Friday 2010-07-23 Dev. update and Discussions

[TUSA/TX-Gunslinger]

Thanks Oleg!

Amazing as always. Wishing you good luck in the final efforts of finishing!

S!

Gunny

[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

[swiss]

Originally Posted by JVM

Did you see this tracer firing directly IRL, without a camera intermediary?

IRL?

Yes, with my own eyes, no camera or night vision device.

At altitude you should not be able (or barely) to see tracers if fired toward you from in front of you

Of course not.
Well I guess, in fact i cant tell - I've never been in this position I really never want to...

My 45° agrees are based on 0° when directly behind/gunner sight.

In Il2 you see tracers from 10 km away like they were fireworks!

Of course, but since we have no recon maps or radio contact to ground units, this is our only way of recon.

Real laser beams travel at the speed of light in a continuous stream rather than defined pulses like a tracer (but unlike StarWars)

Check out Babylon 5.

[JVM]

Originally Posted by swiss

IRL?
Check out Babylon 5.

Ah, Babylon5...watched the full set 15 times and not bored yet...

[kristorf]

Nice pics, looks like its coming on good.

[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!

[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.

[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!