Any way to extend draw distance? SW3

[RoboPatton]

...or rather, in game terms: is there a way to extend the default radar distance to say twice what it is now?

I know this effects radar, making them useless. But In space, with the naked eye, I should be able to see way further.

[Trucidation]

That's the problem, the game doesn't separate visuals from radar (not to mention the mess which is stealth). So you can simply double the scan ranges of all the radar modules if you want.

[RoboPatton]

Thank you for the reply Trucidation. Could you please point me in the direction of the file with radar specs in them? Also, which value should I change.

Thanks again.

*edit- also, I assume there is a default value somewhere for each ship? Since all of them can "see", even when not outfitted with a radar. So, where is the default value located? (please dont say it's hard coded :( )

[Trucidation]

Naw, that kinda stuff isn't hardcoded, just open up Carcasses.xml. You'll notice that every variant of ship has an entry so editing them all may get a little tedious unless you just plan to edit the player-used ships. The tags for each ship should be mostly self-explanatory (thankfully they used english, unlike the comments).

[RoboPatton]

Yeah I was poking around in those files, I changed the radar modules by adding about 100 more to the range on each. Now the basic radar gives me a visual range I would expect with no radar at all.

Didnt look in carcasses (whats with the names?), I'll monkey around with that now. Don't worry about tedious I have been doing more moding than playing already. The basic player ships were kinda boring, so I am currently re-texturing them.

Thanks for the help Trucidation.

[Rastix]

I think it's more easy to use visibility cheat code

[RoboPatton]

@trucidation - What does sensor_resolution do exactly?

@Rastix- I assume that makes the entire map visible? I really only want to add one more klick to each radar and stock, but thanks for the advice.

[Trucidation]

The lower the sensor resolution (i.e. the more "fine grained"), the better. I forgot which value it is looking at, but it's the one affected by stealth - look at the stealth modules.

Side note on stealth:
The stealth modules work by lowering that value. So if that value is lower than a ship's radar resolution, it won't be able to see the stealthed ship. This is the basis behind the "4 Ghost modules ultra stealth" trick - each Ghost module reduces the ship's profile by 80% iirc, so 4 of them would reduce the profile to .2^4 = 0.0016 of the original value.

There's supposed to be a minimum limit actually (it's somewhere in one of the script files) and in practise you can get away with 3 Ghosts and still be able to fly right up into a hostile ship's face and remain undetectable. The broken thing about the game is that attacking doesn't invalidate stealth. Worst of all the AI does not respond to attacks made if it could not detect the attacking ship - hence the long range missile sniping trick and this invisible mode trick.

You'd think a ship being attacked by an unseen hostile would panic and start flying around trying to find the source, or failing that, flee - right? But no, it just continues as if nothing is amiss. Due to this behaviour I've given up on the whole radar / stealth thing.

[RoboPatton]

Very informative. Thanks again.

Edit- 8/12/10-

Actually there is more to the story. In the Main.ini you can edit the following values to increase draw distance to static objects, and things on radar.

"zTransparLenght = 200.0f"
"ZTranspar = 400.0f"

Change the values to double (400 and 800) or, like me, just add a one in front of each number and now stations can be seen from a more realistic distance.