yep: Tracers, WOP and Il-2 COD

[zakkandrachoff]

yep: Tracers, WOP and Il-2 COD

http://i970.photobucket.com/albums/ae188/zakkandrachoff/003.jpg

http://i970.photobucket.com/albums/ae188/zakkandrachoff/002.jpg

http://i970.photobucket.com/albums/ae188/zakkandrachoff/001.jpg

in the first pic (cliffs of dover hurricane scene), i like so much the white tracer but i think that is a 109 or 110 cannon tracer...

Then, the Macci tracers of Wings of Prey are fantastic to me. (like WW2 movies)
dont like so much de hurricane COD tracers, maybe need to be a little more shinning, and will be nice that Wings of prey little "S" effect

[lbuchele]

Bullets doesn't have an "S" trajectory, right?
This kind of "snake" effect is only a visual effect caused by a shaking gun camera doing the register at the moment of firing.
So,that tracer effect in WOP is totally wrong from a real world physics point of view.

[Letum]

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=218129&postcount=74

[Sven]

apart from the message that Luthier left us, when the MG17s of the 110 are fired, aren't the tracers supposed to be red like in IL2? Same counts for almost all same calibre in IL2 by the way. I have no idea what colour they were, and almost all axis combat footage are in black/white, so I can't tell;) Anyone knows?

[Biggs]

Bullets doesn't have an "S" trajectory, right?
This kind of "snake" effect is only a visual effect caused by a shaking gun camera doing the register at the moment of firing.
So,that tracer effect in WOP is totally wrong from a real world physics point of view.

yep, but 'in-cockpit' that effect would be fine... that would be too hard me thinks to have two different versions, one outside and one inside cockpit view.

[Tvrdi]

COD = real tracers
WOP = camera tracers

cheers

[kirq]

What about smoke trails?

[zauii]

Yes we saw them in a recent update.

[mazex]

Well, I've fired thousands of 7.62 tracers from M-240:s and HK G3:s and when you fire them they go straight as on curved rail (as you very clearly see them drop when firing at long distance... There is however NO "wobbly" tendency at all that is caused but the camera vibrating from the recoil and the shutter speed causing them to zig zag as mentioned earlier here (and that is also what causes them to look like lasers as the bullets travel a few meters in the time that the shutter is open (and shaking)).

When in a vehicle your head has very good dampening by flesh, fat and other organic materials from the vibrations as opposed to a camera that is rigidly screwed to the wing that is vibrating - and no - you don't see them zig zag:ing like a camera does. Have not fired tracers from a plane but I guess it's the same as from the turret of an APC ;) Edit - or for that matter when you have you chin pressed hard against the stock of a wildly vibrating G3 that you have to hold very firm to not rise it while firing full auto...

Come to think of it I have fired from the air in the form of the door of a Huey Helicopter on an assault practice but that was only blanks unfortunately ;) The chopper was there to lift "wounded" and we persuaded the crew to lift some of us over the field in front of us where the b-force in the practice was. We skimmed the field that divided us and the enemy and landed in a clearing behind them with our G3:s at full auto. Mmm...

[Royraiden]

I just hope the smoke trails are not overdone as those from Wings of Prey.

[kirq]

Actually I don't like tracers on CoD screensots, they look pale and even, I believe it should have some glow and a little bit variety, after all not all tracers burns exactly the same way. But I might be wrong if they look different in motion. I would love to see a dev video covering different types od tracers. I'm sure that some fancy gun cam video from CoD would make most of us drooling all over our monitors :)

Let's wait and see. No need to worry, if tracers will disappoint us I believe they will be replaced by modders witin few months :) If moded IL Sturmovik 1946 can look like this, imagine how CoD will look with couple mods.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXNcWw6i4eo

[mazex]

Thinking more of this I get a bit split about this as I have also been personally complimented by Oleg earlier for my explanation about how the tracers get 5 meters long (and that is naturally fun!)... Sure - the "long" tracers are fine if we simulate a camera looking at an mg firing tracers, but in that case we actually should really have the zig zag too... Get my thought? Because when looking at a real tracer that is fired (and not from a video or an image) it goes like on rail like I described above - but it looks like a tiny superfast firefly zipping from your barrel out into the night. No long light streak but tiny white glowing dots popping away towards the target (and then the chaos of ricochets going of in all directions that no game has ever been able to catch). It actually looks very surreal and not like you could expect from seeing movies. You get some strange feeling of not firing a gun but more of some kind of super powerful "sling shot" as you see the bullet popping away over the field and then bounce... But like I said - just a tiny glowing dot and no "streak"...

So - if you are going to have the streak then you look through a camera lens and then you should actually have the zig zag too (even though I said the opposite above I'm man enough to admit I changed my mind ;))

Edit again - having said this I also say "what the heck"! It looks good enough as it is (which goes for the landscape too) so focus on real problems now like optimizing net code so that a bullet that really should hit its target does it, don't care that much how it looks ;)

Triple edit - looking from behind at the tracers I also guess that you may need to have the long "streaks" to get the feeling described above as the tiny dots would not be seen otherwise. Looking from the side it may look a bit weird but if you miss a 1x1 yellow pixel otherwise you have to make compromises like this...

[pupo162]

"Let's wait and see. No need to worry, if tracers will disappoint us I believe they will be replaced by modders witin few months If moded IL Sturmovik 1946 can look like this, imagine how CoD will look with couple mods."

like a ruined game.

[kirq]

"Let's wait and see. No need to worry, if tracers will disappoint us I believe they will be replaced by modders witin few months If moded IL Sturmovik 1946 can look like this, imagine how CoD will look with couple mods."

like a ruined game.

Thank You for Your inpunt my friend!

[Gomer Pyle]

... (and then the chaos of ricochets going of in all directions that no game has ever been able to catch)....

That's true, this seems to be a detail often omitted. I do remember however, that I once played a Microprose FlightSim (set in the Pacific theater), just don't know the name anymore although it was the game that got me hooked to genre. It actually did have ricocheting tracers, and I absolutely loved them in spite of them being huge square VGA (...or SVGA) pixel-blocks lighting up the screen - cool times.

/Daniel

[Royraiden]

That's true, this seems to be a detail often omitted. I do remember however, that I once played a Microprose FlightSim (set in the Pacific theater), just don't know the name anymore although it was the game that got me hooked to genre. It actually did have ricocheting tracers, and I absolutely loved them in spite of them being huge square VGA (...or SVGA) pixel-blocks lighting up the screen - cool times.

/Daniel

From what I've seen,bullets do ricochet on RoF but only when attacking ground targets.

[mazex]

From what I've seen,bullets do ricochet on RoF but only when attacking ground targets.

I have owned RoF since day one but I have flown it rather little as it was buggy in the beginning (a LOT better now though!) and realized that I think I have not fired at the ground as I remember it but only on aircraft... Had to fire it up now and you are absolutely right - that's something like that I would expect regarding ricochets. Then of course if firing into a soft field from a rather fat angle I think they exaggerate them, but the RoF ricochets are a definate immersion booster! The tracers look great from the cockpit view also - even though they are a bit hard to see sometimes against that HDR beefed sky... But in daylight tracers are not that visible either so I'm fine with that.

[The Kraken]

"Glowing sperm" definitely fits the WoP tracers...

[zakkandrachoff]

yep, but 'in-cockpit' that effect would be fine... that would be too hard me thinks to have two different versions, one outside and one inside cockpit view.

that is what i am saiyng. inside cockpit: wings of prey tracers
outside: cliffs of dover
right?

[zauii]

... (and then the chaos of ricochets going of in all directions that no game has ever been able to catch)....

Umm, Red Orchestra 1, tracers look natural and bounce/ricochet freaking everywhere, it's as immersible as it gets, its no flight sim tho if thats what you were point at, still a combat sim.
The mod Darkest Hour takes it even further and enhances it, really great stuff indeed.

[Biggs]

that is what i am saiyng. inside cockpit: wings of prey tracers
outside: cliffs of dover
right?

well actually now that i think of it.. the only reason why we know about squiggles is because of the rigid gun cam mountings which transferred the vibrations really well, whereas a human's eye is not mounted to his skull, but cradled in a cushion of fat (IIRC).... and therefore wouldn't see the tracers as squiggles... but straight lines.

so no. I retract my earlier statement.... UNLESS... there is a 'gun cam' feature in CoD, then the squiggles would be accurate.

case closed..............?

[NEWGUY]

COD = real tracers
WOP = camera tracers

cheers

At 6 minutes and 55 seconds you can see that the real Spitfire tracers look like COD tracers; the only difference is the vibration of the camera makes the tracers look slightly distorted, but the tracers, in the absence of the shaking, would look like the tracers in COD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv8rFPLN_Fg

[mazex]

At 6 minutes and 55 seconds you can see that the real Spitfire tracers look like COD tracers; the only difference is the vibration of the camera makes the tracers look slightly distorted, but the tracers, in the absence of the shaking, would look like the tracers in COD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv8rFPLN_Fg

I think CoD tracers are correct in the way that they don't wiggle, but at the other hand the length of the lasers is also a camera effect?

As I see it threre are three combinations if we look at the two camera "errors" of wiggle due to vibration and extended "length" due to shutter speed:

1. The WoP way: Look at the world from a rigidly mounted camera with wiggling AND stretched tracers.

2. The CoD way: Look at the world from a cushioned camera with non-wiggling but stretched tracers.

3. The IRL way: Look at the world from a real eye with tracers that neither wiggle or are stretched. They are just tiny fast glowing "specs" of light "on rails" as the human eye has no "shutter speed" and is well cushioned...

4. The weird way: Ok, the last combination would then be wiggle and no stretch simulating a human eye mounted rigid to the wing with wiggling but non-stretched tracers. Let's leave that one out ;)

The problem here is that alternative 3 is really only "real" for those that has seen real tracers, and for the majority of the world that has seen tracers on movies alternative 2 is "most real", and then alternative 1 for those that have seen a lot of gun cam footage... Don't know about four then but when in a tracked vehicle running on rough surface it gets a bit like it ;)

Having said that I guess that Oleg and his boys have decided on alternative 2 as it will feel real for most of the customers? And the problem with what I call the "real" alternative is how to simulate it correctly in a computer game running at 30-60 fps... That gets a bit like a movie camera actually. If trying to do alternative 3 (the "real" way) then the tiny spec would only be seen in 20-100 frames on it's way to the target. The human eye don't have that so it sees it all the way. Then adding length to fill "the holes" might be the best way...

This is getting out of scope now, I think the compromise of using alt 2 like CoD is OK, and as said here earlier they can tune them after release if we don't like the final result that we don't know about yet! They have evolved lately...

[Blackdog_kt]

I think Mazex explained everything nicely.

I haven't done a huge amount of shooting, but i did serve a year as a conscript in the local air force (we have a mixed armed force, with the bulk being reservist troops, civilians who get into armed duty for some months, and the rest being professional soldiers of varying ranks).

When we practice fired our personal armament (G3s and LMGs) we didn't use tracers.
However, as i was trained to be a flak gunner i also had the chance to fire some 20mm rounds from a dual-barrel Rheinmetall gun.

In that case, the effect was very similar to what Mazex said. The curved rail effect was not so easy to observe because the gun barrels were lifted about 60-70 degrees up in the sky, but the rest is pretty close. The moment i pressed the trigger and the tracer left the barrel, i saw a short streak of thin, yellow light. What surprised me was that the tracer look longer when it was close to me, but seemed to reduce in size within milliseconds, as it raced away. By the time it was past it's half-way point it was almost a dot, then came small puffs of smoke and after a couple of seconds you could hear the explosions.

Now that i think of it, the only simulator to ever have that sound feature was B-17 the mighty 8th, in almost any other sim i've seen it seems that sound travels with the same speed as light.
It would be very cool to have that corrected in CoD as well, so that when an explosion is far away we first see it but hear it a few seconds later.

[Flanker35M]

S!

A title that is VERY old called 1942 The Pacific Air War by MicroProse had ricocheting tracers. Way before IL-2. I hope CoD will have them too. IL-2 has them by "another way of incorporating changes" and adds for sure to the immersion when strafing ground targets.

[mazex]

In that case, the effect was very similar to what Mazex said. The curved rail effect was not so easy to observe because the gun barrels were lifted about 60-70 degrees up in the sky, but the rest is pretty close. The moment i pressed the trigger and the tracer left the barrel, i saw a short streak of thin, yellow light. What surprised me was that the tracer look longer when it was close to me, but seemed to reduce in size within milliseconds, as it raced away. By the time it was past it's half-way point it was almost a dot, then came small puffs of smoke and after a couple of seconds you could hear the explosions.


Agree with that - in the first 100 meters or so it goes so fast that there is a bit of "streak" effect IRL too as the brain can not "keep up with reality" - and then from 100 meters (?) to X the eye can keep up and focus on what is very clearly a tiny glowing dot popping away...

I have an old black and white photo somewhere from an exercise where we had two companies firing "all we had" with M-240:s and G3:s loaded with ONLY tracers at night as our unit had not expended the ammunition budget that year so we had to waste as much money on ammo as possible over a weekend - and tracers are more expensive that ball ammo :) Otherwise we used to have a tracer as the last or second last bullet in our G3 magazines to give a visual indication that you where out of ammo and had to switch to a new magazine as there is no ammo counter in real life ;) In the M-240:s we used to mix one tracer every 3-5 rounds. So at that exercise we had 100% tracers in ALL guns and fired a couple of times from a hill down at a gravel road 300 meters away which had remote controlled practice target of aluminium popping up along it. It was awesome as the air was so filled with tracers that it felt like you should be able to walk on the glowing air down to the road. A hard packed gravel road gives extreme amounts of ricochets so the medical team that was some kilometers away behind the hill and saw the fountain of ricochetting tracers going up in the air and thought we had gone berserk and all fired up in the air :) I then had a camera with black and white film and took a photo with two second open shutter in the pitch black night at the glowing 200 meter wide "tracer flood" from the hill to the gravel raod... You can imagine the look of that... It was 20 years ago though so where the heck is that photo now?

[Flanker35M]

S!

So from reading what Mazex & Co write the CoD tracers are "camera tracers" and not like the human eye. I wish they were smaller and thinner in CoD than shown in screens. IF I wanted something like that I play StarWars ;)

[meplay]

It would be very cool to have that corrected in CoD as well, so that when an explosion is far away we first see it but hear it a few seconds later.

yeah it would be good for say film makers, as if the camera was on top of a building quit far away, when a plane come into strafe a target, you can see the tracers but hear after

[KOM.Nausicaa]

Again someone who thought "wobbly" tracers are realistic. I must have seen that a thousand times already on the forums in the last 7 years --

The "wobbly" effect only occurs due to the camera shaking! The real tracer is not looking like that.

It's a shame that some so called "sims" like WOP try to sell a hollywoodish effect to their audience as the real deal.

[Crane]

Are there any ww2 pictures taken from a normal camera (not gun camera) that show tracer fire, surely a still shot taken from a normal camera would clear up this tracer debate once and for all.

[Daniël]

This should be clear. Il2 CoD tracers are OK. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0cRk7FJOTQ
(Sorry, I know it's a minigun , not a WWII gun;))

[mazex]

Are there any ww2 pictures taken from a normal camera (not gun camera) that show tracer fire, surely a still shot taken from a normal camera would clear up this tracer debate once and for all.

No, as I said - I had a camera and took a photo of that exercise I described above and the image looked nothing like reality (with thousands of lines of light going against the road and then a fountain of lines going in all directions of the sky from the ricochets). In reality it was like a extremely thick swarm of glowing dots all over...

That was at night so the camera "error" was naturally extremely exaggerated by the extreme shutter time, but the error is still the same in daytime. A camera never take a picture of how the world really look ;)

[Koyan]

I'm impressed by all that can be discussed about tracers based upon just a few screenshots :grin: Screenshots are pictures from ingame camera right? ;) So the tracers are correctly illustrated :) Lets just wait for the game to arrive, see what the tracers look like then, and discuss from that point :) Sorry, couldn't resist. Please don´t flame me.

[kirq]

I'm impressed by all that can be discussed about tracers based upon just a few screenshots :grin: Screenshots are pictures from ingame camera right? ;) So the tracers are correctly illustrated :) Lets just wait for the game to arrive, see what the tracers look like then, and discuss from that point :) Sorry, couldn't resist. Please don´t flame me.

How could You suggest that we have to wait and see actual ingame tracers before we judge them?! You Troll!

;)

[Baron]

Are there any ww2 pictures taken from a normal camera (not gun camera) that show tracer fire, surely a still shot taken from a normal camera would clear up this tracer debate once and for all.


Not WWII but Hispano at least.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc9E8_ZuESQ


Emagine sitting at the end of that in a small fighter OMG.

[mazex]

Well, my participation in this thread is more of "academic" nature (which is fun too) as I'm pretty sure that they have worked on the tracers seen in the 3+ months old video used for the release trailer. You don't need to much sensitivity to read between the lines when Ilya sarcastically remarks this regarding the tracers people are complaining about: "They're correct now. They're perfection. They're ideal. They'll never change" ;)

If they don't change them I really don't care as they should focus on getting other stuff right now and work on cosmetics like this later...

I want to have that "wow!" moment I had taking off with the 109 in the IL2 demo and realizing it really felt like flying a plane...

[winny]

All the tracer you could ever need...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyF0G7g4KfY

Completley irrelevant I suppose but worth seeing.

[JVM]

The funny thing is that quite old video (5 y+) is in fact an advertisement trailer for the Dixon Aero M134D minigun...I saw it first at the AAAA tradeshow in 2006...Still impressive, but I guess in real use they lower the RoF a bit...

JVM

[speculum jockey]

Never in the forums of flight simulators was so much complained, about so little, by so few.

[winny]

Never in the forums of flight simulators was so much complained, about so little, by so few.

(Apart from yesterday, oh and the day before that, and the day before that an..)

[winny]

Just being pedantic but the tracers are wrong in one respect, and it's not the way they look.

The RAF didn't mix ammo in 1940. Thay tended to have only one gun of the 8 loaded with tracer. This was because they encountered problems with the firing mechanism if they mixed ammo, (because of the slight difference in recoil characteristics among other things). Many pilots didn't want tracers at all except for the last few rounds in each gun because it alerted the enemy if you managed to sneak up behind them and missed with your first burst.

[Gomer Pyle]

S!

A title that is VERY old called 1942 The Pacific Air War by MicroProse had ricocheting tracers. Way before IL-2. I hope CoD will have them too. IL-2 has them by "another way of incorporating changes" and adds for sure to the immersion when strafing ground targets.

Thanks Flanker; that was the title I was looking for: "1942 The Pacific Air War" I loved it back then.


/Daniel

[mazex]

Thanks Flanker; that was the title I was looking for: "1942 The Pacific Air War" I loved it back then.


/Daniel

Yep - I played it a lot to and loved it as well - and I remember I liked the tracers too... To give this discussion a bit of perspective I downloaded 1942 from an abandonware site (as I cant find the original) here http://www.freegameempire.com/games/1942-The-Pacific-Air-War and fired up DOSBox 0.74 so see how they really looked?

Here we have me attacking a hangar (???) - lasers there at the wing roots and a spray of 1x1 orange pixels that appear far in front but nothing in between (you can see two orange dots above the "hangar" and some yellow hits :)). Most sims did it like that back then as I remember it.

The thing is that in 1994 when this was released it was as good as it gets - and it was not a long time ago for us that are getting old (41 myself).

EDIT: another thing we didn't have whining about then was markings as you can understand from this shot - or if the rivets are correct on the cowling... We had a good time anyway.
EDIT2: I hope you notice the two AA-guns (???) I knocked out on my first run to the left of the field!
EDIT3: Seven years after this we got IL2... There was a bit of Mores law with real results for simmers back then!
EDIT4: And no - i did not turn on anti aliasing for the shot ;)

http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/539/1942rc.jpg

Did it really look this bad? Yes it did, but we thought it looked splendid then and I remember no one whining of the tracers - rather the opposite ;) First time playing it with a G940 at least that works fine in DOSBox if you disconnect the throttle and pedals that get mixed up otherwise :)

Added a shot from the side so the high fidelity ballistic modelling can be seen:
http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/7430/1942bv.jpg

[Upthair]

Bullets doesn't have an "S" trajectory, right?
This kind of "snake" effect is only a visual effect caused by a shaking gun camera doing the register at the moment of firing.
So,that tracer effect in WOP is totally wrong from a real world physics point of view.
I was just going to say that:-). The guns shake when firing, causing the camera to shake and, in turn, causing the tracers to "shake" in the film.

[Koyan]

...Did it really look this bad? Yes it did, but we thought it looked splendid then and I remember no one whining of the tracers - rather the opposite ;)

If those tracers were 2 pixels wide there would be a lot of whining... Silently, at home... no internet forums yet. ;)

[Heliocon]

Yea, I found the WOP tracers are very good and not zig zaggy in game. I am fine with straight tracers as long as they use the correct lighting (I am not sure if the tracer round is bright because of heat or fluourescence but it "emits" light so should be bright.
As long as it doesnt look like I am shooting star wars laser beams... But it should be a "streak" not a "bar" although in a ss we dont get a sense of speed so its hard to tell. WOP did a very good job on the trails except they seem to be smoke trails which in reality they arent. Its the bullet compressing / warping the air which creates a "whirl as spotters call it I believe". So when the bullet first leaves the gun there maybe should be slightly darker trail but after that it needs to leave a ripple, imagine with dx11 shooting through smoke or clouds and having the bullets stir it up? :-P

[Upthair]

well actually now that i think of it.. the only reason why we know about squiggles is because of the rigid gun cam mountings which transferred the vibrations really well, whereas a human's eye is not mounted to his skull, but cradled in a cushion of fat (IIRC).... and therefore wouldn't see the tracers as squiggles... but straight lines.
And perhaps the biggest reason is this: the vibration of the fuselage of the aircraft is negligible compared to that of the gun camera, which was usually fitted in the wing during WWII (the explanation involves a lot of physics). And if the fuselage does not vibrate, the seat of the pilot, and therefore the pilot, does not either.

[mazex]

If those tracers were 2 pixels wide there would be a lot of whining... Silently, at home... no internet forums yet. ;)

We used newsgroups back then which came long before the web, but with the same basic functionality like these forums (and the same trolls and flamings). I have found posts from me from 1994 discussing other games (as Google have indexed the old newsgroups) but not regarding 1942 though ;)

Here is a post I found searching the old favorite rec.aviation.simulators regarding which is the best sim from 1994 where the tough demand on 8mb for best experience regarding 1942 is mentioned ;) I don't agree with him - I would have said Aces over Europe back then :)

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.aviation.simulators/browse_thread/thread/72ca6319420f137e/1fdc155e88c28540?lnk=gst&q=1942+graphics+#1fdc155e88c28540

And here we have a classic "when is the patch coming" post regarding 1942 from 1994:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.aviation.simulators/browse_thread/thread/7bad96ea0fff03da/13836aa146f71ee8?lnk=gst&q=Release+1942#13836aa146f71ee8

[Erkki]

As long as it doesnt look like I am shooting star wars laser beams...


Where do you think George Lucas got the idea? ;)

Thats it. Thats how they look IRL. They do lose speed and fly a curved path, though, and the "bars" are short enough to appear as dots looking from behind.

[T}{OR]

Let's wait and see. No need to worry, if tracers will disappoint us I believe they will be replaced by modders witin few months :) If moded IL Sturmovik 1946 can look like this, imagine how CoD will look with couple mods.

That is based on the presumption that you will be able to modify this in CoD. ;)

[Koyan]

Here is a post I found searching the old favorite rec.aviation.simulators....

Interesting read. This brings back memory's of Hellcats over the pacific and Missions at Leyte Gulf. Played that on Atari 1024, loaded from floppy :grin:

[mazex]

Interesting read. This brings back memory's of Hellcats over the pacific and Missions at Leyte Gulf. Played that on Atari 1024, loaded from floppy :grin:

Yeah! It's nice reading old newsgroups realizing that the same problems has been discussed for +25 years - like this thread from 1986 where they whine about the intrusive copy protection in Microsoft Flight Simulator (1!):

http://groups.google.com/group/net.micro.mac/browse_thread/thread/9e8e7bd012348f0a/82e61692ef46a9bf?#82e61692ef46a9bf

Whining in forums / newsgroups is where the internet was born ;)

[Heliocon]

Where do you think George Lucas got the idea? ;)

Thats it. Thats how they look IRL. They do lose speed and fly a curved path, though, and the "bars" are short enough to appear as dots looking from behind.

Well I mean in rl I have seen tracers and they look like streaks, not bars. If you get a sparkler at night and swish it around then close your eyes you see bright lines, that the best way I think I could describe them. I mean they need to look less like a physical object (a bar) and more like light rather then a texture and geometry.

Oh god starwars: New game mode, bomber wars. outfit bomber off your choice with ppl as gunners online, then have at it! Last bomber alive wins :rolleyes:
BROADSIDE NOW! :-P

What about missile battles, no guns or cannons only missiles?...

[The Kraken]

I think CoD tracers are correct in the way that they don't wiggle, but at the other hand the length of the lasers is also a camera effect?

There are some additional aspects that have to be considered to make the tracers work in a computer game, which have nothing to do with eye or camera perception:

- tracers have to work for a wide range of framerates (obviously the higher the framerate, the better they will work)
- they should still be visible from further away, especially from the firing platform's perspective (big issue with many tracers in Il2)
- they need to work for different lighting conditions (quite visible at daylight and extremely bright at night)

Me, I'd use a thinner and longer tracer object, HDR/bloom for some glow effect (which would increase the apparent size in the distance) and maybe some motion blur. Probably would have been the first sensible use of those effects in any game; normally I quickly disable those if possible :-P But it looks like they went for a more practical and compatible approach, which should also work fine. Certainly better than the glowing sperm above.

[Heliocon]

There are some additional aspects that have to be considered to make the tracers work in a computer game, which have nothing to do with eye or camera perception:

- tracers have to work for a wide range of framerates (obviously the higher the framerate, the better they will work)
- they should still be visible from further away, especially from the firing platform's perspective (big issue with many tracers in Il2)
- they need to work for different lighting conditions (quite visible at daylight and extremely bright at night)

Me, I'd use a thinner and longer tracer object, HDR/bloom for some glow effect (which would increase the apparent size in the distance) and maybe some motion blur. Probably would have been the first sensible use of those effects in any game; normally I quickly disable those if possible :-P But it looks like they went for a more practical and compatible approach, which should also work fine. Certainly better than the glowing sperm above.

Well the stretched bar is meant to be the "motion blur" because it moves so fast it leaves a streak in your vision. I think we have moved beyond the time when a tracer is a yellow cylinder... Also remember if the ballistics are realistic they have to bounce off objects and stuff which would look absurd if they are geomtry.

Why turn off HDR/Bloom?

[Tiger27]

yep, but 'in-cockpit' that effect would be fine... that would be too hard me thinks to have two different versions, one outside and one inside cockpit view.

No, as you wouldn't see the wobble in cockpit, it is the camera shake that causes the sperm as Luthier called it... Ah the good old days are back we will be discussing these things for the next 10 years as we did in IL2 :grin:

[Biggs]

No, as you wouldn't see the wobble in cockpit, it is the camera shake that causes the sperm as Luthier called it... Ah the good old days are back we will be discussing these things for the next 10 years as we did in IL2 :grin:

yea bud, I know. I recanted that statement back on page 3

well actually now that i think of it.. the only reason why we know about squiggles is because of the rigid gun cam mountings which transferred the vibrations really well, whereas a human's eye is not mounted to his skull, but cradled in a cushion of fat (IIRC).... and therefore wouldn't see the tracers as squiggles... but straight lines.

so no. I retract my earlier statement.... UNLESS... there is a 'gun cam' feature in CoD, then the squiggles would be accurate.


if you read before posting then maybe we wont be 'discussing these things for the next 10 years' ;)