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.m...e61692ef46a9bf

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

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?...

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?

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

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