting, i did not know about that.

[Kapt]

I would also like to pass along a little tip to cut back cpu cycles of the server running as host.

I have my graphic settings turned way down on my server because it's not needed. But the big thing i noticed is if you point your pilot to look straight up at the sky why just sitting there the cpu cycles will drop dramatically.

Server Specs:

Asus M2N-E SLI, NVIDIA nForce 500 SLI Chipset
AMD Athlon64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 6000+ (3.0GHz 2x1MB 125W) Boxed
2GB DDR2-800 Dual Channel Kit CL5
Asus GeForce 6200LE TC256 64MB DDR TurboCache

[102nd-HR-cmirko]

thats a great server machine kapt

[rnzoli]

I would also like to pass along a little tip to cut back cpu cycles of the server running as host.

I have my graphic settings turned way down on my server because it's not needed. But the big thing i noticed is if you point your pilot to look straight up at the sky why just sitting there the cpu cycles will drop dramatically.

Interesting, very interesting!

Cmirko, should we try this on the co-op server? Although the pilot remains in the cockpit of the host aircraft, it could actually look up to the sky after the mission starts. I think we could use a little more CPU cycles, if this really works

[Kapt]

Just a quick recording to show usage.

[102nd-HR-cmirko]

good idea Kapt - we should definitively try it Zoltan - can it be incorporated in DSC after some tests ?

@Kapt, as with your server, server is running without sound and on minimal 640x480 details, we get great fps in cockpit of server but if this helps a bit more it will be a great addition to Zoltans DSC

S!

[rnzoli]

I added this automatic pilot lookup within 3-5 seconds after the misison launched. The graph is quite convincing, so I hope it saves everyone a few CPU %s.