Patch à venir et sityation du modding

Sorry I haven't posted in a couple of days, I waited until
our progress was a little more clear. We are up on here a lot, and your
feedback and reports are extremely helpful. Thank you all for your
support!

We are planning another patch for this coming Monday the 18th of
February, with a beta version of the patch this Friday the 15th. The
beta version will be the same as before, manually extractable to your
game folder, then automatically overwritten by the release version of
the patch.

Before I get more into the patch, I want to discuss the sfs – mod
situation a bit. First of all, the data you’re accessing was never
intended to be hidden from the user, but rather accessible as part of
our larger plans for SDKs and user mods and expansions. It’s just we
planned to open it up ourselves eventually, once the SDK was ready, but
our enterprising fans found a way to do it earlier.

Most importantly, I need to mention something about Valve anti-cheat.
Valve has their standard feature running on top of multiplayer, and we
have some of our own additional checks. The way it works is not an
automatic immediate server ban, but rather a data-gathering and review
process resulting in eventual account ban from all multiplayer for the
game.

So while many of you may enjoy playing around with game content, please
do so offline. We do not yet have the user interface for switching
between modified and stock files, nor do we have the server GUI to
allow/disallow custom content so that makes things a little more
difficult for the players. We’re probably going to ignore any
infractions before today, but we’ll become more aggressive in the coming
days. Please be warned. There will be a wide-scale account ban once we
identify a large number of culprits. Everyone will be banned
simultaneously, with no prior warning or chance for redemption. If you
do not wish to be made an example of, please do not use ANY modified
files in any online matches.

After all, cracking the game is against the EULA and theoretically we
could ban everyone who has ever tried any mod, but that of course would
serve no purpose. Once again, we do not mind you fiddling with your own
game on your own machine, as long as you don’t use that ability to try
to give yourself an unfair advantage online.

And now, the patch.

1. Further improvements to framerate in regards to the terrain engine.
The improvement promises to be the most drastic yet, but since it’s
currently split in half between two different machines we won’t have a
more precise idea of the FPS gain until later today or early Friday.
2. SSAO is optional, a checkbox in Video Options.
3. Texture manager split into a separate core, which does wonders for
performance on 4+ cores but offers no improvement on two cores.
4. Texture quality slider added to video options.
5. New Steam Lobby feature as an alternative to existing Server search.
6. Improvements to the Quick Mission Builder feature.
7. Large number of various changes in aircraft and cockpits

Future plans and roadmap:

1. SLI / Crossfire support (had to temporarily halt development due to ongoing work on FPS and texture manager)
2. Improvements to the campaign engine, including a rank and awards system.
3. Changes to multiplayer interface to better deal with the mods
4. More FM and DM tuning
5. Fin