WarThunder - Stuka Bad Day

My apologies for the lapse in posts over the last couple of days, however, I've been a. Very Busy and b. Very Ill.  So ill in fact that on Wednesday last, I was vomiting at work - proper up chucking - and the wife had to come get me, and then I spent time pulled over in a lay by vomiting some more with traffic hooting at me... Yes, all you bastards on the A52 near Bardills Island Hooting at the guy vomiting blood into the bushes, that was me, your hoots of hilarity didn't improve my day.

But, before I was down and out I did spend sometime playing about with my recording settings, both with OpenBroadcast, then Bandicam and then nVidia Shadowplay.  The latter producing Blueray quality footage with absolutely no lag - I was mesmerised by it - and so I used it as the source for some footage for a video I'm putting together about flying the BF109 series in WarThunder under Simulator Battle full aerodynamics, so expect that as soon as my new mic arrives from the folks at Amazon, because the narration I had recorded was terrible on my headset.

Other things which made me laugh in WarThunder was this... Notice the German AI plane in the foreground, it is locked on to and chasing a player landed at the Russian base, whilst the Russian AI you can also see there are locked onto a German player attempting to kill said Russian... The AI however, are simply flying formation with one another in the race to blindly follow whoever has aggro on them... This is Simulator level play... Hmmm... 

This is also a reported bug, which reading the reply from Gaijin they're not saying much about, check out the Moderated bug report forums for the thread - I can't find the link at the time of writing.

Another annoyance was I decided to stop playing BF109's and grind some skins, the first being the Skins for the Stuka B2 model, there are a LOT of skins (6 I think) for this little rank 1, level 1 plane which gets ignored...

When you're winning a 17 ground streak plus one human Air Kill streak in Realistic in the B2 STuka, you do not want to then see this:

I can tell you now there was nothing wrong with MY network, I was connected, able to open other websites and had up and download speeds reported of over 6mbps... Yet, the server decided I had a problem and kicked me.

At this point I was something like 21 ground kills and 2 air kills, I had landed and returned to the battle three times.

This was utterly frustrating... But you know what was worse?

In the next battle over Malta, I was 12 ground kills up and in the middle of a turning fight (which I win easily with my air brakes) against a Nimrod Mk 2... And suddenly this happened again, and gave the nimrod a kill for me slamming into the ground out of my control!

To then rub shit into the open wounds created by this the game then chides me for "Leaving the Battle Early"... I never, you kicked me!

This server instability was reported by Jingles, but I'd not seen it, until now... This was a weekend day, and there were a lot of players on, but... still...

These two shots also show a problem I had over the weekend of the 27th October, the massive number of American playing players in the queues, world wide... It was very interesting to play German, as one either got a swarm of B25's flying formation which one was totally unable to tackle without bursting into flame... Of we got people flying P38's, P40's or P26's who simply didn't know how to fly...

OpenBroadcaster - x264

I spent a bit of time last night messing around with OpenBroadcaster, capturing some of my Simulated Battles in WarThunder...

As you can see I've got my name, the game and what I'm up to added as text legends, I've included the track IR window and the game itself.

It worked, I've captured like an hour of game play, including three air kills (which was good going in the Italian G50 I was flying).

My main challenge is playing about with the settings... So I have an EVGA 770 GTX SC graphics card, so not a slouch... And my CPU is a Core i7 (8 threads) running at 3Ghz (I can over clock it, but its not at present)... and I've got fast cooled DDR3 RAM...

However, the x264 encoder really sucked the life out of my machine, making flight hard, but the video very poor quality.

After that I set about looking at using NVENC, but it came out as this very strange sort of effect where as things moved the screen recording was fuzzy, as the screen stopped changing so much it would spring up into perfect detail, and then slowly degenerate again.. Pulse of detail, then blurr... over and over... so it was strange.

Tonight, I am intending to mess about with my settings some more, and if all else fails I'm going to revert to capturing the game with nVidia Shadow Play and using an editor to overlay text.

Elite Dangerous - Still Not Going To Play It

I am not going to play Elite Dangerous... Let me get that said, not because I have to eat humble pie and say it does not look a bad game, and unlike my prior posts David Braben has proven himself to NOT be a snake oil sales man, as he has delivered the game to the masses (least as a test/alpha/beta so far)...

But, that said, watching someone competent play is interesting, prior to seeing the below videos I've only watched some mediocre coverage from Jingles and then the terrible developer example videos from back when they were still looking for online funding...

Ralfidude however, a YouTuber with a plethora of DCS and other flightsim coverage, has taken to the space ways, and he's given us these few videos with his coverage of the game... Looks good.

My problem with the game is not the game, I love Elite, and I understand it there is a single player game involved in this title... However, its the online play which counts and it seems to me there are too many ways for people to grief.... And I did all the griefing I needed in Eve-Online.

I'll admit though, Ralfi's Videos have me tempted... But not for £50... Fuck that price point with their millions upon millions start up capitol already in the bag!

WarThunder - Simulator Battles

I've spent a lot of time playing WarThunder, I've in fact only played WarThunder this weekend.  Importantly however, I've almost exclusively been playing Simulator battles... Not with any luck, I hasten to add...

I've spent a lot of time looking at clouds and seeing nothing, but I have been flying well enough and getting used to take-off and landing procedures.

I have to give a big shout out to "Viper" a nice chap I met in the Simulator Battles room... And whom took me up in a battle - where he absolutely owned - in ME109E3's... And where I ended up hit by flak and returned to base just as the wife started shouting me... She didn't care I was fighting a war... But hey ho...

Later I flew out in my P47 and was immediately bounced from above, out the sun, by Hayabashi's...

Even later still I flew out in my HE112, and saw nothing but got killed by AI - yes I could not even out fly AI..

And finally I flew out in my FW190A1 again, saw no-one... Finally spotted a target, dove on it and got a couple of hits, pulling out however I suddenly saw above me two La5's... And they tore me to shreds.

I think I'm okay at flying... I'm below average at spotting.. and I'm utterly useless at manoeuvring.

Now I have lots of screen shots, however, I can't find the memory stick they're saved on, so trust me they were stunning.

But later on Sunday night I came back to play again and my funds are exceedingly down on WarThunder,  so I played a few Realistic Battles, made 100,000 credits and called it a day.

I've unlocked two aircraft this weekend - the upgraded P47 and the Fw190-A5... Neither of which I can afford...

But I'm determined to play more Simulator battles.

WarThunder - Experiments - Fw190-A1 Taxi Handling

http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/fw190/eb-104.html

Having read this page we have the following snippet...

"The tail wheel is freely pivoting but can be locked by holding the control column back as on the P51B"

This leads me to want to experiment with my Fw190 take off procedure, which right now is:

1. Apply Brakes.

2. Start Engine.

3. Check Rudder trim is neutral.

4. Apply 25% power.

5. Release brakes.

6. Apply slight right rudder.

7. Progressively increase power and right rudder until rolling.

8. Allow the tail to rise at 70 mph.

9. Rotate and pull up at 110mph.

10. Retract gear.

11 At 130mph and climbing raise flaps.

It may have to become:

1. Apply Brakes.

2. Start Engine.

3. Check Rudder trim is neutral.

4. Apply 25% power.

5. Release brakes.

6. Apply slight right rudder.

** As the airframe straightens, pull the stick full back to lock the tail wheel **

7. Progressively increase power and right rudder until rolling.

8. Allow the tail to rise at 70 mph.

9. Rotate and pull up at 110mph.

10. Retract gear.

11 At 130mph and climbing raise flaps.

We can also make use of this, if in the game on the landing, as we flutter on near zero power and touch down, pull the stick full back to keep the tail down and lock the straight running tail wheel.

----

Addendum

I've just found this item on DCS handling of the Fw190-D9... You can clearly see that the rudder use is not violent here, and the pilot talks of gentle use of the rudder.

I will be experimenting with the brake stearing in WarThunder later this evening (written Friday before posting, so there maybe another Addendum).

WarThunder - FW190-A1 - Definitely Broken

After my last post from WarThunder world, regarding the FW190-A-1 I had literally dozens... *cough* alright half a dozen... *cough* alright two.. e-mails telling me quite how much of a noob I am.

Thanks to you two for your fine and informative input, don't actually tell me what I'm doing wrong, don't actually help just be fucktards!

But I thought, maybe I am doing something wrong... So I decided to test my energy fighter skills against others, and luckily I wanted to unlock all the modifications on the F4F, the F6F and the Corsair... heavier, meatier, fighters I think you'll agree...

And they worked as expected, I'd climb, dive on a target jink around and climb away... I actually did best in the F4F, the F6F annoys me a little and the Corsair I'm not very good in yet... But everything worked as expected and I made decent progress, and even on the missions I lost, I felt I'd had fun, even if I just came down on a dive ran out of energy so farmed some ground targets.

The FW190-A1 immediately showed another problem at low altitude, and that was combined with the wiggling in turns it has huge ground effect... Literally you can hear the ground effect from around 200-50feet... Other aircraft you only seem to hear the ground effect around 75 feet and down... not from as high as in the 190...

I'd now tried the broken fighter, and then a bunch of really not very comparable crates... What about a stable mate of the 190... The venerable, reliable 109...

I set off on a series of missions, none of which I have screen shots for.  And I compared in my mind the climb rate, the performance in the dive, the ground effect, the turning - when forced - performance and the low level, low speed turning & performance... And you know its not bad, on any of them... Once I was in my 109F4 and the 109F4/Trop they were fine... Apart from having minuscule ammo loads the 109 performed as I expected... They even performed and took punishment quite well....

I therefore stand by my gut reaction, the FW190-A1 is broken.

WarThunder - FW190-A1 - Broken?

Over the weekend past I've been a very busy boy, this was in spite of being ordered to rest by my doctor.  But I did manage to get two sessions flying out in WarThunder...

Mainly to test out the new graphics card, more about which later.

But whilst flying around I levelled up my American planes and I unlocked the F4F-3, the F6F, the P47D-28, the P38 and a bunch of aircobra's.... All Good I thought, I was playing energy fighters and getting somewhere...

This was, until I thought I'd try to fly the new Fw190A1 on the German branch... My first Focke Wolf 190, and to be honest I had very high hopes for it.  Based on its legendary status that is, and the fact that I'm playing realistic battles not the ram fest arcade version of the game.

And... I'm pretty sure its rubbish... The FW190-A1 appears to be the Marmite of the Butcher Bird world, as I've spoken to other players randomly and they either exclaim "No you're flying it wrong!"... or they exclaim "yes its rubbish!"

So, lets just go over it, I fly the 190 as an energy fighter, trying to climb, I keep a steady rise to altitude going, but above 10,000ft it aircraft is sluggish to move into a turn, also it consistently wants to nose down when travelling below 220mph.

When going into a turn, be that a low altitude high speed turn, or a high altitude low speed turn, or anything in between the thing wobbles and widdles around on the flight instructor.

The engine also incessantly overheats, and cutting throttle into a dive it takes an age for the water to cool again, yet if I leave it above 0% throttle it cools quicker, which is totally nuts.

So, I don't like the FW190A1... And though I see people getting up to 15,000ft in it and taking out AI spotter planes I can't get mine to go up there, it simply stalls out, and even in a standard climb the angle of attack to keep in the climb means we're flat planing at altitudes around 10,500-11,000 feet maximum.

I've asked what I'm doing wrong, I've played other planes - both higher and lower in tier... In both the German Tree and others, and the Fw-190-A1 has to be, for me, the most disappointing aircraft in WarThunder.

All this before I even mention the damage model, its almost worse than flying a Japanese plane, because you know they have no armour.  But the Fw190 was build with armour a forethought, it was a fast, light yet rugged machine... Not the delicate thing they're presenting us with in the game.

The 190 was designed to intercept, more than be a fighter, it was to be a jabo... a Fighter Bomber... and a high altitude interceptor.

But its so badly behaved and so brittle.

And I'm not just saying this... Look at a comparable tier aircraft, the P400... Look at the damage mine took, and got me back to base in the very same Ruhr mission which was knocking the Focke Wolf down like a mosquito in rainy season.

One eight of this kind of damage and the 190 bursts into flames, or its wings tear off like a small child is toying with flying ants.

So, I don't like the 190-A1, so much so that I'm not even going to show a picture of it here...

WarThunder - Douche Bags, Frame Drops and Realistic Battles

The new graphics card has arrived, so expect some game-play footage of my Realistic battles from WarThunder very soon....

Last night I actually played a few battled in WarThunder, I found a few bugs too, especially in the OpenGL Renderer.  Before I install the new card tonight I'm going to take my old settings & DxDiag info to send off to Gaijin, then install the new card and see if the same graphical bugs show up.

The reason being that the OpenGL hardware implementation on the the old cards was 2.2 and 3.2 respectively, and both showed the problems, and the new OpenGL implementation is 4.2 (maybe higher if I patch it).

Anyway, I played a good 5 realistic air battled, unlocked the P47D and flew it out... You know what its a decent aircraft, what I immediately noticed was the stock ammo load out sets aircraft on fire fast... The mission contained a set of 3 spotter AI, I took 2 of them down with high deflection shots, setting them on fire.

I then swooped down on two AI HE111's and a player 109, the player I tore up and both AI Bombers too... Over the enemy airfield I then got shot down by AAA.

The next flight out, I met perhaps the biggest douche ever in WarThunder.  He was in a Beaufighter, I'm in my P47... And he's after ground kills, I figured he had rockets and could knock out the pillboxes... No....

No he was just farming the ground targets, so when I saw him break and destroy a couple but take AAA fire, I dove into the mix and shot up a couple of AAA emplacements... Next thing I know he crosses my tail and shoots me with his MG's...

I wondered for a moment whether this was a mistake...

Then messaged... "The word you're looking for is "Sorry", you dick head"...

His reply... "no"...

No he wasn't sorry, he shot me for shooting "his" ground targets... So he was not contributing to the battle, he was just farming credits & XP... The mission was not won by killing the ground targets, indeed, I won the mission killing the last player and last AI air target, as well as emptying my guns into the AI spotted plane mission objective... 

And I was on my way back to the airfield, still with the only battle damage from that moron, when the ticker ran dry.

What annoyed me though was this douche got rewarded for being a douche, he got anti-mech, and "mission maker"... so he got 18 ground kills, but got them through duplicity and aggression towards friendly aircraft.  It stank to high heaven.

I reported the moron, and when I have the new card installed I may fire up and record the replay for my retard videos on YouTube...

This guy left a sour taste in my mouth, so I switched to playing a ground battle, going into a mixed air and ground battle with the Germans... GOD THE LAG!... The ground forces played okay on this same machine with the same settings, but adding the air and ground I got at most 10FPS, and red indications all the time on the frame rate.

Clearly, my rig can't play combined arms fights, so I need this upgrade.

GeForce 770 GTX SC on WarThunder and World of Tanks

I want to enter a decent picture for the monthly Screenshot of the Month Competition over at WarThunder... I figure applying the vintage texture filter is going to be a must, and I'm going to have to find a reference shot then build skins for the aircraft involved.

Since I'm a bit of a billy no mates its also going to be important that I have something which is perhaps just my aircraft and some action in the foreground.

Nailing the aircraft custom skin is going to be the key...

But what pictures are floating around the internet for me to take on?

Spotting that one was promising, the P47 is not an aircraft I have unlocked yet, but I'm currently researching it, which would give me time to work on the custom skin... I think the difficulty would be finding that exact structure in the game and flying near it...

I've also looked at real-world footage of the BF110, but can't seem to find anything which fits...

I also spotted this image, which will require a friend or an AI stuka...

But, wait wait wait... You've all seen my screen shots and that I have either used a 540 GTX or an older 260 GTX Graphics card to play WarThunder... How can I possibly take really high quality screenshots?

Well.... Drum roll please... I've just been informed that an item from my Amazon Wish List has been purchased for me for my Birthday, which is very soon... The item is....

Oh yeah, an Nvidia GeForce 770 SC with ACX Cooler, not a 780, not a titan, but price versus performance for my rig this is the beefiest thing I've ever ever put in a PC my end.

And I am going to run WarThunder and World of Tanks in such stunning high detail that I'll get myself a case of "The Apocalypse Now's"... You Wouldn't know man, you weren't there!

WarThunder - OpenGL Performance Discussed

In the final of my series regarding WarThunder this week, I've taken a look at the performance of the OpenGL rendering options.

I've tried this on two machines, with different graphics cards, but very similar specifications otherwise, the two machines are:

Core i7 - 950 - 3.07Ghz

16GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM

NVidia GeForce 260 GTX 896MB DDR3

Core i7 - 3770 - 3.01Ghz

8GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM

Nvidia GeForce 540 2GB DDR5

Clearly one machine has the superior graphics performance on DirectX mode, yes the 540 out does the 260, just... Though my 260 is a really good superclocked edition, so much so its proving hard to find an economical replacement (pushing me to have to buy a 770 GTX just to see a significant improvement).

Most all the screen shots you see of WarThunder on this blog come from the machine with the 260 in it as well.

But so far all the screen shots have been from the Direct3D renderer.

Now, however I'm testing the OpenGL renderer, the option is listed as Test and I've also tried to collaborate my observations with other players... My overall impression is:

Half the FPS, if I got 60fps in a situation in a plane in Direct3D, I'd get 30 in the near same situation in OpenGL.  This is a rough and ready measurement taken by eye from the FPS reading given on screen in the client.

I've purposefully NOT recorded my game play, I've not run other programs nor over reached things - that is I've not thrown clouds of AI aircraft into formation within a custom battle and flown through them.  I've stuck to playing the regular game in the regular way.

Lets take a look at some screen shots:

It looks the same, I've not noticed any surface level differences, the game looks just as good.

Only when one scrutinizes things do you find the differences, if we jump into a cockpit and look around, we can see where in Direct3D we'd get smooth textures things can look quite odd:

This is the seat over my pilot's left shoulder in the Fw190 A1, as you can see there's this square stippling going on, also along the window rail you can see a darker indication that is actually a shadow from the wind shield surround.

This isn't the only odd thing noted, in the 540 card, not on the 260, I took the Fw190 into a twilight flight.  You can change this yourself in your settings under the Graphics options you need to select the Texture type of "Night as Day" (or something like that)...

When I flew the plane out on the 540 GTX, I saw this strange halow effect around the periphery:

The effect persisted against the clouds, from any angle, or against the ground.  But it did not show against clear sky.

Switching back to Direct3D no such halow was present on either card's output.

Performance wise I've already mentioned the lower frame rate, however, at one point during a pursuit in Historical battle in the Me410 I took out an enemy aircraft, with the explosion close I suddenly had a frame rate reduction down to 2FPS.  Literally slide show mode...

I used a little back stick to bring my nose up and came through it, but I'd moved around 1km before the frame rate returned to above 20 and allowed me to have some semblance of control.

I checked my logging, there was no hard drive activity, no appreciable network lag, no dropped packets, I could type into the client and ask "Anyone else getting lag", which was a reply of "nope" from a fair few players.  Yet I was at 2FPS 50 meters off of the hard deck struggling.

The optimisation of the Direct3D code being used by Gaijin is really good, they get performance out of my rigs other less intensive, less pretty, games get... So perhaps we can chalk this massive red blot on the performance of the OpenGL implementation to a lack of development/optimisation and of course the code being "Test".

But, one would assume the Mac client is already using OpenGL, are any Mac players out there able to share their thoughts?

Either way it looks promising that OpenGL does work, and this of course leaves us thinking about Linux/SteamOS.

Is WarThunder coming to Linux?

I've been musing about the future of many of the titles on Steam, and their progress in converting them to Linux; or more specifically the Steam OS.  Valve (the publishers behind Steam) are bit into providing technical talks and information to developers to help assist them in converting titles to OpenGL, so I've taken sometime to look at the games I have on Steam and which ones I'd like to see on Windows.

The first, and most recently played was "WarThunder", and after a little reading and a little looking, I spotted in the launcher the option to use "OpenGL"...

It looks promising therefore that Gaijin are porting the rendering engine to OpenGL, I even went as far as switching to OpenGL an firing up the game, my immediate feedback would be that where I was getting 60FPS+ and even 90 FPS in places, I was suddenly getting an average of 43FPS.  However, the OpenGL rendering is listed as "test" and one would assume its not optimized at all yet.

Performance changes aside it does look like Gaijin could have a Linux operable version soon... I just hope when they fix the annoying team text chat bug soon... What bug is this?  Well, when you crash, or die, you are presented the team chat box; and I often start to type into it information to pass onto my team where I went down, especially if I went down due to enemy fire... You can be midway through typing a message when the screen times out and changes from the view of the opponent who put you down to the "Select a plane" or "Observer" screen... This then re-presents the same (or an identical looking) team chat box, but it has wiped out the input you had just seconds before... This is a bug which has been in the game since I started playing, so it is a very annoying problem and one which either isn't getting reported, or isn't getting noticed and fixed.

Back to Gaijin's development model however, if we search for news or even output regarding their porting to Linux there's little initially to go on, in fact on an unbiased Google search this was the first result.

http://forum.gaijinent.com/index.php?/topic/9346-linux-port/

"At the moment only for Windows. About Mac and Linux we will see in the future."  A comment by a Gaijin Forum Administrator on the 28th July 2012.  So have things changed since then?  The launcher says they have... Pawing through the archives it also appears that OpenGL has been quietly present in the builds since early November 2013.

My question to Gaijin therefore would be, have they been forcing any test clients into OpenGL mode, have they been gathering information, or switching us players to OpenGL to gather rendering information?  Because, it is a setting in a solemn corner of the launcher, but so very important to us Linux-philes, for if they release this game for Linux then I'm down to only three titles needing Windows specifically, I could finally look at just playing their game on a native Linux platform...

Linux is not the first new platform they've targeted with the engine, you can now get the option from the website to download the Mac version of the game client, clearly the Mac version is going to leverage OpenGL, and indeed any Mac based players will be testing the formal OpenGL calls.  Unfortunately that doesn't test for quirks in Linux or Windows with their independent implementations of OpenGL.

Steam OS is also a very new kid on the distro block for Linux, so if they're going to target it surely they're going to also be able to give us tweaks to run it on standard Debian or Ubuntu distro's too.

Excitingly I've spoken to Gaijin, and had a reply from one Alexander Trifonov, his message is short and sweet:

"Linux/SteamOS, please wait a little more and there will be some news"

Thank you for your reply Alexander, we look forward to more news from you soon...

WarThunder - Progress

With the man lab v1.0 up and running - this is plastered and a new desk from ikea - I've gotten some WarThunder time in... probably too much since its now 3am...

I have been enjoying the Japanese this evening though, and have made over 60% progress to my first real zero... Now this is not to mention my navy zero, but this borked piece of shit really struggles in Arcade, and is not quick enough in Historical battle...

I have enjoyed pulling off water landings however, and even got repaired for this landing... not often one lands the navy zero... lol