What a tracer should look like (before spazzing just look).

[yellonet]

Originally Posted by winny

You are thinking outside the eye.

It only takes a very small movement for this effect to happen. The speed of the bullet is irrelevant. It's all about relative speed across the retina. regardless of actual speed (which is the reason that tracer coming in from the side appear to have a longer tail), they move across the retina quicker than ones moving away from you.

Again, this effect does not hapen anywhere except in the eye. Any movement of the head/eye/aircraft will effect it.

To understand this you need to stop thinking in 3d, tracer light trails are a 2d effect on the back of the eye, like a pen on paper. They are not affected by perspective.

To say that the effect is miniscule is missing the point, if the tail appears to be 2 feet long or 22 feet long it should still be aligned to the relative movement over the 2d image in the back of the eye, not the actual movement in 3D space.

As for wasting cycles.. That's what they are doing now, by drawing in 3d bars of light.

I'm no games designer and this may actually be horrendously difficult but..

Surley it would be lighter on resources to simply not render the tracer in 3D but to draw them in as a 2D overlay, with the tail at 180 degrees to the movement across the eye/screen? ie. treat it exactly as it is, instead of rendering a 3d bar of light that doesn't actually exist anywhere except inside your eye.

I understand what you're saying, but I actually do think it's more difficult to implement this optical illusion than to do what we have now.
I would guess that what we have now is a visible "light bar" simply riding on the already calculated trajectory of the bullet.
To get a dynamic representation of tracer fire someone would likely need to create such a function from scratch. Perhaps the Devs aren't aware of the effect or they just didn't think it was worth the effort to implement.