Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: phookat on September 09, 2004, 11:21:42 AM
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I think tracers are currently less visible than they were in reality. This is probably due to limitations in the range of light intensity displayable by a computer monitor. They might match up to gun-cam footage, but such footage is subject to the same intensity limitations and should therefore not be used as the basis for in-game tracer visibility.
Here's how I see it.
Reality:
Tracers bright from nose mounted guns.
Tracers brighter from wing-mounted guns.
Tracers brightest from the perpective of the target.
Game:
Tracers visible from the target.
Tracers dimmer from wing-mounted guns.
Tracers nearly invisible from nose-mounted guns.
To make up for the fact that in-game tracers are not and can never be incandescent like their RL counterparts, I would suggest two things:
1) Make tracers a different color, which is not used anywhere else in-game. Hot-pink would be a good choice. :)
2) Make the tracers a bit bigger (especially in "diameter")
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHAH!
you just posted saying NO to night time, an obvious realism factor, yet you sit here and complain of the 'realism' of tracers?
mad i tell you.
completely mad.
batfink
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Night, MRE's, real pain and real death....I don't want any of those in game, even though they were a part of war.
Realistic tracers, I do want. Which are not possible on a computer monitor, so I am offering an alternative.
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Lordy ... if anything I'd want them alpha-blendable so they wouldn't be so intrusive. Fire off the front guns of a Mosi and good luck seeing what you were shooting at.
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Originally posted by DoKGonZo
Lordy ... if anything I'd want them alpha-blendable so they wouldn't be so intrusive. Fire off the front guns of a Mosi and good luck seeing what you were shooting at.
I think that may be more from the smoke than the tracer. In fact, the smoke is more visible than the tracer, which is also kinda strange.
But, for your problem, you can always disable tracers... ;) For myself, I can simply not see where the round went most of the time.
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think how good tracers would look at night time... :D
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Originally posted by phookat
I think that may be more from the smoke than the tracer. In fact, the smoke is more visible than the tracer, which is also kinda strange.
But, for your problem, you can always disable tracers... ;) For myself, I can simply not see where the round went most of the time.
Yeah ... it is the smoke more than the tracer ... I turn 'em off for that reason.
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Originally posted by mechanic
think how good tracers would look at night time... :D
Yeah, that's true, the tracers do look good in those screenies you took. This is because we have a nice wide range of intensity, so the tracers are a lot brighter than the background. But in the daytime...other mechanisms needed.
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Any of the retired fighter pilots can tell how good you see real tracers?
I always thought the game tracers are already bigger and easier to see than real ones.
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I think tracer effects are neat but I started turnin them off a couple weeks ago and my gunnery has hit an all time high for me any way. I think it's because I'm paying more attention to the targets relation to my sight and not where my tracers are going.
In short the effects are nice but they distract you from perfecting your aiming.
Just my humble opinnion.:D
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Originally posted by Schutt
Any of the retired fighter pilots can tell how good you see real tracers?
Would like to hear from them as well.
Originally posted by Schutt
I always thought the game tracers are already bigger and easier to see than real ones.
I would be very surprised if this was the case, especially for nose-mounted guns. If this were so, then the main purpose of tracers is lost, and they simply wouldn't have used them.
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Originally posted by Flayed1
I think tracer effects are neat but I started turnin them off a couple weeks ago and my gunnery has hit an all time high for me any way. I think it's because I'm paying more attention to the targets relation to my sight and not where my tracers are going.
In short the effects are nice but they distract you from perfecting your aiming.
Just my humble opinnion.:D
I semi-agree, but for different reasons. I think the reason for this is what DoK brought up, the smoke obscuring the target. If tracers were bright enough, they should help your aim...but they don't, cause you can't see them. And to make it worse, the smoke hides the target. Again, if tracers worked in reality how they do in the game, I think they probably wouldn't be used at all IRL.
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I'm still trying not to pee my pant's from the "Hot PinK" suggestion
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Originally posted by Flayed1
I think tracer effects are neat but I started turnin them off a couple weeks ago and my gunnery has hit an all time high for me any way. I think it's because I'm paying more attention to the targets relation to my sight and not where my tracers are going.
In short the effects are nice but they distract you from perfecting your aiming.
Just my humble opinnion.:D
I'd love to be able to use them as I usually fly 3 or 4 (or more) different planes in an evening and the ballistics from Hispanos to Russian 20's to German 20's to US .50 cal's are all pretty different. But the smoke trails are so pervasive and distracting that I don't bother switching tracers on.
Anyway way to just have a smaller or quicker-dispersing or less opaque smoke trail?
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was never a fighter pilot. i fought the river war. when we loaded tracers we put them ever tenth round in the .50 cal and every fifteenth in the 20mm. i found them very distracting. from my point of view the tracer looked like a very bright firefly with a rocket strapped to his a** and always seemed to be going high so if you corrected for the tracer you where missing with everything. in early 1971 the powers that be decided to take the 20mm off the boat. the 50cal was moved amidship and in its place they put the GAU-2A minigun from the cobra gunship. this was a 7.62cal weapon and could fire 6000rpm in high and 2000rpm in low the tracers came every five rounds in this as all ammo came preload. we carried 15,000 rounds so that gave us 3000 tracers very pretty but i still didnt like them. buy the way vc/nva tracers where red. ours where green. at night the main disadvantage of tracers is they gave away the ambush site and increased the pucker factor. in ah i still dont use tracers(lol) turn them off and your gunnery will improve. now if i could just learn to fly a fighter.
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Originally posted by JTs
from my point of view the tracer looked like a very bright firefly with a rocket strapped to his a**
I think you'll agree that the tracers we have in-game certainly doesn't look like a very bright firefly :)
Originally posted by JTs
at night the main disadvantage of tracers is they gave away the ambush site and increased the pucker factor.
True. Even in-game in daylight this applies.
Originally posted by JTs
in ah i still dont use tracers(lol) turn them off and your gunnery will improve.
Before going tracerless, you have to have practiced with tracers on...especially true of big guns, which have poor ballistics *and* very few rounds to experiment with. So you need to see where the rounds are going to get a feel for the gun.
With big guns and tracers off, I am basically just guessing and getting lucky once in a while--and you really can't learn from that.
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Use the .target xxx, the x's being the distance you want the target at while flying offline. A classic circle target appears in the North at about your flying altitude and you can practice your gunnery with or without tracers.
I originally turned off the tracers in the game for two reasons:
1) the smoke and tracers were distracting due to the cone-like dispersion of the rounds fired. (you'll really see how much lead goes flying around in places other than where you are aiming when you use the offline target since the holes show up nicely against the white background)
2) I don't have the best computer system for running the game, and I experienced a lag in frame rate when firing (thanks to the already graphically intense tracers that we do have)...which often would cause me to miss horribly beyond my already terrible gunnery.
After using the .target command, I discovered my guesswork with the various calibre guns was only slightly off, but with practice, I can now pull fairly nice 1 burst kills in my 190A-5. Now that I'm learning to shoot better...I have to learn how to get more shots. That means I have to fly better. I figure I'm only a few years away from being a good AH pilot. hehehe.
I agree the tracers might need some rework...but I won't use them anyway because they are still quite distracting in my opinion and making them even more visible would make them even MORE distracting.
Using tracers just lets the guy you sneak up behind suddenly become aware that you are there in the event that you miss your first shot. Without tracers, you might miss that first shot...but with a quick correction and a second burst...you might just get him.
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Yeah, I knew about .target...but that's not useful for learning how to shoot with any deflection or while pulling any Gs. And since that is almost always the case, flying against other planes is IMO the only way to learn.
Also, in the 190 you have a lot of rounds to spare, so you can spray a little which makes no tracers easier.
Hack9, try no tracers with a low vel gun like the 30 or 37.
Actually, what I find distracting is squinting at the screen trying to find the tracers...when actually the tracer should jump out at me at a glance.
I agree that smoke is distracting. That's the price of tracers...but the benefit should be clearly visible rounds.
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tracers would be incandescent if pixel shaded.
It'd be neat to be able to choose each gun's tracer color, or at least have their color the same as irl, red for US 50s, blue for D 151/20, green for VVS 7mil, etc.
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Originally posted by moot
tracers would be incandescent if pixel shaded.
No, even then they wouldn't. The problem is that the brightest color displayable on a computer monitor is white. The monitor is not capable of displaying incandescence beyond that. For example, your monitor can never be as bright as the sun. It can never damage your eyes from being too bright.
Originally posted by moot
It'd be neat to be able to choose each gun's tracer color, or at least have their color the same as irl, red for US 50s, blue for D 151/20, green for VVS 7mil, etc.
Although this might be nominally more realistic, I'd say it would end up being effectively less realistic because of the brightness issue. They might be different colors, but they shared the characteristic of all being brighter than a monitor. The latter is more important to simulate than the former, IMO.
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Be more fun to have different colors for each country.
The smoke trail on the 20mm's seems the most overblown.
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:lol
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Ok I've been trying the ack guns on he field an I do agree that they fire so slow that tracers are a bennifit for them.
How ever I still say turn them off for fighters. My usual ride is an A6M2 and you can't get much lower on actuall killing rounds than that (120 cannon I think) I have been able to get 1 or 2 kills more each flight with out tracers than I usually did with them.
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Originally posted by Flayed1
My usual ride is an A6M2 and you can't get much lower on actuall killing rounds than that (120 cannon I think) I have been able to get 1 or 2 kills more each flight with out tracers than I usually did with them.
Try 65 rpg with the 109's 30. And lower muzzle velocity.
No tracers are fine once you learn how the gun handles....or if the gun is easy to handle to begin with. But to learn, especially when you have little ammo and low muzzle vel, you need to see where your rounds are going.
With the 30 in the nose, I often can't see whether I missed below or above, unless I have a blank sky as the backdrop, am flying totally straight and level, and I focus really hard on the tracer itself.
I really don't think it was that way in real life. The tracer should jump out at you unless you are flying into the sun. Again, I'm not asking for something unrealistic...just to emulate the real situation in the best possible way. Hot pink sounds absurd on the face of it, but I think effectively it is most realistic.