yep: Tracers, WOP and Il-2 COD

[mazex]

Originally Posted by NEWGUY

At 6 minutes and 55 seconds you can see that the real Spitfire tracers look like COD tracers; the only difference is the vibration of the camera makes the tracers look slightly distorted, but the tracers, in the absence of the shaking, would look like the tracers in COD.

I think CoD tracers are correct in the way that they don't wiggle, but at the other hand the length of the lasers is also a camera effect?

As I see it threre are three combinations if we look at the two camera "errors" of wiggle due to vibration and extended "length" due to shutter speed:

1. The WoP way: Look at the world from a rigidly mounted camera with wiggling AND stretched tracers.

2. The CoD way: Look at the world from a cushioned camera with non-wiggling but stretched tracers.

3. The IRL way: Look at the world from a real eye with tracers that neither wiggle or are stretched. They are just tiny fast glowing "specs" of light "on rails" as the human eye has no "shutter speed" and is well cushioned...

4. The weird way: Ok, the last combination would then be wiggle and no stretch simulating a human eye mounted rigid to the wing with wiggling but non-stretched tracers. Let's leave that one out

The problem here is that alternative 3 is really only "real" for those that has seen real tracers, and for the majority of the world that has seen tracers on movies alternative 2 is "most real", and then alternative 1 for those that have seen a lot of gun cam footage... Don't know about four then but when in a tracked vehicle running on rough surface it gets a bit like it

Having said that I guess that Oleg and his boys have decided on alternative 2 as it will feel real for most of the customers? And the problem with what I call the "real" alternative is how to simulate it correctly in a computer game running at 30-60 fps... That gets a bit like a movie camera actually. If trying to do alternative 3 (the "real" way) then the tiny spec would only be seen in 20-100 frames on it's way to the target. The human eye don't have that so it sees it all the way. Then adding length to fill "the holes" might be the best way...

This is getting out of scope now, I think the compromise of using alt 2 like CoD is OK, and as said here earlier they can tune them after release if we don't like the final result that we don't know about yet! They have evolved lately...

[Blackdog_kt]

I think Mazex explained everything nicely.

I haven't done a huge amount of shooting, but i did serve a year as a conscript in the local air force (we have a mixed armed force, with the bulk being reservist troops, civilians who get into armed duty for some months, and the rest being professional soldiers of varying ranks).

When we practice fired our personal armament (G3s and LMGs) we didn't use tracers.
However, as i was trained to be a flak gunner i also had the chance to fire some 20mm rounds from a dual-barrel Rheinmetall gun.

In that case, the effect was very similar to what Mazex said. The curved rail effect was not so easy to observe because the gun barrels were lifted about 60-70 degrees up in the sky, but the rest is pretty close. The moment i pressed the trigger and the tracer left the barrel, i saw a short streak of thin, yellow light. What surprised me was that the tracer look longer when it was close to me, but seemed to reduce in size within milliseconds, as it raced away. By the time it was past it's half-way point it was almost a dot, then came small puffs of smoke and after a couple of seconds you could hear the explosions.

Now that i think of it, the only simulator to ever have that sound feature was B-17 the mighty 8th, in almost any other sim i've seen it seems that sound travels with the same speed as light.
It would be very cool to have that corrected in CoD as well, so that when an explosion is far away we first see it but hear it a few seconds later.

[mazex]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

In that case, the effect was very similar to what Mazex said. The curved rail effect was not so easy to observe because the gun barrels were lifted about 60-70 degrees up in the sky, but the rest is pretty close. The moment i pressed the trigger and the tracer left the barrel, i saw a short streak of thin, yellow light. What surprised me was that the tracer look longer when it was close to me, but seemed to reduce in size within milliseconds, as it raced away. By the time it was past it's half-way point it was almost a dot, then came small puffs of smoke and after a couple of seconds you could hear the explosions.

Agree with that - in the first 100 meters or so it goes so fast that there is a bit of "streak" effect IRL too as the brain can not "keep up with reality" - and then from 100 meters (?) to X the eye can keep up and focus on what is very clearly a tiny glowing dot popping away...

I have an old black and white photo somewhere from an exercise where we had two companies firing "all we had" with M-240:s and G3:s loaded with ONLY tracers at night as our unit had not expended the ammunition budget that year so we had to waste as much money on ammo as possible over a weekend - and tracers are more expensive that ball ammo Otherwise we used to have a tracer as the last or second last bullet in our G3 magazines to give a visual indication that you where out of ammo and had to switch to a new magazine as there is no ammo counter in real life In the M-240:s we used to mix one tracer every 3-5 rounds. So at that exercise we had 100% tracers in ALL guns and fired a couple of times from a hill down at a gravel road 300 meters away which had remote controlled practice target of aluminium popping up along it. It was awesome as the air was so filled with tracers that it felt like you should be able to walk on the glowing air down to the road. A hard packed gravel road gives extreme amounts of ricochets so the medical team that was some kilometers away behind the hill and saw the fountain of ricochetting tracers going up in the air and thought we had gone berserk and all fired up in the air I then had a camera with black and white film and took a photo with two second open shutter in the pitch black night at the glowing 200 meter wide "tracer flood" from the hill to the gravel raod... You can imagine the look of that... It was 20 years ago though so where the heck is that photo now?

[Flanker35M]

S!

So from reading what Mazex & Co write the CoD tracers are "camera tracers" and not like the human eye. I wish they were smaller and thinner in CoD than shown in screens. IF I wanted something like that I play StarWars

[meplay]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

It would be very cool to have that corrected in CoD as well, so that when an explosion is far away we first see it but hear it a few seconds later.

yeah it would be good for say film makers, as if the camera was on top of a building quit far away, when a plane come into strafe a target, you can see the tracers but hear after

[The Kraken]

Originally Posted by mazex

I think CoD tracers are correct in the way that they don't wiggle, but at the other hand the length of the lasers is also a camera effect?

There are some additional aspects that have to be considered to make the tracers work in a computer game, which have nothing to do with eye or camera perception:

- tracers have to work for a wide range of framerates (obviously the higher the framerate, the better they will work)
- they should still be visible from further away, especially from the firing platform's perspective (big issue with many tracers in Il2)
- they need to work for different lighting conditions (quite visible at daylight and extremely bright at night)

Me, I'd use a thinner and longer tracer object, HDR/bloom for some glow effect (which would increase the apparent size in the distance) and maybe some motion blur. Probably would have been the first sensible use of those effects in any game; normally I quickly disable those if possible But it looks like they went for a more practical and compatible approach, which should also work fine. Certainly better than the glowing sperm above.

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by The Kraken

There are some additional aspects that have to be considered to make the tracers work in a computer game, which have nothing to do with eye or camera perception:

- tracers have to work for a wide range of framerates (obviously the higher the framerate, the better they will work)
- they should still be visible from further away, especially from the firing platform's perspective (big issue with many tracers in Il2)
- they need to work for different lighting conditions (quite visible at daylight and extremely bright at night)

Me, I'd use a thinner and longer tracer object, HDR/bloom for some glow effect (which would increase the apparent size in the distance) and maybe some motion blur. Probably would have been the first sensible use of those effects in any game; normally I quickly disable those if possible But it looks like they went for a more practical and compatible approach, which should also work fine. Certainly better than the glowing sperm above.

Well the stretched bar is meant to be the "motion blur" because it moves so fast it leaves a streak in your vision. I think we have moved beyond the time when a tracer is a yellow cylinder... Also remember if the ballistics are realistic they have to bounce off objects and stuff which would look absurd if they are geomtry.

Why turn off HDR/Bloom?