Friday 2010-07-23 Dev. update and Discussions

[Splitter]

Originally Posted by IceFire

The age old tracers debate

So long as they are useful to me as a simulator pilot I'm not going to complain too much. I hope everyone remembers that tracers look like lasers because we all saw StarWars at some point or another and StarWars is based on World War II air combat videos. Real laser beams travel at the speed of light in a continuous stream rather than defined pulses like a tracer (but unlike StarWars).

The pictures themselves look great. I think it's sometimes silly to complain about the visuals of an explosion until it's seen in motion. Often the various frames of an animation have an overall effect that cannot be seen from a single frame.

This. The pictures look excellent once again and I especially love the battle damage with the torn cloth. Awesome detail.

On tracers....didn't different countries use different tracers? I've never seen it modeled in a game that I can remember (did not play IL2 so can't comment there), but gun camera footage from German planes tends to show "smoke trails" on the tracers.

Here is a cool quote from 5ad.org:

"It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th found with a tracer round to aid in aiming. That was a mistake. The tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target, 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet, the tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. That was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down."

I'm not sure how one would lead another aircraft without tracers though, I know I couldn't lol.

Pie in the sky here, but one thing that would be a great addition in the sim is the option to load out and sight your guns to your own preference. I know some pilots wanted all of their bullets to pass through a single point at a given distance while others wanted a spread. Others used a combination. They also ran combinations of tracer, AP, and incendiary ronuds.

Anyway, GREAT photos, can't wait!

Splitter

[Splitter]

Originally Posted by IceFire

The age old tracers debate

So long as they are useful to me as a simulator pilot I'm not going to complain too much. I hope everyone remembers that tracers look like lasers because we all saw StarWars at some point or another and StarWars is based on World War II air combat videos. Real laser beams travel at the speed of light in a continuous stream rather than defined pulses like a tracer (but unlike StarWars).

The pictures themselves look great. I think it's sometimes silly to complain about the visuals of an explosion until it's seen in motion. Often the various frames of an animation have an overall effect that cannot be seen from a single frame.

This. The pictures look excellent once again and I especially love the battle damage with the torn cloth. Awesome detail.

On tracers....didn't different countries use different tracers? I've never seen it modeled in a game that I can remember (did not play IL2 so can't comment there), but gun camera footage from German planes tends to show "smoke trails" on the tracers.

Here is a cool quote from 5ad.org:

"It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th found with a tracer round to aid in aiming. That was a mistake. The tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target, 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet, the tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. That was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down."

I'm not sure how one would lead another aircraft without tracers though, I know I couldn't lol.

Pie in the sky here, but one thing that would be a great addition in the sim is the option to load out and sight your guns to your own preference. I know some pilots wanted all of their bullets to pass through a single point at a given distance while others wanted a spread. Others used a combination. They also ran combinations of tracer, AP, and incendiary ronuds.

Anyway, GREAT photos, can't wait!

Splitter

[Robert]

Best wishes to Luthier. I hope your coming back to the states isn't because of anything tremendously serious. I know it doesn't matter in the big scheme, but I'll think good thoughts.

Oleg, Dammit man. You're on VACATION. Screw us!!!!!! You should be tanning and spending valuable time with family.

That said. Thanks Oleg.

[Feuerfalke]

It's WIP - I bet this is just a basic tracer-test and colors are added later.

I can imagine they look rather nice in motion and even better: They vanish gradually!

[ECV56_Lancelot]

Originally Posted by Splitter

On tracers....didn't different countries use different tracers? I've never seen it modeled in a game that I can remember (did not play IL2 so can't comment there), but gun camera footage from German planes tends to show "smoke trails" on the tracers.

Il-2 have´s diferent color tracers according to country and ammo since the original IL-2 release.
Green tracers from I-16 and I-15 have been an issue because they do look too much like taken from Star Wars. But nobody researched seriously if they look and are realistic, only judge if they like it or not, like here.
Still, tracers should be judged only from ingame video, not by screenshots, they can be very deceiving on an screenshot. And also they look very diferent when saw from a distance (like small lines moving fast) or from behind when you fire them (like dots), but it seems most people do not realize that.
Also, if tracers give away your position and all that, its another subject, they were used and were an standar part of the ammo loadout, so they should be there. Even if some pilots or squadron preferred not to use them. Or else provide data that the real policy of the RAF or Lufftwaffe was to not use tracers.

[Tone71]

Originally Posted by JVM

Concerning shot 5, I see the tracers are there, but why do we have to see them as dashes like we are watching a movie?
The dashes appear because during the time the shutter of the camera is open the moving bright point that is the tracer goes a certain distance which depends only on the shutter open time and the bullet speed (this is a way to calculate the speed!); however in a simulation we are using directly our eyes which only see the bright points going away, like anybody having fired tracer rounds with a gun or a machine gun could assess!

That's because this is a computer game, so the effect needs to be simulated. If you move a dot across a screen that updates 60x a second you will never achieve quite the same effect. In reality, however, our eyes don't see things in discrete steps, so fast moving lights are blurred.

Originally Posted by GOA_Potenz

maybe it's because we been waiting this since 2005, and 5 years later see some things too similar to il2 engine, makes you wonder why.

Oh and GOA_Potenz, that's just plain rude btw.

Thanks for the shots Oleg, very good of you seeing as you are on vacation and should be taking a break from work! Remember, you can't please all the people all of the time!

[hellbomber]

on the note of tracers, if you've ever fired a heavy machine gun loaded with tracers (i have), they do indeed look like streaks to the human eye

the old ww2 clips dont do them justice they look different on camera than they do to the human eye, due to the way film captures light vs the way the human eye captures it

even when you just try to capture a picture of it the tracers dont appear as long in the picture as they do when you see them in person

you see long streaks this is because the bullets are moving so fast the bright lights will appear long and 'burn' the image into your cornea, although during bright light in the day the effect is alot more subdued, if there is heavy cloud cover out covering the sun or if its dusk / dawn the tracers will look alot longer and brighter, tracers never look like an individual point of light to the eye, sometimes on camera they will as there is time in between frames and the image is captured in frames wheras the eye captures it in continuous motion, they look like streaks, even when they bounce of rocks and stuff they look like cool "L" or "v" or "w" (if they skip) shapes, it would be cool if at night the images from the tracers would temporarily leave streaks on your screen as they will irl at night the light leaves streaks in your eyes like a camera flash will

[philip.ed]

Damage effects are awesome; tracer is mediocre, smoke and fire are crapper than I thought. Will I be flamed for saying this (no pun intended)? Yes, probably. Do I care? No.
Seriously, the smoke here looks worse than current Il-2 and much worse than RoF.
But that damage is just incredible. Hopefully all of the effects will be severely re-worked.

Originally Posted by No601_Swallow

Thanks, Drumtastic. That's pretty much what I was going to say.

Oleg - ignore the know-it-alls! Personally I feel privileged just to be able to see these WOP updates. Thank you!

Why post for us to share our critique and ignore it? What a waste of time that'd be.

[louisv]

Originally Posted by mark@1C

A question, who can tell me please what are those four shining spots in the first picture?
Reflected light from He-111? Then from the body or the canopy?
I feel a little odd, I mean if it came from the body, the shining spots should be bigger than that have been shown, shouldn't they? Or if it came from the canopy, then where are their bodies? Vanished in the blue sky, because of their camouflage? Or they are just navigation lights? In a daytime in a white colour?
Those four shining spots really look a little odd for me at such a distance in the picture, just like four UFOs...

Flak exploding I think (watch from close -up we can see some far-away flak smudges)

[louisv]

Originally Posted by GOA_Potenz

maybe it's because we been waiting this since 2005, and 5 years later see some things too similar to il2 engine, makes you wonder why.

If what you have been seeing in the updates in the last few weeks looks to you like IL-2, then there is no hope for you