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

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...

"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!

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.

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.

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

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

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.