19 replies to this topic

[IMG News]

Feral Interactive has announced the release of a demo for the recently released Battlestations: Pacific. The sequel to Battlestations: Midway expands upon the original game with two large campaigns, one based on the actual events of the War in the Pacific and the other a ‘what-if?’ scenario based on the premise of Japanese victory. Battlestations: Pacific features 14 missions for each campaign, over 100 different types of war machines to control, improved graphics, and enhanced multiplayer modes.

This sequel to Battlestations: Midway sends you back in time to World War II, when Japanese forces threatened to expand their empire across the Pacific. Battlestations: Pacific builds upon the scope and ambition of the hugely popular Battlestations series with improved graphics, more detailed gameplay, five new co-op and team-based multiplayer modes for up to eight gamers and loads more.

The demo gives a taste of the single player missions, but also drops you into skirmish mode so you can practice the skills you’ll need for the full game’s multiplayer experience. So what are you waiting for? Visit our downloads area and give it a try yourself. If you’d like to find out more about the game, there’s also our Battlestations: Pacific mini-site, featuring screenshots, trailers and more.

Click over to the links below for more information.

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[UmarOMC1]

Awesome! Thanks, Feral!

[Janichsan]

Oh, wow. The game needs quite a powerful machine, as it seems. My poor little 13" MBP with a 9400M is pretty much overextended with everything but almost every setting turned completely down...

[Sargiel]

From the great looking trailers & gameplay video's on youtube I was betting on this needing a bit of umpfh Maybe you'd have better performance with the prior game Midway ?

[pantherv]

It may need a bit of a machine,but i would say it needs a patch. I have an i7 with 6gb or ram,even with no AA it runs like a pig and has major graphic issues in the demo.

[Janichsan]

Sargiel, on 17 October 2010 - 10:48 AM, said:

Maybe you'd have better performance with the prior game Midway ?

Sure I have. But I played Midway already to death.

[Eric5h5]

pantherv, on 17 October 2010 - 11:08 AM, said:

It may need a bit of a machine,but i would say it needs a patch. I have an i7 with 6gb or ram,even with no AA it runs like a pig and has major graphic issues in the demo.

What graphics card?  Also maybe you need to update your OS.  Mac Pro + 5870 on 10.6.4 runs fluidly with everything maxed and no issues (although shadows seem permanently disabled).  The only issues seem to be the default controls--there's nothing set up for bombing mode, which can be fixed by going into the options, but I can't really get anything to happen in skirmish mode.  It seems to be stuck in spectator mode; I can cycle through bases but nothing much else.

--Eric

[Mister Mumbles]

The demo was interesting, but ultimately the game's not my thing. *shrug*

[DaveyJJ]

It blows up hellishly graphic wise on my new i3 iMac with the 512 card. Unusable in fact. Too busy after screwing up my iPad this weekend to yet send an email to Feral.

[edddeduck]

Janichsan, on 17 October 2010 - 09:43 AM, said:

Oh, wow. The game needs quite a powerful machine, as it seems. My poor little 13" MBP with a 9400M is pretty much overextended with everything but almost every setting turned completely down...

Yes, the 9400 card inside a MacBook is a low end option for this game as the 9400 is a integrated card with shared RAM. The 9400 just the like the GMA cards is not designed for gaming so with the newer games can struggle on the higher settings.

pantherv, on 17 October 2010 - 11:08 AM, said:

It may need a bit of a machine,but i would say it needs a patch. I have an i7 with 6gb or ram,even with no AA it runs like a pig and has major graphic issues in the demo.

We don't know of any performance (or graphical) issues on the i7 machine (we have one here at Feral). If you could email us with a support report from the demo we can have a look. Please note trying to play at native resolution with everything on may well overextend your graphics card as the native resolution of the 27" iMac is extremely large so you may run out of VRAM.

We know on the 512MB i7 iMac lowering the resolution by one setting give a very smooth performance even with everything on high settings as the card can keep everything in VRAM without paging.

Eric5h5, on 17 October 2010 - 12:15 PM, said:

What graphics card?  Also maybe you need to update your OS.  Mac Pro + 5870 on 10.6.4 runs fluidly with everything maxed and no issues (although shadows seem permanently disabled).  The only issues seem to be the default controls--there's nothing set up for bombing mode, which can be fixed by going into the options, but I can't really get anything to happen in skirmish mode.  It seems to be stuck in spectator mode; I can cycle through bases but nothing much else.

--Eric

In Skirmish mode you need to bring up the support manager you can then select and launch units etc. Although once all your controllable units are dead that's it for you!

DaveyJJ, on 17 October 2010 - 09:09 PM, said:

It blows up hellishly graphic wise on my new i3 iMac with the 512 card. Unusable in fact. Too busy after screwing up my iPad this weekend to yet send an email to Feral.

As I mentioned above if you try and over stress the card the performance will fall off a cliff as the card will start paging data from the HD (which is quite slow compared to VRAM). Try lowering your settings or resolution a little, the newer iMac's have huge screens with extremely high resolutions and the cards can struggle to support native resolutions.

To explain a bit more the resolution can have a huge effect on the performance on these large screens. The game was designed for the XBox 360 and it runs at 720p, the 24" iMac native resolution requires 2.5 times as many pixels to be rendered and the 27" at native resolution requires 4 times as many pixels!

This said if you think you have noticed something wrong please create a support report in the front panel of the game and email our support address and we will investigate asap.

Edwin

[ltcommander.data]

edddeduck, on 18 October 2010 - 07:31 AM, said:

As I mentioned above if you try and over stress the card the performance will fall off a cliff as the card will start paging data from the HD (which is quite slow compared to VRAM).

I remember from John Siracusa's 10.2 Jaguar review that Quartz Extreme replicates and extends the VRAM into system memory, if I interpreted it right. Is video memory for OpenGL not virtualized and augmented by system memory before relying on the HDD? I though we were ahead of Vista in that regard.

[Eric5h5]

edddeduck, on 18 October 2010 - 07:31 AM, said:

In Skirmish mode you need to bring up the support manager you can then select and launch units etc. Although once all your controllable units are dead that's it for you!

Yeah, it says to click mouse 2 to launch, so I click that and nothing seems to launch.  The icon changes to a building and then back again.

--Eric

[Janichsan]

ltcommander.data, on 18 October 2010 - 08:04 AM, said:

I remember from John Siracusa's 10.2 Jaguar review that Quartz Extreme replicates and extends the VRAM into system memory, if I interpreted it right. Is video memory for OpenGL not virtualized and augmented by system memory before relying on the HDD? I though we were ahead of Vista in that regard.

Even paging into the main RAM is comparatively slower than direct access to the VRAM (at least when there is dedicated VRAM). So I would expect a performance hit in any case.

[edddeduck]

Eric5h5, on 18 October 2010 - 08:43 AM, said:

Yeah, it says to click mouse 2 to launch, so I click that and nothing seems to launch.  The icon changes to a building and then back again.

--Eric

Don't know what you are doing but follow these instructions

Press Z to bring up the Support Manager. Now select the plane you want to launch using WASD then press enter to launch it. Their are other ways of doing this but I checked this method right now for you. Enjoy!

ltcommander.data, on 18 October 2010 - 08:04 AM, said:

I remember from John Siracusa's 10.2 Jaguar review that Quartz Extreme replicates and extends the VRAM into system memory, if I interpreted it right. Is video memory for OpenGL not virtualized and augmented by system memory before relying on the HDD? I though we were ahead of Vista in that regard.

Janichsan, on 18 October 2010 - 09:16 AM, said:

Even paging into the main RAM is comparatively slower than direct access to the VRAM (at least when there is dedicated VRAM). So I would expect a performance hit in any case.

I try and make my answers understandable for everyone, your mentioning of different types of paging is true however unless you are a programmer or at least know have training in the area the exact details are not easy to understand without further reading, hence I try and keep things simple and understandable by all. That way readers understand if "I turn my graphics up to high the card cannot take it and the game slows down" if I said "When you hit a certain threshold the card hits it's memory limits causing a cascade effect to the performance starting with paging of the VRAM which can then increase the RAM usage which causes the OS to page other items to disk to cover for the increased usage, this all spikes the data rates on the motherboard and HD which will then further slow down the machine" some people would just give up the will to read any further.

Regardless of the type of paging (HD or RAM) both will cause a massive performance hit if it is going on for each frame. The performance difference from accessing the data directly on high speed VRAM and having to push data up to the card from lower speed RAM over the motherboard is massive in computing terms and will cause large frame rate drops. Basically you can only do so much depending on the card go over the limit and you get a big fps drop get just under the game runs fine, often the smallest change (like one setting lower on the resolution) will get the card under the limit.

Cheers,

Edwin

[Eric5h5]

edddeduck, on 18 October 2010 - 11:54 AM, said:

Now select the plane you want to launch using WASD then press enter to launch it.

Enter!  That's like the only key I didn't try.  Thanks, that works.

--Eric

[pantherv]

Thanks for the advice, as for my machine it's the ATI RADEON 4850 card, last years i7:(
I will try lowering the graphics and see how that goes.

[edddeduck]

pantherv, on 19 October 2010 - 10:53 AM, said:

Thanks for the advice, as for my machine it's the ATI RADEON 4850 card, last years i7:(
I will try lowering the graphics and see how that goes.

For that card I think lowering the resolution by one setting does the trick but with so many cards to test I am not certain I know once you get the sweet spot the game really flys on that card and iMac!

Cheers,

Edwin

[Janichsan]

edddeduck, on 18 October 2010 - 07:31 AM, said:

Yes, the 9400 card inside a MacBook is a low end option for this game as the 9400 is a integrated card with shared RAM. The 9400 just the like the GMA cards is not designed for gaming so with the newer games can struggle on the higher settings.

*sigh* Okay, I guess I have to pass on that game at this time.

[edddeduck]

Janichsan, on 19 October 2010 - 11:55 AM, said:

*sigh* Okay, I guess I have to pass on that game at this time.

The game does play on the 9400 you just need to run low resolutions (resolution is one of the biggest performance killers on the 9400 card).

Edwin

[Janichsan]

edddeduck, on 20 October 2010 - 02:15 AM, said:

The game does play on the 9400 you just need to run low resolutions (resolution is one of the biggest performance killers on the 9400 card).

Yeah, I've noticed – I went down to 640x480 in the demo. But honestly: the game then looks like ass and still isn't too smooth.