Invisible GV's

[Noir]

Hello there, I'd like to report some probs I have with GV's and ground in general.


Sometimes gvs are invisible to me, I can see the shadow of em on the ground, I can see the bullets coming at me, but no icon (yes I'm in range) and no iron to shoot at. I had the problem both in air and on the ground.

When my FPS are running very low (40fps in normal flight, 10 over a smoking field) I HAVE to switch to short vis range in the middle of combat (I love it ) I used it for a while until I discovered it affects the icons of the gvs when you are in air (shorter range of icon) so I have to reswitch it in case there are gvs near that smoking field (gotta love it !).


I have a problem with trees also....its quite simple but hard to explain. Put the details to the minimum, get a gv near a forest and look at the low detail "trees"...now zoom your view and you'll discover a real forest and real trees that has nothing to do with what you were seeing before.
the worst part is when you try to go thru that low detail forest, and gotta zoom from time to time to see the actual trees to avoid.
Or you think you are safe behing your green textured vegetation wall, and in fact the nmy perfectly sees you cause you are hidden behind a bonzai in panzer on his screen with max details...

I'm running an athlon XP 2400 with a radeon 9600SE and I loose 20fps when zooming on trees.....a joke ?

For me in a MMOG if you meet the minimal requirements you should have the same chances to win that another player, but on AH2 the PC performance tends to influence too much how you can play (can't go to crowded places for exemple or have 5fps, the trees problem also).

I just hope HTC is aware of the FPS problems and will wake up. Patience costs money to players.

[WMLute]

Originally posted by Noir
Hello there, I'd like to report some probs I have with GV's and ground in general.


Sometimes gvs are invisible to me, I can see the shadow of em on the ground, I can see the bullets coming at me, but no icon (yes I'm in range) and no iron to shoot at. I had the problem both in air and on the ground.

When my FPS are running very low (40fps in normal flight, 10 over a smoking field) I HAVE to switch to short vis range in the middle of combat (I love it ) I used it for a while until I discovered it affects the icons of the gvs when you are in air (shorter range of icon) so I have to reswitch it in case there are gvs near that smoking field (gotta love it !).


I have a problem with trees also....its quite simple but hard to explain. Put the details to the minimum, get a gv near a forest and look at the low detail "trees"...now zoom your view and you'll discover a real forest and real trees that has nothing to do with what you were seeing before.
the worst part is when you try to go thru that low detail forest, and gotta zoom from time to time to see the actual trees to avoid.
Or you think you are safe behing your green textured vegetation wall, and in fact the nmy perfectly sees you cause you are hidden behind a bonzai in panzer on his screen with max details...

I'm running an athlon XP 2400 with a radeon 9600SE and I loose 20fps when zooming on trees.....a joke ?

For me in a MMOG if you meet the minimal requirements you should have the same chances to win that another player, but on AH2 the PC performance tends to influence too much how you can play (can't go to crowded places for exemple or have 5fps, the trees problem also).

I just hope HTC is aware of the FPS problems and will wake up. Patience costs money to players.

I've posted on this topic until my fingers bled.  I DON'T think HT is fully aware (or possibly they are) of this issue, or the "big" picture involved with it.

It's wrong to attatch the GV viewable distance to the customers computer spec's.  The high end fast machine customers can spot a gv from 3k out no worries.  The medium guys are lucky for 1.5k, and the lower end systems are lucky if they are able to see them at all.

?????

Why would you have something that is based on customers hardware spec's affect gameplay?  Why should only SOME of the players get to see nme gv's (ack's etc) from far out?  Why would you not want a level playing field and allow ALL players to spot 'em at a certain distance?  The whole "why only allow big CPU customers to see the icon" bit has always had me baffled.  It's like only letting faster machines be able to see Vehicle Hangers or Ammo strat on a field.  "If you are able to max out the video sliders, you can see that fh, for you others, sorry, your out of luck.  Have fun trying to bomb it"

The response I recall from Dale (HT) was that they attached nme gv viewable distance to help hide said nme ground vehicle.  But if one simply reasons that out, hide from who?  They are not hidded from the 3.ghz machines, just the 1.4ghz's.  Seems silly if ya' think 'bout it.  Why would you only want that nme gv hidden from SOME of the player base?  Is possibly HT a closet GV'r and this way he can sneak around and not be spotted by 1/2 the customers?  ()

Reward the high end systems, and punish the low end.  It's neither fair, nor balanced, and could you please, if not FIX this issue, at least talk about it to us and explain the Fast Computer Bias thing.

[715]

Yes, people with slow computers are at a disadvantage, but this is not an easy thing to fix.  Suppose they did what you wanted: made the GVs visible at ranges beyond which the trees are visible.  Then everyone would set tree distance to the very minimum and *poof* every GV that was trying to hide in the trees would become instantly visible and easily targeted.  That would basically remove the whole point to trees (and fine scale terrain).  Although I don't know for certain, I am pretty sure the visibility/non-visibility of GVs is entirely under the graphics card Z-buffer control- ie a GV is hidden only because the graphics card draws a tree in front of it and doesn't draw the GV, if that is what the geometry calls for.  It isn't under program control so the program cannot make GVs disappear behind non visible trees.

(Disclaimer: I am certainly not one of those blessed with high performance.  I feel your pain, so to speak; with all detail set to max I can get my frames per second to actually drop to less than one.  [2.8GHz P4 w ATI 9600XT])

[emodin]

Have you tried Shift+F4 (Ground Vis mode)?  This should help a lot if you haven't already been using it.

As for icons, you will never see enemy ground vehicle icons if you are in a gv yourself.  You should, however see their icons if you are in an airplane, at a distance of 1.5 or less, and in Ground Vis mode; at least that's my experience.

Hope this helps.