Friday update and duscussions 2011-02-18

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Blakduk

A quick question- in the 3rd picture of the second series posted today, what's the panel open on the wing of the Spit?
Is it something to do with deploying the flaps?

I think that's a mechanical indicator for the pilot. You just look at your wing and if the small "rod" is pushing up the panel you can be sure that your flap is down for that particular wing.

What i'm more interested to know is if the AI will be able to use partial flaps in aircraft that only had retracted and full down positions (like it used to be in IL2). In the screenshot with the two Spits climbing after the 109 i think that the trailing one has full flaps, but on the screenshot you mention it seems as if it's using partial flaps which is not possible in the Spitfire. I can't be sure though without viewing it from a head-on angle.

Originally Posted by Strike

As much as this tracertalk has been debated, I think I'd like to chip in my 2 cents or rather, my experience on firing tracermunitions.

I fired 7.62x51mm ammunition from a H&K AG-3 (Norwegian version of G3A3 with some small improvements). That's relatively close to our BOB type spitfire/hurricane/blenheim whatnot ammo.

My opinion is that when firing a shot, the tracer burns in the "wake" of the projectile, and in reality it's our own eye that cannot capture the small lightsource with enough speed. So that what we see is a "laser" because the lightsource is blurred. I have never seen a twitching twirling zigzag tracer like we see in guncam videos because the bullet DOES NOT zigzag. However, a zigzag effect would be natural for the human eye to see if the eye is vibrating. That is, if your body is vibrating because you're firing 8x guns from a hurri or spit, or in turbulence or just shaking cause engine is going max rpm or something. I think shaking tracers are REALISTIC for guncams, and for a shaking aircraft, BUT the thing that bothers me the most with the screenies is the "Girth" of the tracer. It's too fat. I shot tracers during the night, and we had illumination rockets/flares over the targets so that the tracers seemed thin, but bright orange/red. However in the pause when the illumination rocket burned out, and the next was being prepared, the tracers apperad MUCH larger, longer and fatter because they were the only light source and kindof "blinded" us. In daytime however, tracers do still look like lasers, but are much thinner and stick less out. I think these tracers look ideal for night conditions, but not daytime.

Here is what I in real-life can relate to and say "Ah, that's just like what I experienced with my own eyes".

The first being seen through NVGs, the tracers seem to "Glow" much more because of the surrounding darkness and sensitive NVGs. - thats how they appeared to me too without nvg in pitch black darkness... glowing orange lasers from starwars!!

and then daytime without nvg.. much thinner, slim tracers, to the eye they appear to be about 2-3 m long, whilst in reality it's only a small light in the rear of the bullet. If however, you are firing tracers and looking down your ironsights, they appear to be small "orbs" that slightly fall down until they ricochet off the ground and again appear to be about 2-3 meters long. So when firing a tracer round, with your eye at the same level of the bullet trajectory, it only looks like a small glowing ball.. but seeing the tracers from the guy next to me, they look extremely long coming out of the barrel, and then they look shorter and shorter the further away they are, until they ricochet off the ground and fly upwards... so it's all because of the BLUR of the human eye.. I HOPE that's what Oleg is doing with this game. Letting motionblur decide how tracers look that is the most realistic approach to it then tracer length would depend on bullet speed too which is realistic!!

I'm really excited about the "ball" tracers we have. Let the graphics card make it blurred that way, detecting tracers being fired at you is harder when looking forwards, than when looking at your 3 and 9 O'clock because then they will look long as they're wizzing by!!

I've fired 20mm rheinmetal AA guns during my time as a conscripted flak gunner and what you describe is similar to what i experienced. It's like a thin, elongated light that's moving away from the gun at tremendous speed, but as it goes further away it shrinks into a dot (much similar to the ones in today's screenshots).
The most interesting thing for me was that the fast "shortening" of the tracer from rod to dot created the illusion that the round was slowing down much more rapidly and to a much lower speed than it really was, it seemed as if they stopped to a hover at about 2km range (which is the approximate effective range of the gun i was shooting).


As far as the rest of the update is concerned, i'm really impressed with the tuned colours and the sense of scale and altitude. Definitely one of the best set of screenshots so far.

Edit:
I was a bit slow about the flaps it seems

Originally Posted by Superluminal_8

They´re flap indicators.
"Flap position on Spitfires is fully UP or DOWN only, the only indication being two small doors on the upper surface of each wing which are spring loaded flush. These are pushed open by each actuator as the flaps go down, which they do very quickly".