aircraft disappearing against terrain.

[timholt]

As a (used to be) pilot in real life I think it is realistic.

[patrat1]

Originally Posted by timholt

As a (used to be) pilot in real life I think it is realistic.

is it realistic to have a bomber formation about 1k away, disappear as your staring at it?

[Winger]

Originally Posted by patrat1

is it realistic to have a bomber formation about 1k away, disappear as your staring at it?

They dont disappear at 1km. They just get that small that you loose them
I am certain that the distance at wich planes effectively dissapear is bigger than 1km depending on your resolution.

Winger

[timholt]

Originally Posted by patrat1

is it realistic to have a bomber formation about 1k away, disappear as your staring at it?

My experience in the game (so far) is they don't disappear, they just blend in with the ground (the reason for the camo paint schemes).

Try enemy view and I am sure they will be there. I will confess I have had to resort to this more than once )purely as an aid to my 64 year old eyes) for low flying a/c over land, especially around dawn and dusk.

[reflected]

The wonderfully made reflections on canopies don't help either, especially at dawn or dusk! Still, I love it

[Buzzer]

Also find it hard. But I think its pretty realistic.
As someone else mentioned: in BoB pilots said they could one moment be in the thick of it - the next minute you were (ie thought you were) completely alone.

Also in RL its extremely hard to spot other AC:
Sometimes the easiest way is to spot a dot moving against the background.
Could be a white 737 - imagine this was a greenish spitfire: would be impossible to spot it.

But yes, its frustrating loosing sight of an enemy you know is there somewhere.
Been reading books about Dick Bong, Bruce Porter, George Barclay, Douglas Bader etc - and they rarely speak of 1on1 encounters. Guess its because its too hard to spot single AC, and also the usual operation was large groups in formations.

Funny to read how many times they had to return due to oil on the windshield...trying to find the way back...

But good to hear others having the same "problem" .

[SEE]

Open the canopy and take a look outside then close it. The effect of the canopy seems overmodelled in terms of reduced visibilty. I am constantly having to open the canopy to look around and soon as I close it the enemy ac seems to just disappear as I track it into my sights. It's tough without icons but unfortunately, using them is not an option for me. I would prefer to see some optimisation on the closed canopy effect - the world looks too flat and dull.

[Blackdog_kt]

I don't have personal experience but i remember one of the devs (probably Luthier) stating that it's done on purpose based on real-world flying experience and pilot accounts.

I think it's a better implementation than what we had in the previous IL2 series, where you could pick up distant contacts just fine and yet you would lose them against the terrain if you closed 300m or less. In CoD it seems that it's easier to keep track of the closer ones but increasingly hard to maintain a visual as distance increases.

I too found it hard, until i realized it's better to look for movement and not for distinct silhouettes and shapes. I might not be able to pick up shapes and make a positive ID right away, but unless they are already a few km away i can easily perceive something moving over the landscape. If they do put some distance between me and them however it's much harder to spot them against the terrain.

Come to think of it, if that wasn't the case there wouldn't be so many examples in real life where ground attack missions were carried out at tree-top level. If real-world pilots were going into a combat zone at a complete altitude disadvantage, then there must have been some kind of advantage to offset that otherwise they wouldn't do it. It seems that moving low and fast was indeed effective in making aircraft hard to spot and even if spotted, make it easier to lose them.

As a final note, i remember reading an article on simHQ a few months ago where one of the website's staff members took up real-world flying lessons and started making comparisons between the real thing and simulations on the PC. The aim of the article was to explore if and how much of an advantage a sim flyer has when stepping into a real aircraft for pilot lessons and naturally, there were things that were easier in real life (orientation due to feeling the movement and so on) and things that were easier in the sim.

He talked in length about each aspect, for example he said that as a sim flyer he picked up a habit that's bad for RL flying, looking at the instrument panel too much and not enough outside the window, but on the other hand his simming experience made it very easy for him to use the controls with precision and so on.

At some point he talked about visibility and the way he put it was that "the graphics of the real world are in need of an upgrade". He then proceeded to describe how the ATC gave them a traffic advisory about another, larger aircraft in the vicinity that was at their 2 o'clock low or something similar and yet, even though they knew exactly where to look for it they couldn't see it for an entire minute, even though it was only a couple of miles away.

So,i think it's probably realistic the way it is in CoD, or at the very least more realistic than how it was in IL2.

[djwolters]

Originally Posted by reflected

The wonderfully made reflections on canopies don't help either, especially at dawn or dusk! Still, I love it

I remember from the Mig Alley sim that it was often the canopy reflections of enemy airplanes which would give you an early indication that there was something 'out there'. Apart from engine contrails at certain altitudes, of course.

Perhaps this could be modeled as well in a future CoD patch, that canopy reflections can be a bother, but may also help you spotting bogies (and vice versa)?

[Heliocon]

In WW2 werent like 80% of fighter on fighter kills made when one party was not aware of the enemy before they got shot down? I mean most kills resulted from people closing in and hoping the other pilot is distracted (I would be if I was sitting in a plane for 6+ hours, after a few hours I imagine your nerves calm down and you lose concentration).

Only problem is of course the AI doesnt operate based on sight which makes it a bit unbalanced.