Good news! radars are working :)
 

So I spent quite some time in the FMB yesterday and wanted to see if the radar systems really are working. To my delightful surprise they are and are also very easy to deploy. Just place any of the British radar types (the german Wotans are not radars they are x and y-gerät and used for radio direction beams) along the coast of choice. I've only tested the English radar type 1 so far. Place an enemy flight somewhere in the channel and create a flight for yourself. Start the mission and simply wait (it might take a minute or two before contact reports start coming in. As you can see in my example pictures below you can of course use the English radars for the blue side to (since there is no Freya radar in the game yet), simple choose when you deploy them.

Why you have those blue dots on textures?

But good news, thanks

Those are caused by the lack of AA causing sharp holes on the camo nets to look odd.

Not looking normal at those black areas

LOL! It's not that, the clear blue sky is on the other side of the nets, that's why you see "blue dots".

Your right about the blue being the sky through the camo net, but wrong about the sharp dots not being a result of the lack of AA.

Here is an example of a basic camo net texture against a blue background
With AA it looks like this:
http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/4149/camo2.jpg
You can see how the AA has smoothed out the holes by making pixel colour the result of the colour of a selection of sub-pixels:
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/5096/camoaa.jpg

If I turn off AA, the camo next looks like this:
http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/3667/camo3.jpg
up close, you can see that the holes have lost their shape and become dots.
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/7003/dots3u.jpg

It looks like it is covered in blue dots because the pixel colour no longer takes account of it's sub-pixels.
it's the same effect that makes the holes in the CloD screenshot look like blue dots.

AA isn't just for the jaggies.

Fantastic :grin: Cant wait to get the radio com working as well :grin:

Radars people! Let's stick to the topic plz:)

The radars were working all the time. See the Huns! mission, I've placed in there all the english camaign radars, and also some for the german side. Both of them were working without any problem.

wow, this is actually... nice! I didn't see that coming! How does it work exactly; does each radar station report on its own or can you even set up some centralized "fighter command"? Hmm well, if done (and implemented) right, it doesn't even make a difference from a pilot's point of view, I imagine.

Are you sure they are not on by default? I have made several missions none of them included radar in FMB and still get vectors from controllers when playing the mission. Or do you find it increases the amount of reports?

At what sort of ranges do the radars pick up enemy planes?

Does the flight leader (assuming it's not you) lead the flight towards the enemy, or do you still have to set up waypoints?

Good question and no, I actually don't get vectors if I don't have radar. I tried last night without them and waited and waited and waited but no radar reports. Maybe when your flight or another friendly flight discovers an enemy formation they will report it over the radio so all friendly flights will know there's enemies about. I'll try it again just to be sure :).

I'm not sure but if they are historically correct they should be able to pick flights up as far as France. Also if they are correct they shouldn't be able to detect flights that are flying below 500 meters just like it was during the BoB. You don't get directed to the flights BUT ground control will tell you where the enemy formation is and at which direction it's heading. Just open up your in-game map and look at the battle grid, if ground control says enemy formation is in "BQ 40" you can look at the grid where "BQ 40" is.

Thanks for the info, addman. This sounds like a really great feature, and one I wasn't really expecting. I'll definitely give it a try later.

You're welcome and I must say it brings the game up a notch for me because I'm an offliner primarily. It's so easy to set up too, wish we would've been provided with better documentation so it wouldn't have taken us so long to learn about it though.

I look forward to the SDK getting released so that the quality of controller reports can be improved. A real controller wouldn't speak as they do currently.

Good observation addman, will test it myself. Thanks!

Yeah, it does work for sure, although it does pick up aircraft that fly below 500m. :(
It detected Heinkels flying at 300m, but what's interesting is that the information you receive seems to differ depending on the altitude of the incoming aircraft. (Such as the number of aircraft detected.)

It also detects them way out to sea. All in all, a nifty little feature.

This was talked about in one of the developer interviews or the regular Friday feedback pre-release. They said that radars give valuable intel but they can also make mistakes.

Also, from what i remember there was two types of radar guiding the RAF. Chain Home was the high-altitude/long-range radar that detected targets as far as some miles inland of the French coast, as long as they weren't flying too low.

There was also Chain Home Low, which was the short-range/low altitude radar. These could be static or mobile radars and had shorter range, but they could detect targets at an altitude of 500 feet (or roughly 150m) at a useful distance. It seems that if you placed some around Dover you could pick up low flying targets almost half-way across the channel, take a look here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...e_coverage.jpg

Awesome testing bud.