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Page 6
Preview: Rowan's Battle of Britain
by Bob "Groucho" MarksThere are some beautiful atmospheric effects in BoB. Sunrise and sunset are rendered in some truly stunning colors and the sun appearing low on the horizon can also make spotting your quarry difficult. At dusk or dawn settings, buildings actually cast shadows and low areas in the terrain will be in shadow and higher areas will be bathed in golden light.
Clouds are another issue. While invaluable and realistic from a tactical standpoint, I’m forced to deselect that option as it kills my frame rate, actually rendering the sim unflyable. This is a major bummer, as the clouds in BoB actually are semi-opaque and not just eye-candy a-la CFS2. At the risk of sounding like a CPU snob, there is no excuse for any sim running at 1024 X 768 resolution and 32-bit to bring a one gigahertz-class processor to its knees. Sure, knocking the resolution down a bit, selecting the FSAA back from 4X4, or kicking the color down to 16-bit helps, but all other graphics suffer. Look, I’ve got a 64MB GeForce 2 video card and 384MB of very fast VC133 RAM and selecting some atmospheric effects should NOT knock framerate to the sub-10 fps level. That is just plain inexcusable, and something that I sincerely hope is a code optimization issue and not something that BoB actually ships with.
View a little restricted? Open the canopy and lean out!
Bottom Line
Despite a few miscues in the graphics and collision modeling departments, I love this simulator. It’s challenging, immersive, and wickedly addictive. It’s not the easiest sim to master and will not blow up everybody’s skirt, but at present, it has no equal in the arena of hardcore prop sims. Rowan successfully set the stage for challenging dogfight simulations with MiG Alley, and has now delivered an epic performance with Battle of Britain. As well executed as they come, BoB should prove a worthy additon to the dogfighting sim crowds' roster of must-have titles.
[Editor's Note: Look for our follow-up preview on the Multi-player component soon.]
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