Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Wing Walker]

I have BAT updated all the way through 3.8.5 (I've been downloading for a month)

I worked up a simple escort mission with 36 B-17's in box formation at 25,000ft+ and the con trails causes my fps to drop like crazy.

Is there something I can do to work around this, or get it to not effect my fps?  Or even a way too effectively shut them off

This is also the first time I've ever had a fps or lag issue with this game with pretty elaborate missions.  Seems to just be when I am actually looking at the contrails.

Thank you,
W.W.

[BlackAce7727]

FPS can be a sod especially with fine details like contrails. The only course of action would be to reduce the graphics as that DOES help, I don't know what your PC specs are but give it a shot and see what comes out.

[Wing Walker]

I was afraid that would be the only option, to kill off my graphics.

Is there a specific number I can reduce in the .conf that would effect as little as possible?

The only other time I've had fps drops like this have been with larger formations of boats firing up mass amounts of AA.

[FL2070]

To decrease the number of particle effects, you need a mod. There is no setting in the conf.ini that does that.

This mod will replace the contrail effects in BAT with ones that are orders of magnitude more FPS-friendly, but also lower quality (2d instead of 3d). Extract the LessCondensation folder to #WAW3.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/fwx2hhan0hn99h3/LessCondensation.zip/file

[WxTech]

To elaborate... the fps hit results from the contrails being made up of many hundreds of individual cloudlet particles for each individual contrail.

The fps-friendly mod (which is the way the earlier game versions did this back in the day) uses a different approach, based on a segmented line, where each line segment replaces potentially scores of particles. The result is far fewer individual elements to draw, lessening the graphical burden.

Furthermore, when lots of 'smoke' effect particles are being rendered with the conf.ini entry Effects=2, the frame rate is hit even more so due to every particle having shading applied based on the direction from which it's illuminated. Effects=1 does not have this shading calculation in operation, thus making for a faster frame rate--as well as not suffering the too frequent 'flashing' phenomenon when things are busy.