[TUSA/TX-Gunslinger]

Interesting thread - relevant and great work.

Whatever would come of this - visibility option should ultimately be scalable, for adjustable gameplay.

I remain a bit sceptical regarding the true fidelity possible. It seems that your nailing the size vs aspect vs distance - and will achieve something to that end.

Where I'm concerned is the inclusion of high fidelity specular (glint) effects, properly represented. Significant impact to the detecting aircraft when located is upsun in the early morning and late evening. While small-area scale games like BF3 are making efforts in this area - how do you imagine this will work over a large area, like our CoD maps? The BF3 mechanics aren't even tied to time-of-day and atmospherics as these are static on each of the tiny maps.

Canopy and metallic glint can be seen a very long way off. While there are accounts and studies of minimum detectable range - what of long range detections, made at altititude? How do you propose to simulate this?

Imagine when bare metal skinned aircraft are introduced?

Maybe someday, very high level systems may be able to render these necessary effects - but low level systems might not. I'll even go out on a limb and say that probably no current computational system can do justice to this type of ray-tracing physics, in real-time - to match the level of LOD detail you are discussing. If there is not a balance between the effects - then there will be less reality - not more.

That's my concern - but please don't let that dampen your work. Again, great job, knoble pursuit.

S!

Gunny