Official SEOW

Just trying to work through some problems with a campaign at the moment that is a bit too busy (160 platoon movements) and I would like to know what you fine gentlemen have been able to run as maximum playability settings in previous campaigns?

Also has anyone thought of compiling a list of succesfully played campaigns? just a simple list of map, air moves, platoon moves and flotilla moves?

Cheers

An example from our online WestFront 44 SEOW campaign:

maximum settings for 60/70 pilots:
2 x 40 air orders
2 x 35 grounds orders
1 x 10 sea units orders

Note that these factors modify the playability:
- Type of ground unit: A simple vehicle (without armament) has a low effect. AAA and artillery have a great effect when firing. Try not to put all AAA and artillery too closed from enemy units at the same moment. If not, too many events will be sent to all pilots
- Rate of Fire (ground and sea units)
- All dynamic objects (e.g. now runways lights are dynamic)
- Burning Wreckage: Active only infrastuctures.

512 exe has to be activated.

Thankyou Dore. I had hoped for a few more replies on this matter but this is a good start

Here is what we used in Normandy

62 x air orders
2 x 40 ground orders

Hi Classic,

The number of players, and the number of moves (chiefs, flights) are important in setting playability, but so are the number of stationaries and the types and firing ranges of stationaries.

We have been running with about 60-80 aircraft and about 80-100 ground/sea movements per mission for many years now. As computers become more powerful, hosting becomes easier.

At HQ our focus is not on large numbers of pilots, so we can happily support more stationaries and more ground/sea movements per mission.

The current Peanut Specials campaign runs with about 50 aircraft, 140 chiefs, 2700 statics and 100 scenery objects. The current Illustrious Blitz campaign runs with about 50 aircraft, 60 chiefs, 1100 stationaries and 200 scenery objects. Both of these are hosted using personal desktops.

Here is some more data from Badger's France campaign run via JG26 squad. One of the early missions had 60 chiefs, about 45 aircraft, 2800 statics and 500 scenery objects. One of the final few missions had 60 chiefs, about 35 aircraft, 2000 statics and 450 scenery objects. This campaign averaged about 10 pilots per mission and was hosted off a personal desktop.

Cheers,
4S

tip for those that run SEOW server on dedicated machines.

if u run the game in the window (most of us are), server mission loading time will be DRAMATICALLY reduced if u minimize or just put the game window off focus.

right now we have mission that, if the window is in focus, needs 10 minutes to load. if i put the window of focus it loads in 10-15 seconds !!

putting window off focus will also help in gameplay reducing the lag for other players.

in some cases, game is only playable if the window is off focus

Thats perfect thankyou Shades.

I think at present we have

60 aircraft
160 platoons (this equates to approx 600 moving units on the ground)
2500+ statics (many stationary tanks, trucks, infantry etc and a fair amout of AAA and artillery)

At present the campaign is not playable

day before yesterday VARP had a successful server stress test with

40+ planes
220+ chiefs
2500+ statics
38 rockets
2300+ buildings

60 air orders
45 ground orders

our hardware is

intel dual core E8500 @ 3.4Ghz
4GB RAM
onboard video
Win Server 2012

In the online test that just failed for us we had

60 planes
224 chiefts
2771 statics
1772 buildings

Hi Classic,
is the server dedicated to just running the mission with no one playing it?

That is a key point to getting high server frame rates as also noted by Gec's post above which is the same procedure for the server I use when hosting.

It can be the difference between playable and unplayable in these big missions.

What frame rate are players getting and what is your unplayable frame rate limit?

I believe Classic is using DCS to control the server. I learned from cmirko that they do not have possibility to minimize the game window.

Mi believe that that's why their server needs to be much more powerful than ours with kickass GPU.

II/JG77Hawk_5 wrote:Hi Classic,
is the server dedicated to just running the mission with no one playing it?

That is a key point to getting high server frame rates as also noted by Gec's post above which is the same procedure for the server I use when hosting.

It can be the difference between playable and unplayable in these big missions.

What frame rate are players getting and what is your unplayable frame rate limit?

yes - server is looking into the sky so we usually get very high average fps on server. Unplayable is more a feeling than exact science unfortunately, if we get average fps bellow 20 fps on this exact server, there will be lag in the mission, usually for all players with possibility of very strange results in actual missions (like, ghost flights appearing, invulnerable enemy and so on).

I've just received a new controller version from Zoltan, this version minimizes the il2 window when hosting missions which have SEOW in their name.
Controller works fine, but there seems to be no performance gains between minimized and active game window in a borderline mission - same number of timeouts happen in first 60 seconds of mission start...

we will test "minimized hosting" today with human players just to be sure.

Its probably already set but just to be sure check setting in the conf.ini file in the Window section. Make sure its set as below.
DrawIfNotFocused=0