I have spent several hours working with this beta version and given a choice I would give it a grade lower than Beta 1.002. I realize this is a work in progress but ...



Good things about 1.003

1. All of my game packs work.

2. The game store is great.



Troublesome things

1. The sky selection is erratic Some times they work some times they don't.

When they don't I have to go back and select a clear sky and reselect the one I wanted before. Like I said not always a problem seems too have a mind of it's own. Some times the game or editor screen goes black after fussing with the sky, and I have to use task manager (needless to say my work is lost - that's why we save so often).



The issue of entities popping up whenever, is not a good thing.

When I put entities on one side of the lake and stand on the other side of the lake the buildings do not appear until I walk around and get closer, then the buildings on the other side (where I just came from) disappear.



Not a condition I would be happy with!



Performance wise I don't see much improvement in the full graphic condition

except in looking at the sky (Cloudy)



Get to the River in Beta 1.002:

Full graphics(answer to prompt=No)

Looking at camp 7 fps

Looking at sky 28 fps

Minimum graphics (answer to prompt=Yes)

Looking at camp 15 fps.

looking at sky 87 fps.



Get to the River in Beta 1.003:

Full graphics(answer to prompt=No)

Looking at camp 9 fps

Looking at sky 32 fps

Minimum graphics (answer to prompt=Yes)

Looking at camp 13 fps.

Looking at sky 176 fps.



These fps are standing a the game start position only

One more thing - Creation of water areas is really chunky not refined as the previous 2 betas - don't like it!

I like the way now, when a building goes out of view because another building is blocking your view, it unloads it, and has to reload it when it comes back in to view, which isn't quite as quick as it could be.



However completely agree, even when draw distance set on maximum on the TAB options, the draw distance is pretty terrible, reminds me of Black Hawk Down. Yes this performance increase is good news, but it should be optional depending on your computer specs. This seemed to be more RAM performance enhancing, which i'm not sure is the problem.



My computer should have no problem with Quad Core 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM + Nvidia GTX280, 64 bit system, but my FPS is similar in the latest update. Around 37FPS mark. Am I running a mid range computer these days, its a few years old now?



Also am I being dumb, haven't seen anywhere to choose your screen resolution? That can make hell of a difference for some people.

I got a doubling of my frame rate - on both my slower and "faster" machines.



My "faster" machine is about 8 years old, Intel Core 2 Quad, 8 GB RAM, and has a 3 or 4 year old video card (Radeon 4800). I now get 57 fps when I answer "yes" to optimise. This may be better than twice my last score.



My other machine gets 4 fps, also optimised. This machine has onboard Intel video, but is an I7 with 8GB of RAM.



Both machines are W8.1 64 bit.

The new shader panel with everything set to LOWEST should provide some sizable gains with BETA 1.004. Check it out!