yep: Tracers, WOP and Il-2 COD

[mazex]

Thinking more of this I get a bit split about this as I have also been personally complimented by Oleg earlier for my explanation about how the tracers get 5 meters long (and that is naturally fun!)... Sure - the "long" tracers are fine if we simulate a camera looking at an mg firing tracers, but in that case we actually should really have the zig zag too... Get my thought? Because when looking at a real tracer that is fired (and not from a video or an image) it goes like on rail like I described above - but it looks like a tiny superfast firefly zipping from your barrel out into the night. No long light streak but tiny white glowing dots popping away towards the target (and then the chaos of ricochets going of in all directions that no game has ever been able to catch). It actually looks very surreal and not like you could expect from seeing movies. You get some strange feeling of not firing a gun but more of some kind of super powerful "sling shot" as you see the bullet popping away over the field and then bounce... But like I said - just a tiny glowing dot and no "streak"...

So - if you are going to have the streak then you look through a camera lens and then you should actually have the zig zag too (even though I said the opposite above I'm man enough to admit I changed my mind )

Edit again - having said this I also say "what the heck"! It looks good enough as it is (which goes for the landscape too) so focus on real problems now like optimizing net code so that a bullet that really should hit its target does it, don't care that much how it looks

Triple edit - looking from behind at the tracers I also guess that you may need to have the long "streaks" to get the feeling described above as the tiny dots would not be seen otherwise. Looking from the side it may look a bit weird but if you miss a 1x1 yellow pixel otherwise you have to make compromises like this...

[Gomer Pyle]

Originally Posted by mazex

... (and then the chaos of ricochets going of in all directions that no game has ever been able to catch)....

That's true, this seems to be a detail often omitted. I do remember however, that I once played a Microprose FlightSim (set in the Pacific theater), just don't know the name anymore although it was the game that got me hooked to genre. It actually did have ricocheting tracers, and I absolutely loved them in spite of them being huge square VGA (...or SVGA) pixel-blocks lighting up the screen - cool times.

/Daniel

[Royraiden]

Originally Posted by Gomer Pyle

That's true, this seems to be a detail often omitted. I do remember however, that I once played a Microprose FlightSim (set in the Pacific theater), just don't know the name anymore although it was the game that got me hooked to genre. It actually did have ricocheting tracers, and I absolutely loved them in spite of them being huge square VGA (...or SVGA) pixel-blocks lighting up the screen - cool times.

/Daniel

From what I've seen,bullets do ricochet on RoF but only when attacking ground targets.

[mazex]

Originally Posted by Royraiden

From what I've seen,bullets do ricochet on RoF but only when attacking ground targets.

I have owned RoF since day one but I have flown it rather little as it was buggy in the beginning (a LOT better now though!) and realized that I think I have not fired at the ground as I remember it but only on aircraft... Had to fire it up now and you are absolutely right - that's something like that I would expect regarding ricochets. Then of course if firing into a soft field from a rather fat angle I think they exaggerate them, but the RoF ricochets are a definate immersion booster! The tracers look great from the cockpit view also - even though they are a bit hard to see sometimes against that HDR beefed sky... But in daylight tracers are not that visible either so I'm fine with that.

[The Kraken]

"Glowing sperm" definitely fits the WoP tracers...

[zauii]

Originally Posted by Mazex

... (and then the chaos of ricochets going of in all directions that no game has ever been able to catch)....

Umm, Red Orchestra 1, tracers look natural and bounce/ricochet freaking everywhere, it's as immersible as it gets, its no flight sim tho if thats what you were point at, still a combat sim.
The mod Darkest Hour takes it even further and enhances it, really great stuff indeed.

[Flanker35M]

S!

A title that is VERY old called 1942 The Pacific Air War by MicroProse had ricocheting tracers. Way before IL-2. I hope CoD will have them too. IL-2 has them by "another way of incorporating changes" and adds for sure to the immersion when strafing ground targets.

[Gomer Pyle]

Originally Posted by Flanker35M

S!

A title that is VERY old called 1942 The Pacific Air War by MicroProse had ricocheting tracers. Way before IL-2. I hope CoD will have them too. IL-2 has them by "another way of incorporating changes" and adds for sure to the immersion when strafing ground targets.

Thanks Flanker; that was the title I was looking for: "1942 The Pacific Air War" I loved it back then.


/Daniel

[mazex]

Originally Posted by Gomer Pyle

Thanks Flanker; that was the title I was looking for: "1942 The Pacific Air War" I loved it back then.


/Daniel

Yep - I played it a lot to and loved it as well - and I remember I liked the tracers too... To give this discussion a bit of perspective I downloaded 1942 from an abandonware site (as I cant find the original) here http://www.freegameempire.com/games/...acific-Air-War and fired up DOSBox 0.74 so see how they really looked?

Here we have me attacking a hangar (???) - lasers there at the wing roots and a spray of 1x1 orange pixels that appear far in front but nothing in between (you can see two orange dots above the "hangar" and some yellow hits ). Most sims did it like that back then as I remember it.

The thing is that in 1994 when this was released it was as good as it gets - and it was not a long time ago for us that are getting old (41 myself).

EDIT: another thing we didn't have whining about then was markings as you can understand from this shot - or if the rivets are correct on the cowling... We had a good time anyway.
EDIT2: I hope you notice the two AA-guns (???) I knocked out on my first run to the left of the field!
EDIT3: Seven years after this we got IL2... There was a bit of Mores law with real results for simmers back then!
EDIT4: And no - i did not turn on anti aliasing for the shot



Did it really look this bad? Yes it did, but we thought it looked splendid then and I remember no one whining of the tracers - rather the opposite First time playing it with a G940 at least that works fine in DOSBox if you disconnect the throttle and pedals that get mixed up otherwise

Added a shot from the side so the high fidelity ballistic modelling can be seen:

[Koyan]

Originally Posted by mazex

...Did it really look this bad? Yes it did, but we thought it looked splendid then and I remember no one whining of the tracers - rather the opposite

If those tracers were 2 pixels wide there would be a lot of whining... Silently, at home... no internet forums yet.