What settings influence time dilation in career?

[Eisenfaustus]

Well there is the quite obvious answer: Density. By lowering the density I can trade immersion for performance. But is there anything else I can do? Any other ways I can reduce TD? Graphic setting don‘t seem to have an impact. 
 

Especially the Normandy career is for me unplayable once the Allies have landed as the beachhead AAA reduces the game to 10% real-time speed…

[sevenless]

36 minutes ago, Eisenfaustus said:

Well there is the quite obvious answer: Density. By lowering the density I can trade immersion for performance. But is there anything else I can do? Any other ways I can reduce TD? Graphic setting don‘t seem to have an impact. 
 

Especially the Normandy career is for me unplayable once the Allies have landed as the beachhead AAA reduces the game to 10% real-time speed…

 

Until 2 years ago I was still playing with a i7-2600K@4200 (now i9-9900K@5200) and I can tell you from my experiments back then, troop DENSITY is the only thing that influenced time dilation for me. I guess it hasn´t changed since then. Reduce AI units that claim CPU cycles. Play on scattered density. If that doesn´t help, only a CPU uprade will help.

[oc2209]

2 hours ago, Eisenfaustus said:

Especially the Normandy career is for me unplayable once the Allies have landed as the beachhead AAA reduces the game to 10% real-time speed…

 

Even with my density on lowest, I still couldn't handle Normandy. Actually, Bodenplatte has never worked well for me, either. I mean, yes, I have a crap PC, but all other things being equal, I can run Eastern Front maps better.

[dburne]

Does any other flight sim actually do this?

[KevPBur]

I found reducing map scenery distance to 50km has helped a lot. Under Settings > Game. Also Horizon draw distance to 70km under Settings > Graphics

[ShamrockOneFive]

2 hours ago, dburne said:

Does any other flight sim actually do this?

 

They all have their ways of dealing with this. IL-2 slows down... small and then in larger amounts. DCS can handle large numbers but eventually it just drops frames into the single digits when it gets overloaded. IL-2 is a bit of a graduated experience where light time dilation is hardly noticeable and heavy is very annoying. DCS tends to be good up until its very much not good.

 

Most other sims don't have to deal with this. X-Plane and MSFS don't have combat in any meaningful way so they don't have a lot of AI actors at all.

[dburne]

8 hours ago, ShamrockOneFive said:

 

They all have their ways of dealing with this. IL-2 slows down... small and then in larger amounts. DCS can handle large numbers but eventually it just drops frames into the single digits when it gets overloaded. IL-2 is a bit of a graduated experience where light time dilation is hardly noticeable and heavy is very annoying. DCS tends to be good up until its very much not good.

 

Most other sims don't have to deal with this. X-Plane and MSFS don't have combat in any meaningful way so they don't have a lot of AI actors at all.

 

Ok thanks much for the info.

 

[AtomicP]

14 hours ago, sevenless said:

 

Until 2 years ago I was still playing with a i7-2600K@4200 (now i9-9900K@5200) and I can tell you from my experiments back then, troop DENSITY is the only thing that influenced time dilation for me. I guess it hasn´t changed since then. Reduce AI units that claim CPU cycles. Play on scattered density. If that doesn´t help, only a CPU uprade will help.

As far as I know, there's no CPU available that will completely alleviate the effects of time dilation. I'm on a Ryzen 5 5600X and it still shows to an extent, but much less than when I had a FX8350. If there was an easy fix I'm sure the devs would have done that by now given the many reports of TD over the years. That they seem to dodge the question implies there's no obvious cause. It's clear that adding more complexity to missions yields more TD, but not what exactly. Troops for sure, but the problem of TD has existed prior to troops being put on the ground.

[sevenless]

1 minute ago, AtomicP said:

As far as I know, there's no CPU available that will completely alleviate the effects of time dilation.

 

That might be correct, but a faster CPU increases the threshold until TD kicks in. It is the only way the user has to influence that, if already scattered density is chosen. The root of the cause, however, can only be eliminated by the devs.

[IckyATLAS]

Please check this link below for a possible solution to TD. ?

 

8.8 GHz: Intel 13900K on liquid nitrogen achieves highest overclock on record | TechSpot

 

[Harlequin]

Hi.  In PWCG there are a lot of options to set density. i.e air, ground and AAA.  but there are also more advanced settings that can set max number of AI in flight etc.  It would be worth looking into as you should be able to have a more custom campaign to suit your PC.  It's much better than the regular career too in my opinion. :)

[Eisenfaustus]

12 minutes ago, cosg_Paul said:

Hi.  In PWCG there are a lot of options to set density. i.e air, ground and AAA.  but there are also more advanced settings that can set max number of AI in flight etc.  It would be worth looking into as you should be able to have a more custom campaign to suit your PC.  It's much better than the regular career too in my opinion.

Very true - I love @PatrickAWlson‘s work and enjoy it very much. But I also like the built in career and would like the be able to play a Normandy career at somewhat normal speed ^^
 

Concerning a new CPU my wife and my wallet agreed on „hell no!“ so…

[Gambit21]

5 hours ago, AtomicP said:

As far as I know, there's no CPU available that will completely alleviate the effects of time dilation. I'm on a Ryzen 5 5600X and it still shows to an extent, but much less than when I had a FX8350. If there was an easy fix I'm sure the devs would have done that by now given the many reports of TD over the years. That they seem to dodge the question implies there's no obvious cause. It's clear that adding more complexity to missions yields more TD, but not what exactly. Troops for sure, but the problem of TD has existed prior to troops being put on the ground.

Correct

 

TD exists even when you think it doesn’t. In a mission with no TD, hit 4x time accel - notice how it’s not really 4x? That’s TD, but just hasn’t crept to 1x yet.

Aircraft attack logic has a huge effect IME, among other things.

[Leftenant_Soap]

In addition to the very good points mentioned already, in career missions with many AI flights present, I have experienced time compression when (presumably) AI flights start despawning. It feels like playing 2x time accel, very noticeable and difficult to do complicated things like dogfighting and landing. ?

 

For what it's worth, it wouldn't be the end of the world to lose FPS instead of this time dilation business. I played OG IL-2 with 30 fps for years and was happy. Now I run everything locked at 75 fps; I can live with 60 or 30 fps. That ship has sailed though, the game engine is what it is.

 

Not whining about it but it may be time for a TD support & therapy group...

Edited December 5, 2022 by DD_Soapy

[spreckair]

So DCS is now heading toward a multi-threading solution so that the application can use more cores.  See https://stormbirds.blog/2022/12/02/multi-threading-for-dcs-update/  .   I wonder if this kind of approach solves this problem.

[AndyJWest]

10 minutes ago, spreckair said:

So DCS is now heading toward a multi-threading solution so that the application can use more cores.  See https://stormbirds.blog/2022/12/02/multi-threading-for-dcs-update/  .   I wonder if this kind of approach solves this problem.

 

Given how many years they've been working on it, I hope it does something...

[sevenless]

4 hours ago, AndyJWest said:

 

Given how many years they've been working on it, I hope it does something...

 

Maybe NOR will get them up to speed. Good for the customer:

 

Unreal and NOR and future simulators from the Unreal engine – Stormbirds

[IckyATLAS]

I remember long long ago when I was doing coding and programs would run single thread only, with languages without any parallelism.

And when this possibility arrived then parallelism meant mainly running multiple different single tasks in parallel chunks and later on some communication between them at high level was possible.

Here I will not speak about vector/matrix calculations, which are inherently parallelable and could easily adapted to parallel code and multi thread or multitask systems. Very quickly we had special hardware to do just that, and the parallelism was handled by the hardware and not the software, so that burden was not really visible at high level.

The challenge was to modify a very linear code that did something and rethink it in a parallel way so as to increase its execution speed. Guys I did find that it was extremely hard. We did not have any tools to help at least in the beginning (then I stopped anyway that activity and moved in a different direction). The problem I thought at that time was that we consciously think linear and unconsciously our brain, our senses all work absolutely with an incredible level of parallelism. The conscious process is very slow compared to a computer and not parallel. But yes, we do not do the same things as the computer, so my comparison stops here.

 

However, we do program the computers. I can perfectly understand that it must be very difficult for the devs to adapt the code so as to fully use say 16 or 32 cores in the sim.

 

On one hand it may appear conceptually very doable.

If you have 20 planes 20 ships and trains plus artillery and vehicles and you have 32 physical cores. 

Easy, assign the 20 planes that are very demanding one per core, then the ships split on 4 cores (5 per core), trains on one core, artillery on one core, vehicles on two cores, one core dedicated to the dynamic allocation of cores to the various entities, choreography and communication between the various parts of the game, synchronization of events like bullets fired by one plane that hit another plane on a different core, and finally you have left 2 full cores for all the rest windows etc. If you have 64 threads (two per core), then I let you do an imaginary split-up.

 

Anyway, this is just a very simplistic approach but seems parallel stuff. Planes, vehicles, ships, trains, artillery, explosions bullets flying, all that in a battle theater do happen in parallel, but at the same time you have events that are caused by other events and there is no parallelism. After all, you must wait for the bullet to hit you before you start to bleed right?

 

 

[AtomicP]

13 hours ago, DD_Soapy said:

In addition to the very good points mentioned already, in career missions with many AI flights present, I have experienced time compression when (presumably) AI flights start despawning. It feels like playing 2x time accel, very noticeable and difficult to do complicated things like dogfighting and landing. ?

 

For what it's worth, it wouldn't be the end of the world to lose FPS instead of this time dilation business. I played OG IL-2 with 30 fps for years and was happy. Now I run everything locked at 75 fps; I can live with 60 or 30 fps. That ship has sailed though, the game engine is what it is.

 

Not whining about it but it may be time for a TD support & therapy group...

I get that sometimes too, it's like the game coils up like a spring when it gets complicated then pings back when the load comes off. Makes everything hard to control for a bit. I'd also prefer reduced FPS than the in-game timer messing up.

[Hook_Echo]

 You can reduce time dilation by overclocking your CPU. I have a single core on my CPU overclocked, since IL-2 relies heavily on one core (actually one thread) for the calculations of the AI units. I only over clock one core of my CPU so that overall my CPU stays fairly cool with the one core chugging along at max speed and producing the heat.

 

Ideally for IL-2 we would be running CPUs with a small number of cores that run really fast, but that is not how CPUs are made. It shows the age of the game engine. You can have a really great CPU but the game only uses a fraction of it's computing power.

 

Oh another option, but you need to be really knowledgeable, would be unpartition your cores (edit: disable hyperthreading, I couldn't remember what it was called), so they aren't split into threads, but that is going to hurt your PCs overall performance. It would only maybe be worth it if the PC was used exclusively for IL-2.

Edited December 7, 2022 by Hook_Echo
clarification