Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[WxTech]

Not that anyone here these days ever uses arcade mode.    But in the interest of helping beginners who might make use of this game option...

As you know, in the [game] section of conf.ini is the entry

  Arcade=0

When set to 1 this enables three visual aids:
- For bullet hits against other than aircraft, a glowing blob is drawn at the hit point.
- For hits against aircraft, a bunch of arrows are drawn passing through the craft to indicate the direction of travel of shrapnel particles generated by an explosive round.
- For certain aircraft events like a gunner being hit, a fire commencing, bailing out or the decision to RTB, a 'thought bubble' with the appropriate phrase appears just above the plane for a short while.

I've just begun exploring this because the crucial Explosions.class invokes two of these features; hit blobs and 'thought bubbles.'

-----
The hit blobs are generated by method generateShot(), and in the stock implementation are kept active for 30(!) seconds. Because I've increased the live times for most bullets by a factor of 2-3 (only some cannon shells required to increase their live time), the chance of hits against the surface and objects is increased at lower altitudes. This can result in quite a lot of these glowing blobs being scattered all over the landscape if the visibility distance of the texture is on the larger side (10km seems to be the stock value.) And this can impact frame rates.

My inclination is to stop the drawing of these glowing blobs entirely. Who needs to see where their shot has impacted after the event? Least of all for 30(!) seconds. As an alternative I could shorten the live time of these blobs considerably, to, say, 3 seconds. And to make the texture smaller and/or less opaque and/or of a different form.

-----

The thought bubbles were made fully opaque, and they were drawn so as to hide part or much of the plane, impairing the ability to see in order to aim for subsequent fire. I've made them partially transparent, as well as continuing to shrink beyond the former 100m limit out to the new limit of 500m. These measures make these 'thought bubbles' FAR less obstructive.

[WxTech]

What I would like to do is to possibly stop the drawing of the forest of arrows which make a plane look like a porcupine when splattered with cannon shells.   

I find these arrows to be of limited usefulness during play, being only more useful if pausing to assess the pattern of hits. From any kind of distance the whole thing looks like a jumbled mess.

[WxTech]

Here we have two of the 'thought bubbles' displaying simultaneously. There are five in all ("PK", "Gunner down", "I'm on fire", "Bailin' out" and "RTB"), and it's possible that all could be shown together, overlapping. And so I've displaced the text for each so as to have some chance of reading each when shown simultaneously, like this.

The more are drawn on top of each other, the higher the total opacity and the fainter the text of those 'underneath'. But this approach is much better than the old scheme, where the bubbles being fully opaque resulted in a rapid flickering between the two (or more) being drawn at the same time.

[Orge Schwab]

If the arrows could be truncated to show just an entry and exit 'hole' - with appropriate decal, perhaps - it would be more realistic and might actually be useful as a default option in 'non-arcade'. At the moment we have somewhat approximate damage effects (in the non-arcade game), which, as I understand it, are a made-up skin artefact and do not really correspond to the true trace lines of individual rounds. It's ironic that 'arcade' traces rounds exactly and translates that into arrow graphics, but the default game does not use the information to create more realistic bullet hole decals. Don't know if it's feasible to do something like this, but I put it out there...

[WxTech]

Great idea! But a potential complication is introduced by this. The underlying collision boxes are what are considered for the purposes of determining if a hit has been sustained. It would require some math, I should think, to get a corresponding position on the mesh/skin. For both of the first hit and for the subsequent fragments flying from the burst and tracked by the arrows.

After splattering a group of planes so that several are showing these forests of 'porcupine quills' at a time, the frame rate impact is pretty bad. These arrows are drawn so as to be seen over a considerable distance, at least 6km. I would like to greatly reduce this draw distance to no more than a couple hundred meters.

Anyone know what resources are involved in the drawing of these arrows? I did a quick search after running a dump, but this hasn't revealed anything obvious, and a look through the classes I can think of has not turned up anything suggestive yet...

[genXgamer]

Great idea Mr. Schwab
 
I would imagine pretty hard (under statement) to implement.