That all makes sense now mate,and thanks.Getting accurate ranges to targets with the naked eye or as you say a small rangefinder would have took nothing short of god-like abilities.

Just one last little question about this now.Lets say you got your range wrong by about 100,or 200m,how far out would that be after about 50km of tracking,would the contact still be in either visual or audible range?.Getting the ranges wrong,would naturally give you a slightly incorrect course angle,and after 50km or more even a 1 or 2 degrees shift could be quite substantial.But probably not that much,he should still be in sound range,at least.

In SH3 the visibility is just 16-18000 metres when using the 16 k environment mod (And only <9000 metres without it), so you must consider the 50 km figure that OLC said more as a real life matter than something usable in the game.

If you plot the target using the IWO and make an average after say, 6-10 estimates, you should have a fair degree of accurancy and be able to do a good end around at full speed plotting a paralell course in the limit of visibility, i.e. a course parallel at 15000 metres to the target/convoy (in good visibility), so you never lose the sight of the tips of the masts, or at least the smoke plumes.

16-18000 metres? and,the stock game vis. limit is on a clear day about 8-9000m.That is about double,is that correct then?,that is bloody far :o
Would someone be able to see that far with the naked eye?

You can see the moon, right? ;)

In very clear weather the limiting factor on visibility is how high up you are vs how high the ship mast / smoke column is (because of the curvature of the earth). On the ocean, with your eyes just 5m above the surface of the water, the horizon is 8km away (which means that - on paper - you can see things that are 5m tall up to 16km away, and things taller than 5m can be seen further than that).

And of course your crew are not really spotting "with the naked eye" - they have binocs.

I guess that makes sense.
Strange the developers never considered all these technicalities in their stock game,I would have thought the visibility of distant objects to have been an important aspect in the tactical nature of the game.The same goes with the sometimes awful observation skills of the watch crew,who sometimes miss objects clearly coming into view on the horizon line,and you really don't want that if its a warship steaming towards you.

Thanks for that.

No problem. And I'm sure they did consider it. Extending the environment to 16km takes quite a toll on the performance of a typical 2005 gaming machine. Also, in SH3 the world is flat (a little shortcut the developers took). With an 8km atmosphere, and your eye at 5m above sea level, you can get away with a flat ocean... but extend the visibility further out and it becomes quite obvious that the world is not curved like it should be. Let's hope they address the problem in SH5 (and the dodgy crew ship-spotting as well).

Well I would guess they did, but back then in 2005 they probably thought it would put a too high stress on computers and make the game unplayable for those on low spec systems. :hmmm:

EDIT:

OLC and me cross posted, but we said the same :up: !!

Thanks for that both of you.

I can see now why the viewing distances were brought nearer (maybe),a consideration for those on lower end systems.Having said that though,do you think it would be that much of a performance hit having the distance extended to 16000m or so?,after all you can lower most settings on your graphics card,like full screen AA,or Anis.Filt,and other eye candy effects,that could alleviate performance problems.

I myself use 1x AA,8x Anis.Filt (important for distant objects in games),Catalyst AI,geometry instancing (renders objects of the same type much quicker),and Trilinear Filtering (giving 3 draw buffers as opposed to just 2 as in bilinear).With the above settings my game runs very smooth,and when I got the most current version of Direct X9c the game improved even more.

I think the only minor performance issues I have noticed is during rough seas,as at a certain compass point when looking from the c.tower the fps drop slightly.Seems to be just during storms/high waves.And this problem has already been observed by many people in here I think.

Well,thanks again,and I think that concludes all my questions and queries :yep:

Even if they kept the world flat for simple motion dynamics or navigation sake, they could still have made a convincing approximation by rendering the horizon and ships lower with increasing distance. Heck, even Sh1 did that, and that was on puny little 386/486 cpus with barely over 1MB ram. It would have made a world of difference.

@Paul
If you are into realism you should really try one of the supermods (e.g. GWX) if you haven't already.

@Pisces
The SH3 engine does allow for the water to be curved (up or down) to a sphere of any radius, using EarthRadius (make it negative to make the water curve down like it's supposed to) but that's no use on its own because the ships all float on a perfectly flat plane. Maybe it was a planned/unfinished feature?

Oh cool, I didn't know that. It's not as bad as I thought then. Oh well, still no points for unfinnished business. (Which reminds me of something I neglected to do. :oops: )

OLC

I will be planning on installing GWX and other realism mods just as soon as I finish my current campaign.I've come too far already to cancel my current campaign for the other mods out there.For the time being though,and I know its only a small adjustment,I am enjoying the commander add on,as there are some interesting tweaks inside that alone.

Cheers.

On a very clear day, you can see the superstructure of another ship above the horizon with binoculars at 15 NM or ~28km. That being said, how much you can see all depends on your height of eye above the surface. I can't imagine a Type VII could have been much more than 5m or so. That would give you a distance to the sea horizon of 8km. Anything further than that would start to dip below the horizon.