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!

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...

WoT - Tier III HEAT

Did I seal cub club?... No.  Let me explain I set about recently fleshing out all the tree's which have changed in my World of Tanks garage since I started playing.  But with only a single garage slot - and no cash to buy any more - I'm having to be conservative about which tanks I own and then unlock.

So, I started with just the Cruiser Mk II, a British light tank which I was able to skip through to jump into the Valentine.  Now, I want to go back to the Val at some point, but I was also watching Jingles videos where he was talking about HEAT rounds.  The first tank I could see where I could use a HEAT round was this baby, with its Howitzer.

And you will find comments from other players about getting one shotted by this gun, and when you do hit and kill its glorious.  But more often than not you don't hit because... well, the aiming time is horrendous - and only exacerbated by having a 50% crew - this is only a test tank to get elite and quit for me.

Anyway, I loaded heat and set off onto the battlefield.... Initially, playing very slowly, very much from the back, I could compete... and I even cleaned up a few games to get big scores.

But, there are two maps which really don't lend themselves to this tank... Himmelsdorf.

Turning and then coming around corners to snap shot, simply can't be done easily, and you find with 18+ seconds reload you're picking your shots and then getting screwed over.

I've been point blank with a T28 right in my sights, 5 meters.... whole enemy tank filling the reticule... fire... MISS....

The arch of the projectile is also very off putting, and then the speed of the projectile, its so so slow.

So, its totally miss with this attempt at playing clever.  Switching up to the Pom Pom gun has not helped, this tank is so slow it can't compete when there's PzII's & III's zipping around you.  Not to mention the plethora of Ruskies running circles around you.

Track IR for WarThunder, Bargain PS3 and WarThunder Ground Combat!

Right, so I played IL2 and Forgotten battles loads, I even had an X52 throttle and joystick and a TrakIR4 head tracker...

I've just started to pack my current lab/office up to move, and I found the head tracker and I know where the joy stick set it...

It maybe time to hit "full real battle" on War Thunder...

In other news, I got the first PS3 from t'internet... this one was £14.99... Reportedly its broken... Well, After fiddling with the little wire from the Blueray deck, and resetting it to Factory mode - reflashing - and then starting up again, it seems to be fine.

Then there was coverage out over the weekend (from Gaijin, but reposted in English by Jingles) of the ground combat in WarThunder...

Okay, the physics look dodgy... and the integration with air combat had me a little nervous, but boy did it look gorgeous, and Gaijin already make WarThunder in flight mode look spectacular!