After flying many a mission in the AvA where you have Air Starts enabling you to fly instantly above 15k and after intercepting MANY MANY a HQ strike in the MA above 20K I think Contrails should be considered. But others have mentioned that said contrails would hamper a players Frames Per Second. I have some ideas that would lessen the FPS hit.
The first is a given. In the video preferences make a button allowing the player to enable/disable contrails. This would help the players that have machines that come up a bit short in the performance issue.
2nd, The contrails would only be encountered above say 15 to 18k. Kinda like the cloud layer that we currently have in the MA and AvA.
3rd, The contrails would not/cannot flow continuesly behind the A/C. As in you cant have aircraft "darkening" the skies with contrails that stretch from one horison to the next. They would go out to a certain point and stop. This would also reduce a Frame rate hit.
Im sure to me it seems but a small addition to the game and might as well be a large mountain to HTC but I think it would add that touch of Nostalgia and Immersion. In other games ive seen contrails modeled but only really at insane Altitudes, 30k+.
Even todays "budget" machines are coming with onboard vidcards made by Ati or Nvidia that are totally capable of rendering AHII style graphics. I have many other reasons and explanations on how this could be emplamented but the ones above are my top 3.
How bout them Contrails HTC?
