Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: WhiteHawk on October 25, 2003, 09:31:59 PM
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I know this is just in the early staes, but I cant play with those helix tracers. Some of them swirl out to about a foot radius. Reminds me of those cheap bottle rockets. Anybody else see this or is it something on my end?
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I thought they looked closer to real footage of tracers being fired from WWII airplanes than what we have now
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Originally posted by ply
I thought they looked closer to real footage of tracers being fired from WWII airplanes than what we have now
welllll... the footage you see is exactly that.. footage... from a camera mounted on the plane... which is being vibrated the hell out of when the guns fire....
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So you mean the only thing we have to go no.. we can't go on.. so everything else is just guessing, but that's better than going by video footage? :confused:
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Guess now I'll pay more attention to those films and see what they look like being filmed from a location other than the plane firing. But if your shaky camera theory is right, the pilot must also shake and may see it the same way.
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Originally posted by ply
Guess now I'll pay more attention to those films and see what they look like being filmed from a location other than the plane firing. But if your shaky camera theory is right, the pilot must also shake and may see it the same way.
the pilot will feel the guns balzing away, yes, but his body is a wonderful thing - it'll absorb the vibrations and maintain a steady view with those great mk4 eyeballs.
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I haven't got a clue to what's more realistic, but...
Did you see the tracer effect in "B17II the mighty eight"? I think they based their effect on gun cam footage. All the shaking was a bit confusing but it looked like a million dollars.
If I could cut'n'paste various parts from various sims, we would have the perfect som by now... :p
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Originally posted by Shane
with those great mk4 eyeballs.
Mk4 now is it?
Odd, we're still using Mk1s in Britain.
(http://image1ex.villagephotos.com/extern/640697.jpg)
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:D
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Shane is correct, you dolts. It is an optical quirk of 2-dimensional film due to undampened gun-camera mounting and not what is seen through stereoscopic, fluid-dampened eyes.
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Noone doubts Shane is right, fullback.
We're just pursuing the Mk4 eyball issue... Is Americans born with these? I'd like to upgrade my pair, do I have to send them to the US? I don't mind using a cane while I wait.
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Hey! and don't call me a dolt!
I'm a fullgrown continental idiot, and deserve to be treated as one!
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Actually, all eyeballs and gunsights are now made in Taiwan and China. :)
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Originally posted by jodgi
I haven't got a clue to what's more realistic, but...
Did you see the tracer effect in "B17II the mighty eight"? I think they based their effect on gun cam footage. All the shaking was a bit confusing but it looked like a million dollars.
Wow, I'd forgot about that. Your are indeed right.
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Actually, all eyeballs and gunsights are now made in Taiwan and China.
I just learned that they also make them in Germany (Zeiss), but it will cost you an arm and a leg.
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I knew somewhere there was a page on this
http://www.spanishcastle.com/justplanefun/hollywood.html
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on the history channle yesterday they had a program on the bf109. there i seen a spit chasing on and when the plane was straight the tracer smoke trail was straight as soon as it started to turn any the spirals were just like the ones in AH2 , so the tracers did spiral. i waitied to see a show that sgowed that before i posted any more on tracers. so they do spiral like that. well tracers rounds are a little different than regular rounds to and that may have something to do with waythe bullets act to.
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Tracer smoke does form a spiral - the round is spitting out phosphorus smoke while spinning rapidly. The catch is, the smoke disperses far too quickly on .30 and .50 calibre rounds for the effect to be visible. It's most visible on large diameter rounds. For 20 mm cannon rounds, there would be a visible spiral for just a fraction of a second before the smoke would diffuse into a straight, blurry line. 30 mm rounds show the effect best, the spiral lasts a little longer.
It also depends on what type of tracer is being used. Some leave trails, some don't. Some types of tracers only illuminate the bullet itself and don't leave visible trails.
IL-2 does the effect very well. AHII doesn't, because it isn't a particle effect, it just looks like a series of cylindrical polygons using textures with transparencies, so the spiral lasts forever, and doesn't look very good.
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Originally posted by Sarge
on the history channle yesterday they had a program on the bf109. there i seen a spit chasing on and when the plane was straight the tracer smoke trail was straight as soon as it started to turn any the spirals were just like the ones in AH2 , so the tracers did spiral. i waitied to see a show that sgowed that before i posted any more on tracers. so they do spiral like that. well tracers rounds are a little different than regular rounds to and that may have something to do with waythe bullets act to.
Indeed tracers do become less stable as the material that burns in them is consumed. They weigh less at first then regular bullets and then change as they burn. A bullet is stabilize by the spin rate of the rifling (twist) and that is a designed around the length of the bullet and the weight. Tracers in larger cal. weapons would not be as accurate or fly in the same trajectory as the ball ammo.
I think the spin we are seeing is a bit over done from what I have seen from the M-2 .50 cal firing with tracers on a mount. I have seen what you are describing on Wings channel and think it may be both the vibration and some instability in the tracers. I think the barrels in some of the AC near the end of the war were shot out and were very sloppy but that is just a feeling.
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This could be just on my end but, as i gunned the 7,9mm from the panzer, the trac ers looked like twirling ribbons. It was a helix with a radius coefficient of about 6 inches or more. This is not possible cuz the bullet would have to traverse that path also.
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They'll get it right.
I found that the tracers improved in patch 1 (looked less unreal).
They're still working on it...
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Yea..i know they'll get it right, they always do. But I hope they put a little priority here cuase these things suck the frames right out of my system.
With tracers enabled
p51b sitting on the runway 60fps not firing
12 fps firing for 10 seconds
With tracers disabled
p51b sitting on the runway 60fps not firing
47 fps firing for 10 seconds
Stock sounds for both.
Just me or anybody else get this phenomonnena
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If you fire parallel to the direction of motion, or if you fire when not mooving, the projectiles will be stable (at least in theory). But i think if you fire at an angle of attack the projectiles will spiral due to lift and centrifugal forces on the projectile.
Besides, why would (and how would) the gun camera make a perfect circlular movement only on the tracers, and not on the target, or clouds or ground?
:)
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Originally posted by WhiteHawk
...It was a helix with a radius coefficient of about 6 inches or more. This is not possible cuz the bullet would have to traverse that path also.
Not so. Think about the vortex created by the bullet's motion and spin.
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Just.. put spiral smoke at rounds over 20mm.. and let the 7.7mm~15mm rounds have faint, more straight smoke.. and that's the end of that.
The spirals don't look that bad when you fire them from 109s, but seeing 6 spirals on P-51s.. that, looks a bit funky.
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Have you ever seen one of those goofy looking tracers from an anti-aircraft gun, when the camera was at an offset, i.e. not attached to the firing platform? No, you haven't, no matter if it is .307 or 88mm, and you won't, because it is a photographic artifact, not a representation of the flight of the projectile.
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http://mezek.valka.cz/texty/filmy.htm
go here abd watch these films,
The 50 cals certainly didnt have this type of tracers effect, otoh lw guncams always show lotsa smoke. Sometimes in good spirals sometimes not.
But this is beside the point because if you read hts post you wouldnt really have much to say about the current tracers.
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WHO CARES?!?!
Just let the guys build the game the way they want to build it! After all no matter what you guys say thats what they will do in the end anyway.
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Originally posted by Coolridr
WHO CARES?!?!
Just let the guys build the game the way they want to build it! After all no matter what you guys say thats what they will do in the end anyway.
This forum is for comments and suggestions about AH2, and that’s what we are doing.
You must be new to think, "they will do what they want". I have found HTC not only values our input but uses a surprising amount of our suggestions in the SIM.
So to answer your question about "who cares"
1. We do (those of us in this post)
2. HTC does
3. Most of the players to some extent care about the game
One final point, our comments here in no way stop them from building the game.
As my grandmother used to say " who the heck died and left you boss"
Regards:
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My thoughts on the tracer smoke spirals....
At first I thought having any smoke trail was incorrect for the late-war period that AH mostly handles, at least in the MA. I didn't recall seeing any smoke in guncam films from later than about 1941. But with this issue being discussed a lot now, I've gone back and looked at all the film I could find and now see that smoke was indeed visible in most of them--I had just not noticed it before. So, it now becomes a question of how accurately AH2 duplicates it.
I disagree with folks saying the spiral effect is an artifact of vibration, basically a blur effect. This cannot be true because any such blurring would be caused by small, rapid changes in the angle of the camera relative to the line of flight. The effects of such angular changes would be amplified by distance, so things further away would be blurred more than closer things. IOW, if the vibration theory was true, you would see tracer trails as expanding cones getting wider the further away the bullet got, and the target itself would be a large smear. However, this is not the case. In the films (especially late-war films of pretty high quality), the target is often very clear, yet still the tracers going to it have the spiral, which becomes less and less obvious the further away the bullet gets. Thus, it seems that the spiral effect was indeed caused by phosphorous bits being thrown off in different directions as the bullet rotated.
Another bit of evidence in support of the twists in the trail being real things, as opposed to being vibration artifacts, is the observation that trails are more visible when the firing plane is turning. This is because during turns, you're seeing the trails more from above as opposed to mostly end-on. Thus, the kinks in the trail are individually visible against the background, instead of masking each other.
So, AH2's basic idea of having spirals come off tracers is correct, but I think we all agree that it does not look much like what we see in films. AH2's trails look like rail gun trails from Quake 2 or other sci-fi FPS games, being thin, distinct ribbons wrapped around an invisible cylinder about 1 foot wide. OTOH, the trails I see in films are transluscent "solid" cylinders with twisted ridges on the outer surface. They look like ropes made of smoke. If AH2's trails could somehow be made to look more like ropes of smoke than white ribbons wrapped around an invisible cylinder, the overall effect would be much improved.
The only similarity between the film trails and AH2's trails is that the twists in the films have about the same frequency as spirals in AH2. At the Con this summer, HT told me that he based his spiral frequency on the rifling of the real guns. That this closely matches the twists in the film is further evidence that the twisting of the smoke trails in the films was caused by the rotation of the bullet, not the vibration of the camera.
OK, that's it for general appearance. However, there is still the issue of how often the trails should be seen. This seems to me a much more difficult issue. From looking at lots of films from the whole war, trails seem to get less and less common as the war went on. And when seen later in the war, the trails are much less distinct (so that I wasn't noticing them at first). In addition, not all tracers in the same film leave trails, and what trails there are often only cover part of the bullet's path. And sometimes, they only become visible long after the bullet has gone by. However, this is only a general trend--there are many exceptions that seems to do with the caliber of the weapon and its nationality. And in my own experience with 80s-90s US and USSR weapons on the range and in combat, I never saw (or noticed) any trails at all.
It seems to me that as the war went on, there was a general trend toward smokeless tracers. In BoB films, you see scads of trails (8x.303s), but by 44-45 you hardly ever see them and when you do they're usually almost invisible. German films seem to retain the most trails in total, and they're the most visible, throughout the war. This could be due to their use of more and larger cannon than the Allies.
So why are late-war trails so erratic, not being seen for all tracers, nor the full path when present, and sometimes appearing rather late? Perhaps some of this stemmed from manufacturing defects in what were supposed to be smokeless tracer elements. Sometimes, an improperly made element might smoke, or have small areas in it that would smoke, so you'd get occasional trails, sometimes interrupted. The late-appearing trails, however, must be some contrail-like effect, perhaps as water nucleated on ash particles once they'd cooled down sufficiently. I don't know.
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I never said that HTC doesn't value our input..but if you read 99.9999999999999999 percent of the threads throughout the BB you notice that most of it is whines and complaints and hardly constructive critisism. I'm sure that HTC is interested in our ideas and for sure our bug reports..but come on. There is really some nit-picky stuff getting posted. It would be impossible to make a truly realistic SIM. after all ,I'm willing to bet that most of us were not there and even the stuff in books can't always be trusted as alot of non-fiction is based on the authors opinion.
You would think that people would be more concerned about major stuff like plane sets ,overall graphics , the realism of the planes themselves, and most of all how realistic the flight and handling characteristics of the aircraft are. All I am saying is let them get on with what they are doing. Lets do the beta tests like they want and not be little whiney *****es because we don't like how one minor aspect of the game looks. :D
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Oh and "Scooter", just because I've only been on the BB under this name since August doesn't mean I'm new. You don't know me so don't make assuptions. :aok
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Coolridr said:
You would think that people would be more concerned about major stuff like plane sets ,overall graphics , the realism of the planes themselves, and most of all how realistic the flight and handling characteristics of the aircraft are. All I am saying is let them get on with what they are doing. Lets do the beta tests like they want and not be little whiney *****es because we don't like how one minor aspect of the game looks. :D
Well, it looks like the testing HTC wanted is pretty much done for now. There hasn't been much traffic in the FPS thread for several days now. And HTC's orders pretty much foreclosed discussion of other bugs in the bug forum for now. That leaves us with stuff like this in here :)
I guess the importance of tracer appearance depends on your perspective. My perspective, in terms of the list of items you provided above, is as follows:
- Plane Set: IIRC, HT said we'll eventually get all the AH1 planes back, and new stuff only after that. Which means any new stuff is WAY down the road. That being the case, at present begging for new planes is pointless, or at least way less important than it was in AH1 before AH2 got into work.
- Overall Graphics: With the basic guts of the engine obviously still being in a state of flux and optimization, it's kinda useless to make any judgments on overall graphics at present. I like what I see so far, anyway, and know it will get better with time. So save this for another day as well.
- Realism of the Planes Themselves: I assume you mean how they look, as opposed to how they fly. They look good enough for me, certainly an improvement on AH1. If I have problems with the skins, I know I'll be able to do something about that myself when that feature becomes available. Thus, no real point in discussing appearance, except in general terms of things like allowing swastikas on player-made skins.
- Realism of Flight Model/Handling Characteristics: I've never flown a real WW2 plane so am in no way qualified to judge whether or not AH2 planes fly anything like their real counterparts. However, I've flown enough real planes to appreciate the improvements AH2 brings to the low end of the envelope. That's a lot more realistic IMHO, but I still haven't flown enough in real life to be an authority on this. So I leave this whole topic for those with more knowledge.
- Tracer Effects: This is something I feel qualified to discuss, because I've seen a lot of film and have shot many, and been shot at by many, real machineguns. More to the point, tracers are a rather important game element IMHO because we'll be seeing so many of them when AH2 goes live. If you see something obviously wrong every time you pull the trigger, it'll really hurt the overall impression of the rest of the game. Thus, tracers IMHO are as important to get right as aircraft skins and overall graphics. In addition, HT himself said at the Con that he wanted feedback on this subject so he could make it look more realistic. Hence, I feel it's a worthy topic to discuss :)
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Absolutely correct bullethead. Popcorn aint sht without the salt and butter. And, i am not saying I could do better myself, and i know this is in the infancy, but i feel the need to at least make my humble opinion known. The bullets on the gun cam footage or any gun cam footage that I have seen are spiraling and yes the tracers do tend to give this away, ever so subtly. The tracers I have seen in the early, unfinished, and surley to be improved upon version of AH2 are....LOOK, I AM A SPIRALING PROJECTILE!!
IN FACT I CAN DO THIS>>WHOOSHOBBLEWOOSHOBBLE.
(Bracing for a stoopit dolt japslap from the administrator).
How about an option to keep the 'classic tracers' for sake of frame rate preservation. ( I think the old tracers were perfectly fine and in fact, rarely, if ever heard any complaining of them. Such options may actually expedite the release of AH2 while the creative folks at HTC hammer out these small but important detaisl)
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Originally posted by Rutilant
So you mean the only thing we have to go no.. we can't go on.. so everything else is just guessing, but that's better than going by video footage? :confused:
Yes, absolutely! If we are certain that camera footage is inherently screwed up in its image detail, then it would clearly be a mistake to use it for visual cues.
There is a tendency in realistic flight sims to mistaknely associate "realistic" with "difficult" or "annoying".
Originally posted by Shane
the pilot will feel the guns balzing away, yes, but his body is a wonderful thing - it'll absorb the vibrations and maintain a steady view with those great mk4 eyeballs.
Agreed and well said. Like the icon issue, sometimes a simulation designed to be as physically realistic as possible ends up being less realistic overall because it ignores human factors and limitations of today's computer hardware. Even if there were spirals in real life, if the computer representation of them ends up being more obscuring and annoying than in real life with a Mk4 eyeball, then they should be toned down or dropped. IMO.
Originally posted by WhiteHawk
60fps
My first system project..complete
IC7-MAX3 Motheboard
p4 2.6 800 FSB w/HT
2x512 KB Mushkin PC3500 RAM
radeon 9800 Pro (<--ouch $$$)
WindowsXP($$$)
Jesus, you have a Max3 and a 9800 pro and you get 60fps?? Not good. :( That is exactly the system I am building, but I am overclocking to 266.
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Originally posted by mold
Jesus, you have a Max3 and a 9800 pro and you get 60fps?? Not good. :( That is exactly the system I am building, but I am overclocking to 266.
Well, you go right ahead and overclock. You may want to wait a week before you buy your CPU. Intel is slashing thier prices on the top lines to make room for the new top of the lines.
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Plane Set: IIRC, HT said we'll eventually get all the AH1 planes back, and new stuff only after that. Which means any new stuff is WAY down the road. That being the case, at present begging for new planes is pointless, or at least way less important than it was in AH1 before AH2 got into work.
HTC should build early war planes first, then with time as they get finished, add later war planes. If they take 4 years to develop, all the better.
Historical! Realistic!
Why nobody thought of this before.
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Originally posted by mold
Jesus, you have a Max3 and a 9800 pro and you get 60fps?? Not good. :( That is exactly the system I am building, but I am overclocking to 266.
It's probably his monitor refresh rate
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those short bright snaky trails in guncam films are cam vibration - and it was often not the smoke that caught your attention
tracer smoke would have had some degree of coil due to aerodynamics
not all rounds were tracer - they were mixed in with the hard stuff to give the pilot an idea of where he was shooting. The DeWilde type, which was not tracer but 'splashed' on impact for the same reasons, were typically fitted one every five rounds. I guess tracer was the same.
As experience and ability developed there was a tendency for the better shots to use less tracer for greater impact and less tell-tale - and whose gun cams films do you suppose we have been watching?
Was it 1 inch, 2 inch, 6 inch or 12 inch coils? Don't know, it would depend on the calibre. Personal impression - the AH2 effect does appear a little overdone. But then I never fired these things in RL. Wish we could have asked our guests at the UK AH Con - they would probably have known about .303s and .5s in Lancs.
Any WWII vets still available for acceptance testing?
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i wish i could post screen shots. I could show you all a picture of a panzer shooting a rediculous spring and that would be the end of the argument. These tracers are the worst ive ever seen in any slight sim, including atari tank battle
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Originally posted by Siaf__csf
HTC should build early war planes first, then with time as they get finished, add later war planes. If they take 4 years to develop, all the better.
Historical! Realistic!
Why nobody thought of this before.
Nah...there's no point in designing it that way. Better to have a wide-ranging plane set from the start, with an RPS or RPS-like mechanism so we can cycle through the whole gamut in the space of a couple weeks.
Originally posted by Rutilant
It's probably his monitor refresh rate
I sure hope so.
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ya mold..there is no need to get over 60 fps, just a need to stay over 45fps. That is the important part.
As far as the tracers go, I was watching heavy metal today on the History channel, featuring the p38. The smoke from the tracers is barely visible. I guess, if the air is warm and moist, the smoke from the flare on the bullet is not so pronounced. I would suspect, in cold dry air, or perhaps just cold air, the smoke is more visible. In any event, the key to the tracer problem is not the smoke from the tracer, but the glow of the projectile itself.
Just the right length, perhaps a little jiggle, maybe a hint of spiral (tight!) smoke. But the damage effect as the bullets ripped through the zeros is really the hook. In my opinion, HTC has very nice damage effects in AH, keeping in mind having to keep the frame rates workable for online play. I say, focus on the projectile, not on the path it travels.
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Originally posted by WhiteHawk
ya mold..there is no need to get over 60 fps, just a need to stay over 45fps.
Oh yeah, I agree. I was just worried that you were getting 60 fps unsynched with such a top-end system, just sitting on the runway; and it seemed to me that this might not bode well for the times when there are more objects on screen and the system is more taxed. But maybe sitting on the runway represents a good minimum. Yeah I know, this is a beta etc etc.
Originally posted by WhiteHawk
I say, focus on the projectile, not on the path it travels.
Yeah, I agree. Subtle is better than flashy when it comes to tracer smoke graphics.
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Originally posted by Furious
Not so. Think about the vortex created by the bullet's motion and spin.
Yes irealize that the intent here is to suggest that the smoke of the incindiary is being ejected in a helical path, but the actual result is, that we are shooting 'Oswald' bullets here.
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Originally posted by ply
I knew somewhere there was a page on this
http://www.spanishcastle.com/justplanefun/hollywood.html
I visited the website above. Those cartoons are hillarious! Who is this guy? Does he fly in AH, I wonder?