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Unfortunately, the people who are/were the driving force behind the AI visual detection ranges aren't around that much anymore on the RFB forums. I'll see, though, if things can be tweaked for a future update.
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Luke I have the feeling that the visual sensors were tested and calibrated BEFORE adding some environmental stuff. In the current RFB environment, it is true that seeing rendered on screen a ship that is at long to extreme ranges and your crew has detected, is simply impossible. Yet the detection ranges for the crew seemed reasonable, so I have digged a bit into the scene.dat and have found some weird things.
If you look into the good visibility horizon fog parameter:
scene.dat----->13.EnvSim----->14.EnvSim----->FogDistances----->[0]---->ObjetcsrelativeZmax
you will see that it is set as "0.8", meaning that the fog appears at 80% of the maximum visible range. This is just 16.000 metres (!), meaning that in the last 4000 metres available you won't actually see anything rendered on screen, just horizon fog.
Then, you can see that in the other weather parameters (1 to 3) for denser fog, there are some numbers that are difficult to consider "correct"
The value for light fog (1) is 0.04 (800 metres!!!) // SH stock value ---> 0.5 (10000 metres)
The value for medium fog (2) is 0.01 (200 metres) // SH stock value ---> 0,25 (5000 metres)
The value for heavy fog (3) is also 0.01 (200 metres) // SH stock value ---> 0,05 (400 metres)
I know that SH4 scene.dat worked slightly different than SH3 because now we have volumetric (3D) fog, and I suspect that these very reduced values were set by W_clear to account for that 3D fog. But they might have a perverse effect in the crew lookouts vs. screen rendering proportions. Specially the last two values should not be the same, and
definitively, the light fog value is utterly wrong. This causes that as soon as light fog is present, ships will be almost invisible to the player.
As a provisional measure, and pending an in-depth testing of this all, I would recommend reverting to following values in scene.dat:
[0] No fog --->ObjetcsrelativeZmax=0,95 (Fog starts at 19.000 metres)
[1] Light fog --->ObjetcsrelativeZmax=0,5 (Fog starts at 10.000 metres)
[2] Medium fog --->ObjetcsrelativeZmax=0,25 (Fog starts at 5.000 metres)
[3] Heavy fog --->ObjetcsrelativeZmax=0,05 (Fog starts at 400 metres)
And I have already made those changes in this file here (Luke I hope you don't mind I didn't consult you previously):
It would be very important that all RFB users who experience this problem download it, and provide feedback about situations in which their crew has spotted enemy ships and yet they were not visible rendered on screen.
The report should include:
-Day and hour
-Location (General area will suffice, f.e. Philipines Sea, Palaus, Japan Coast, Kuriles...)
-Fog amount (Use the report weather button)
-Wether you are using volumetric fog (NOT recommended by now) or not
With some feedback on this and a bit of testing I think that we should be able to solve the problem of not seeing what our crew sees. Tweaking the opposite problem (Us seeing something the crew has not noticed) is however much more difficult, because certain sensor stock bugs have a role here (Read more about it in the RFB manual if you are interested)
Thanks all
