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[WxTech]

Number one: Ship wakes

Generally, the cavitation wakes ('foam' trails) behind ships in our game are given a slight continued widening until disappearing. In reality such wakes do no such thing. Because they're comprised of air bubbles, they do not continually expand in areal coverage due to the friction against the surrounding water. Rather, they essentially remain in place (outside of the initial turbulent mixing). And so real cavitation wakes maintain a basically constant width.

The .eff file responsible should therefore have the finishing size of the .tga the same as its starting size. To have this expansion occurring looks cartoonish; a constant-width wake looks far more realistic.


Number two: High clouds

Of late there has emerged an aesthetically pleasing approach to representing the high level clouds. And that's by the wide use of photos of clouds comprised of water droplets. Such clouds as stratocumulus and altocumulus look more interesting than cirriform (ice crystal) clouds due to their greater optical depth and shadowing.

But here's the problem from the science standpoint. They're necessarily placed at the same 7km altitude as the stock cirrus clouds, where ice crystals dominate and water droplet-based clouds seldom occur. (The in-place water drop clouds being cirrocumulus and aircraft contrails, and the intruders being the rising tops of towering cumulus and cumulonimbus.) This incongruity rubs this old met man the wrong way . It's so odd to see the kind of denser cloud found at 1-4km being raised to the regime of the cirrus.

Another incongruity. For those cloudy sky graphics that show much cover by optically dense cloud, the treatment of ground (and other objects) illumination as being like that for thin cirrus is a bit jarring.

I did try for a while some number of these cloud graphics, but have gone back to the more proper and correct cirrus. To this end I have begun to make 2048 pixel cirriform images (just one so far), not having found any made elsewhere.

[greybeard]

You are right! I didn't even know! In fact, the trail is straight and seems to widen only in perspective when viewed from behind.


Left: ship; right: submarine [Source: http://www.sonar-info.info/p96/96pagina.html]





I personally believe that there are more important gaps to fill (for example, the absence of propwash on aircraft), however it would also be nice to see this visual defect corrected.

[slibenli]

Number two: High clouds

Of late there has emerged an aesthetically pleasing approach to representing the high level clouds. And that's by the wide use of photos of clouds comprised of water droplets. Such clouds as stratocumulus and altocumulus look more interesting than cirriform (ice crystal) clouds due to their greater optical depth and shadowing.

But here's the problem from the science standpoint. They're necessarily placed at the same 7km altitude as the stock cirrus clouds, where ice crystals dominate and water droplet-based clouds seldom occur. (The in-place water drop clouds being cirrocumulus and aircraft contrails, and the intruders being the rising tops of towering cumulus and cumulonimbus.) This incongruity rubs this old met man the wrong way . It's so odd to see the kind of denser cloud found at 1-4km being raised to the regime of the cirrus.

Graphics Extender can also render them at different altitude

https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,63186.msg695780.html#msg695780

[jpten]

The bow and stern wakes are made by the ship traveling through the water and therefore spread out.  The turbulent wake is, as previously pointed out, is made by the propellers and are contained within the other two wakes.
  As far as cloud rendering I believe the game's original vision was fighters at medium to low altitude.

[WxTech]

Greybeard,
 If you have the effects folders extracted (or have some comprehensive mod invoice living them), you can look for the .eff files using the wake graphic, and then make the second value for size equal to the first.

Silbenli,
That's a good thing, being able to define the high cloud height. But the matter of cloud depth, or thickness, remains as before. That is, it's treated as a zero-thickness sheet, with a bit of 'fog' effect fakery to suggest passing through cloud. This works well enough for the generally sheet-like cirrus type clouds, but not for optically dense, water droplet-based cloud forms that typically have some vertical depth to them.

[WxTech]

Number three:

There are numerous buildings and objects that have accrued over the years for which shadows were not supplied. This is an easy thing to fix, if all such were extracted and rounded up as a group. The work involves basically copying the existing vertices, and would go quickly. Depending on the number of objects, a small 'task force' could be set up to spread out the work...

Number four:
Some buildings have as the lowest LOD a simple flat polygon that *rests on the ground* (the same height as the 'floor'.) This is bad, for it causes flickering at longer view distances, due to the 'conflicting' with the terrain texture upon which it sits. The solution is to raise this polygon at least a couple meters; the actual characteristic roof height is generally fine.

As for the aforementioned shadowless objects, these annoying specimens--of which I think there are fewer--should be collated for a final fixing. Another simple task, in most cases involving merely raising the (usually) Z value of 4 vertices for the farthest LOD.

[WxTech]

Number five:
Ship and vehicle smoke. I find that the best effect involves a relatively quick initial vertical rise followed by a slowing down so that the smoke trail becomes largely horizontal. A smoke column from a moving vehicle that continues to rise at about a constant rate makes for an oddly straight, fairly steeply angled trail that's kind of cartoonish. Like the way a child might represent it.

Real exhaust gases, due to turbulent intermixing, tend to cool quickly enough that their buoyancy is of small magnitude. Moreover, resistance to the convevtive rising of such small cells by the surrounding air dampens said vertical motion. And so these effluvia rise at slow rates, dissipating largely in place with respect to the air flow within which they are carried. Indeed, with a reasonable breeze and the resulting turbulence induced by the ground/water, the smoke stream often is disturbed to the point where parts can be driven toward the surface.

[WxTech]

Number six:
Ground illumination from rockets. The game uses a simple--indeed, odd--method of 'simulating' ground illumination from rocket motors. And that is to NOT treat the source as being located at the flame itself, but rather to place a light source *always* on the ground/water, directly underneath, irrespective of the putative source height. This results in two bad phenomena for a source some distance above the illuminated surface:
- The intensity of surface lighting is too strong.
- The gradient of illumination is too marked.

This suggests to notably reduce the strength of the effect. To the point, ideally, of invisibility (hopefully) during daytime while retaining some visibility at night.

I've made my own first, not yet aggressive enough stab at this, which definitely looks better. But I'd like to further refine it.

[jpten]

In regards Number Five, does the game use to same effect for non moving burning vehicles? 

[WxTech]

Smokes for burning objects in general do tend to be given a gradual upward acceleration, in order to attain some height without requiring too-long live times (or comically rapid ascent rates.). As we know, longer live times result in more particles, which can tax the old game engine in busy scenarios. It's eminently easy to have many more damage smoke sources than smoke stack smokes, and so more care in keeping damage smoke particle counts low is good practice.

Ideally, fire-sourced smoke should also become less buoyant with time/height, with the result of the smoke column becoming more horizontally oriented. As opposed to the current and common manifestation of becoming more vertically oriented. But as noted, this would require longer live times if the column is to not fade out before attaining any kind of decent height/range from the source.

[WxTech]

Number seven. Gunsight reflector plate specularity.

Gunsight reflector plates should as a general rule be given zero specularity. Why? Because the only way they can reflect light from an external source to the pilot/gunner is *through* the sight *and* the floor of the plane beneath. Notice how sun glare off such a reflector occurs only when the plane is diving vertically or inverted? In other words, when the direction to the Sun is below the belly of the plane, where the light path is coming up through the floor and the sight, so as to be reflected to you. That's so wrong. Having Sun glare from such an impossible direction is a needless impediment.

All my sights do not do this horribly incorrect thing. To that end, I make the textures for the reflector plate as a separate entity. Indeed, both the flat reflecting surface and the edge of said plate are given separate textures with their own lighting parameter values. If a stock sight has its reflector built into the texture for the rest of the sight, a new .mat file could be created, and the mesh have the relevant reflector elements separated out and assigned to this .mat.

[WxTech]

Number eight. The color of fog/haze.

Fog which appears in early morning and for the poorer weather settings is too damn blue. I'd love to see this made more neutral. For that matter, the less opaque haze is perhaps too blue as well, although not as awfully bad as that cursed fog hue.

In one of the classes I found a line which seems to define the RGBA values for fog, but no change could be effected here. I suppose it's locked in a .dll.


Number nine. Overall twilight sky transition.

The sky remains too bright throughout much of the deeper twilight times, then suddenly darkening very near the transition to night. It's not coordinated with the Ambient and Diffuse values calculated for landscape/cloud illumination. The result is odd swaps in the contrast between cloud and sky brightness, with one being too bright and then suddenly the other being too bright. Another element that seems to be tied up in a .dll.


Number ten. Sun and Moon glow when these bodies are beneath the horizon.

These glows (yellow for the Sun, cyan/blue for the Moon) remain too bright when their source is well below the horizon. Particularly for the Moon, and especially when it's just a crescent! Another inaccessible .dll thing.


Number eleven. Star visibility.

Stars seen from ground level practically upon the Sun dipping below the horizon? Right. Stars being seen at high noon from a mere 8km altitude? Right. And I'd argue the points are shown as too intense, at night as well. Another inaccessible thing squirrelled away in a .dll.