Friday 2010-07-23 Dev. update and Discussions

[Erkki]

Thanks man!

[Freycinet]

Love the smoke coming from the right-most plane in the last screenie. Looks exactly the way it should IMHO.

Great also to see the Taifun, tho I guess it won't be flyable.

[JVM]

Hello Oleg!

beautiful shots as always! I like the Bf 108 which was a beautiful aircraft!

Concerning the shot 2, I believe the transition flame/smoke is not really correct and that the red part of the flames are much too transparent: the fuel/oil/dope flames are much brighter light emitters than anything in their environments and their brightness obliterate the view whatever is just behind them. Flames never feel visually transparent (they are really, but your eyes will react to their brightness and could not discriminate any light coming across it if the said light is enormously less bright)
The flame shots of last week or the one before were better from this standpoint.

The smoke itself should at first either be impenetrable if a lot of oil/dope is involved (bad combustion = thick smoke), or can be quite transparent in case of pure fuel smoke (many stills and movies show fuel flames very bright and almost smokeless, this being due to extremely rapid vaporisation of fuel with speed/shell explosion and ensuing excellent combustion...usually some smoke appears quickly afterwards due to other components beginning burning)

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!
This reminds me of the "camera" light reflection effects in Il2...we are so much used to watch WWII or any event for that matter across a camera that we forgot that the camera introduces artifacts and that the real world does not exactly appear that way to our eyes
I would like to see only bright points for tracers...the "fin du fin" would be to be not able to see tracers from anywhere in front 180° of the bullet position, and more and more bright as you see them closer to their trajectory in the aft 180°...this being absolute real world behavior (the optics laws being what they are) the immersion would make a big leap forward...but I could understand simple bright points for the sake of simplicity!

JVM

[kgwanchos]

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!
This reminds me of the "camera" light reflection effects in Il2...we are so much used to watch WWII or any event for that matter across a camera that we forgot that the camera introduces artifacts and that the real world does not exactly appear that way to our eyes
I would like to see only bright points for tracers...the "fin du fin" would be to be not able to see tracers from anywhere in front 180° of the bullet position, and more and more bright as you see them closer to their trajectory in the aft 180°...this being absolute real world behavior (the optics laws being what they are) the immersion would make a big leap forward...but I could accept simple bright points for the sake of simplicity!

I wouldnt presume to lecture Oleg on camera optics and real world visual effects..... hes rather an expert on those subjects.... I would assume a screen shot is to all intents a "photo" hence the emulation of shutter speed on tracers, prop blur etc ........ I think it looks great ... well done Oleg and team ....

[swiss]

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 depends on the percentage of tracers in the amo, cadence and bullet speed.
I have seen machine gun and flab salvos from a >45° angle that appeared rather like a freakin' red laser beam - with a few interrupts.
You are right if you say the shallower the angle of the observer, the less blurry but dot like they appear.

Fire: I agree here, I just checked the pics of the Concorde crash in Paris.


BTT:

Great pics, thanks.

[brando]

I think it's difficult to make constructive criticisms of details like fire and tracers when the only evidence is a frozen moment in an ongoing action. The true extent of the visual accuracy will only be apparent when the game is on the hard drive of your own machine, and I'm willing to bet that the final effects will be several leaps beyond the already stunning ten-year-old sim that most of us know so well.

I don't even worry too much about the opening version of BoB which we are all looking forward to. As a constant 'flier' since Sturmovik became available I've always felt well-supported by the fact that updates, add-ons and corrections have been plentiful. Oleg Maddox and his team have proved their willingness to improve the sim in line with technological improvements in computing many times over - as well as keeping the game available to people with less than leading-edge PCs. This alone is a great achievement.

I'm really looking forward to jumping into Storm of War. I'll leave nit-picking until I have the finished article in my hand and I've tasted action.

Thanks for the updates Oleg, and I hope you return to us refreshed and raring to go.

<S>

Brando

[mungee]

Well said Brando - I couldn't have put it any better!!

Originally Posted by brando

I think it's difficult to make constructive criticisms of details like fire and tracers when the only evidence is a frozen moment in an ongoing action. The true extent of the visual accuracy will only be apparent when the game is on the hard drive of your own machine, and I'm willing to bet that the final effects will be several leaps beyond the already stunning ten-year-old sim that most of us know so well.

I don't even worry too much about the opening version of BoB which we are all looking forward to. As a constant 'flier' since Sturmovik became available I've always felt well-supported by the fact that updates, add-ons and corrections have been plentiful. Oleg Maddox and his team have proved their willingness to improve the sim in line with technological improvements in computing many times over - as well as keeping the game available to people with less than leading-edge PCs. This alone is a great achievement.

I'm really looking forward to jumping into Storm of War. I'll leave nit-picking until I have the finished article in my hand and I've tasted action.

Thanks for the updates Oleg, and I hope you return to us refreshed and raring to go.


Brando

[JVM]

@kgwanchos

I am not lecturing Oleg, I do not have this pretention...I explain for the people who are not aware of these aspects...the tracer issue was already there in Il2...the screen shot is not taken using a camera and should show the tracer for the dots they are, nothing else...but this is only my opinion!

@swiss

I agree but do not forget they were less tracers in WWII than nowadays (presumably tracers were more expensive?) and the rates of fire were also lower so the tracers were more clearly separated! Did you see this tracer firing directly IRL, without a camera intermediary?
At altitude you should not be able (or barely) to see tracers if fired toward you from in front of you (almost no light scattering compared to lower atmospheric layers close to the ground). In Il2 you see tracers from 10 km away like they were fireworks!

I understand however there may be compelling reasons to not being completely faithful to reality on this subject, but I prefer pointing it out now than after the game release..you never know!

[HFC_Dolphin]

Thanks for the update.
One note though: I guess explosions/fires are not final, right?
They don't look that good yet. Too red maybe? I don't know what seems wrong to me, but I think you should work more on them.

Once again, thanks!

Edit: Just saw that other guys mentioned fires as well.

[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.