http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.ph...3338237/1.html
This is what a tracer should look like imo (I have seen them once before in RL too, as well as with a high speed camera). This is what alot of people were talking about, the current tracers are too thick as they are using geometry to simulate the "glow" instead of actual lighting. The way around this is to keep the core tracer (the bullet/tracer round) and just make it very bright which I think looks better (and more realistic). Like the poster says its not perfect, but I think they should move in that general direction once more important things are fixed.
Note: Only other thing is that while looking at a tracer from a 90 degree angle while it is moving (from the side) if you are close it is blurred but at any distance (a few hundred meters) it is a dot btw (we already talked about this but never about the visual from a normal viewing distance of an incoming plane).
I never really argued in these threads much because there were so many people saying so much stuff everything got lost in translation. But also wanted to say for the record that 1. fat tracers on camera are that way because of resolution in many cases. 2. A camera viewing a tracer at a distance sees more or less what the eye sees. If you want to see what your eye sees at a close distance then you need a highspeed camera which frame/capture rate is similar to a human eye (of course mechanically it is not, just talking about the rate of information the brain receives from your eye). The faster the camera, the more the tracers look like dots instead of bars aswell.