LizLemon

That changes when the lod models switch but doesnt do anything for the distance at which objects fade out.

It makes them pretty much infinite. The way the game is determining how far an object is drawn comes down to something in the 3d model file of the object, not everything is draw out to 9.5km. See this example; The camera position is constant in the pics above the only thing that has changed is the level of zoom. You can see that some objects, like the factory(purple), town block(green on the right), and trains(small yellow to the right of the red tower) are rendered out pretty far regardless of zoom. These objects are also rendered out farther than the trees and houses on the map. There are other objects in game like the barrage balloons that are rendered out to even farther distances and the blocks that make up Moscow have a draw distance that is probably 100+ km. Other stuff, like yellowchurch (green to the left of the factory) has a much shorter draw distance that varies with zoom, and redchurch (yellow extreme left) has an even shorter draw distance. Kuban museum (red square) and kuban tower (red tower duh) likewise have different draw distances that change depending on the zoom level. All of this is being controlled in some way by the LOD0 model of objects. There is a post on the rof forums where someone explains how lod/object distance works in that game and I think it is pretty much the same here, except unlike rof there isnt a simple file that can be altered to change draw distance. The game is doing something where it takes the width of the object and determines that it shouldnt be drawn if that object is smaller than X amount of pixels. This is why some stuff has much longer draw distances than other stuff. Its also unclear if its actually getting a distance from the 3d model, that is "the longest side of this model is 30m" itself or if there is some string with a value in the mgm file that says "this object has a 30m visibility sphere". I suspect its a value in the mgm file though because stuff like trains and vehicles renders out farther than the tree/buildings on the map even though the trains/trucks are pretty small.

You may want to try an image attribute value of 217 instead.

You may want to create or edit the existing height.hini file for this. Firstly because I think you can make a duplicate of the existing one that will be directed to the new textures, this would allow you mod to be installed simultaneously with the stock map, and players could choose between the two with the mission editor. The other reason is because the landscape shader used by the default .hini is summer_proc, whereas the other snow maps in game use snow instead. I'm not sure what the difference is but you may want to try changing that line and seeing if things look better.

The image attribute variable works like this; ImageAttr=xxx //the value here is the variables below you want added up // IA_DEFAULT=0, // IA_NOCLIP=1, //presumable stops the camera from nocliping the object, I dont think this works // IA_NOCLIP_ANIM=2, // no idea // IA_NOROTINTERPOLATION=4, //no idea either but may be related to sprites // IA_NOMINZ=8, //no idea // IA_NOMINPIXELS=16, //probably related to lod and the minimum number of pixels threshold and object needs to hit to be drawn // IA_NOPOSINTERPOLATION=32, //no idea // IA_CLOSEVIEWARG=64, //no idea // IA_ALWAYSVISIBLE=128, //this is what makes the ships and smoke be visible from extreme distances // IA_SCALEARG=256, //this scales far lod models, appears to only be used by aircraft // ImageAttr=Attr1+Attr2+...+AttrN //

I did all the smoke map emitters, link at the bottom of the first post. Planes can be done in the same way as this, but because it is editing what is more or less the master config file for aircraft the game will spit out an error message if you try to fly that plane.

Using limited icon gets rid of the in game FPS counter.

If doing the shadows is as drop in as nvidia claims then it would be a pretty nice improvement to the game. GI would be nice as well but the game is sorta faking that as is. One big improvement they could pretty much do right now with minimal effort would be making the cockpits use the same shader as the exterior of the plane, giving the cockpits some reflections and a better sense of place. The other thing they really need to do is move over to a PBR pipeline, but that would be a lot of work.

Its only the big fires that have the extended distance, but I can make this happen to the smaller smoke effects too.

The gpresets.ini file contains a few variables that allow some nice tweaks of the game. By default this file isn't exposed to the player, but by extracting this file into the root install of bos, typically "X:\Steam\steamapps\common\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad" then you will have a copy of the file under X:\Steam\steamapps\common\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad\data\luascripts" and you can then edit it. Once you open the file up you will find several sections broken down like this; //******** Preset 0 ************ [preset=0]..................... ................ //******** Preset 1 ************ [preset=1] ..................... //******** Preset 3 ************ [preset=3] These preset sections correspond to the presets in game, ie preset 0 is minimum and preset 3 is ultra. For editing you should start by choosing the preset section that corresponds to your in game setting. Here is the section of the variables worth changing taken from preset 3, only a few of these arent exposed in the in game video settings but what is there is worth messing around with //Post effects post_effects_enable=true //this controls all post effects, this can be changed in game post_bloom_enable=true //turn bloom on or off, this can be changed in game post_contrast=true //this controls a post contrast filter, changing it to false greatly reduces the brightness/contrast of the image post_sharpen=false //post sharpening that can be changed in game post_drops_enable=true //raindrops, this can be changed in game post_hdr=3 //HDR level change this and see which one you like best, 0-3 for values saturation=1.0 //saturation of the game, where 0 is black and white. I have tried values as high as 2, which is very very saturated. I like 1.2 or so. post_motion_samples=24; //samples for motion blur, increasing this will increase the motion blur quality. //Screen depth, SSAO, SSR depth_res=1 //dont mess with this ssao_res=1 //dont mess with this ssao_samples=16 //number of samples for the ambient occlusion, increasing this reduces the noise of the ssao and improves quality. I have tried 32 but higher values may work ssr_samples=30 //number of reflection samples, higher will be higher quality reflections but this is hard to notice in game. clouds_samples=96 //number of cloud samples, a larger number reduces cloud shimmering. I have tried 512 but another user has done 1024 effects_samples=1 gpresets.zip

Yes, individual buildings could be done. But I'm trying to find a better way of extending the draw distance then just having certain objects render all the time.

Ships draw distance is pretty much infinite. FPS impact of about 2-4fps on a laptop with intel integrated graphics. The large smoke from Stalingrad has also been increased. FPS hit of about 1 also on intel hd 4000. INSTALL Simply drag the "data" folder in the archive into the root folder of your bos installation, ie "xxxx\steam\steamapps\common\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad\" draw distance.zip EDIT Added "draw distance emitters" which makes the range of all map emitter smokes near infinite. Install in the same way as above. draw distance emitters.zip

oh boy..............

Separate tool. I do one scale without noise reduction and one with it on. Then in photoshop I blend the two layers together, using a layer mask made by edge detection for blending the noisy layer with the one that has had noise reduced. This keeps most of the detail like scratches while getting rid of most of the color noise that makes the stock textures look so bad. Now I'm leaning towards doing a bit more tweaking by hand. Some of the details like the leather on the 190 needs to be masked off on its own. Drag the data folder in the archive into the root install folder; steam\steamapps\common\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad

Il2m42, Fw-190a3, Pe-2s87 https://mega.nz/#!7CBiXAIS!AGpAi9CCgQtnYoRxNx_lY0a0TAOIUXLGwu2a0OKDjdE