playing with just 2x AntiA and 2x Filtering, as well as limiting viewing distances to half the slider fixed those random crashes for now. On the other hand, if the slider is there, I want to take advantage of it and my PC runs Crysis & Co like a charm. Please fix those issues.
I'd like to add a bit to this topic. During the development of the new OpenGL shaders effects (Enhanced Lighting and HDR), Alex already warned us that the crazy values we permitted for antialiasing and viewing distances would either make the game unplayable or crash the game because of the extreme stress it puts on the video card and CPU. He even strongly suggested we lower the maximum values for each of the options to make sure people wouldn't complain that maxed out values don't work. We choose to leave the option there, because we wanted people four years from now with future hardware to be able to run to slightly higher values. As a mea culpae, I'd say I should have added some warning in the option menu when selecting values that may be excessive, I admit. This will be done in the vext version.
Why exactly did Standoff worked great with all values maxed out back in Episode 4 and now it doesn't in Episode 5 ? Because you enabled the two new shaders features; if you left Enhanced Lighting and HDR disabled it'd still work as it did (and even better) in our old Episode 4 release.
Why should the antialising and viewing distance values should be lower when Enhanced Lighing and HDR are enabled ? There are two reasons for this: First, it requires
lots more of data crunching. I am not kidding. For example, enabling HDR means that not only the system have to compute more fancy effects, but also that every single pixel to be drawn on screen uses
twice the data bandwidth than before, each RGB colour channel being 16 bits in HDR instead of the usual 8 bits. The second reason is, like Quarto said, that we're making an old engine doing stuff that it wasn't designed to do. Back in 1996 when 3D cards were a novelty, the WCP programmers had the CPU do all the work, then pass the polygons to be rendered one by one to the rendering dll. To be able to process those great new visual effects, modern games have the engine pass the polygons by batches of the thousand,
then do their tricks. That makes a huge difference. Since we can't recompile the old engine to suit our needs, Alex had to work really hard to make it work with a decent framerate.
Now, regardless of all of the above, the most important question is: is it such a big deal if you can't max your options ? The answer is, in my opinion, no.
The ship visibility distance slider determine the distance after which a ship stops being rendered. With the middle value, most capship will already look like a small dot on screen before disapearing; that means that the renderer crunches data and renders thousands of polygons to display a simple dot. Is it worth cranking it higher ? You most likely won't see the difference.
The antialising options make the game prettier by removing the jaggies; but my personal experience with Standoff tells me that there is not a huge difference between 2x and 4x FSAA, and that I can't even see the difference between 4x and 8x. As for anisotropy, I can't see any difference going over 2x.
So the bottom line is: you don't really need maxed options to enjoy the game and not even to get all the eye candy; we could have as well lowered the max settings. You're not missing anything running the game with visibility distances at medium values and 2x antialiasing values. (And yes, we're still trying to see if we can prevent the crashes when your hardware can't keep up with all the hacked rendering we're doing).
Again, all of us have lives outside of Standoff and have put quite a bit of them on hold trying to fix these problems. If we could devote 24/7 to Standoff we would, but we can't...the real world demands our attention too.
I'd love to work on Wing Commander professionally, too
