Interesting discovery

[flakbait]

Well, two of 'em actually.

First and foremost, turning transitions off resulted in a slight FR jump of about 5, but enabling bump-mapping resulted in a much larger FR jump. The difference was 10FPS on my 128mb Radeon 9200 card: 27 without it vs ~37 with it on average. Granted, my FR down low was still running in the mid 20's, but above 2,500 ft it really smoothed out by activating bump-mapping. I'm running Dx9b with the Cat 4.3 drivers on this card.

The second one has a lot more implications for those on low-end systems. Displayed Object Size currently covers all of the ground stuff: trees, farm houses, blown-out barns, field objects, strat locations, everything. Unfortunately, cutting this down to the far right has the side effect of making you practically blind to attacking ground targets until roughly 1,500 yards. It's a Catch 22: You can't bomb anything unless you can get a visual on your target, and you can't get a visual and a half-way friendly FR by chopping this setting down to nil.

I'd like to see Displayed Object Size changed to a pair of sliders: Terrain Density and Target Detail Range. That way you could slice the former down to get a friendly frame rate, but keep the latter turned up somewhat in order to get a tally on target. It would be a huge help, as moving the Displayed Object Size slider from the mid-point to the far right current gives a very nice FR boost. Most of that boost comes from cutting down on the terrain details.





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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High

[Orig]

Unfortunately having 2 sliders might make it difficult to use the terrain to hide behind.  Move the terrain slider to nil and the object slider to full, and you'd see everyone who thinks they're hiding behind trees, barns, whatever.  Depending on how the world is implemented by HTC, tying the terrain and object sliders together may be critical for gameplay since AH2 has more realistic terrain to play/hide in.

My uneducated guess is that most players would rather have realistic terrain and objects to hide behind than the ability to selectively thin out the terrain and terrain objects like trees, shrubbery, barns, etc.  Gotta keep the visual effects pretty much equal for all players otherwise there's little point in having all that detail around in the virtual world.  You'd just end up with people turning the details down to nil to gain advantages if the detail sliders were decoupled from the view_player range settings.

But I don't KNOW so I'm wildly speculating here.

[flakbait]

I haven't played AH2 online, so I don't know how GV's are currently displayed. If it's anything like the current version of AH, I can see where you might be concerned. Those dots can be seen from a looooong ways off! Add to the fact that anyone can clip the visual range of terrain details, and I will definitely agree with you: it'd be hell for the GV drivers. Everyone in the air could see 'em, regardless of where they were or what they were hiding behind on their FE.

The main reason I ask is that there's already something like your probable scenario in the game. Above 2,500 feet AGL the terrain cover vanishes, exposing any GV that's running around. Only when you dive below that altitude can you find out if he's hiding in a barn or in a house. Unfortunately, that's also the problem. I can agree with cutting the trees/shrubs out above a given alt to save FR, but it creates the problem of letting a player see the GV even if the GV is hiding in a bombed-out barn. By separating the two sliders you wouldn't be giving up any more of an advantage to the pilot. As it stands he can probably climb to 2,500ft AGL and see the GV anyway. The trouble arises when you ask everyone to set the Object Size slider to the same setting. Not every system can handle that much ground clutter, plus tracers, plus GVs, plus everything else we see.

That's the primary reason I asked HT to separate the Object Size slider into a pair of sliders. An advantage already exists in that a pilot can climb until the clutter cuts out to spot a GV. So asking for the ability to trim the cover back isn't a major problem. Now I'm not saying I'd like to eliminate it, just have the ability to set strat/field buildings and terrain cover density separately. Basically the same thing we have now in the Object Size slider as far as what it does, only split into two sliders. That way I can get a nice FR, still see plenty of ground cover, and ident strat/field buildings from further than 1,500 yards out. GVs wouldn't lose much of an advantage, if any, because the pilot would still see the same cover in the same place the tank driver does. But it would make flying down low, on a slow system, less like a slider-show. Plus you could actually dive bomb a strat target from higher than 3k.



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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High

[Orig]

I think the point is that the objects (players) should (or will) vanish at the same time as the clutter so they are NEVER unmasked by decluttering, range/altitude culling, or altering video settings.