Really? Then what was the actual file? Was the file skycolorsatl.dat, for example?

If not, then the visibility mod wouldn't affect your ambient light. If it does, then if you can provide the variable you edited I can test it.

I did alter skycolorsatl.dat very significantly (the night reflection colours have been very much darkened), but I just don't remember what caused the ambient light to change. All I recall is that it did change, and that I had to counteract for the sub being less visible. Anyway, there is an ambient light value in EnvColors_***.dat, so it can presumably change via that. However, a quick look just told me that, in RUb, this value appears to be unchanged from the standard file.

One thing I know I changed (looking back at my notes) was the Shipwakeabovewater colour in EnvColors_***.dat.

Thanks for the info.

When you say you had to "counteract for the sub being less visible", what do you mean exactly?

That's the problem. I don't remember. I remember seeing that the sub appeared darker, and I remember that I tried to do something about it. I don't remember anything else and it's not in my notes.

Oh, just a sec. Looking at my notes again, it does say 'halve ambient light at night'. I'm not sure if that was done, or if it was something I tried to do to tone down the wake brightness.

Anyway, differences to look for are, in EnvColors_***.dat:

Shipwakeabovewater
AmbientLightcolour

Both of these would be the 'full night' values only.

In SkyColors_***.dat, I unpacked the image files and in the 'reflection' file I used Photoshop to darken the full night image by somewhere between 50 and 80%.

Right... well the ambient light is ok for me at the moment, so I'll not mess with it. It shouldn't affect the crew ai sensing range though should it? That's what we're interested in primarily.

It won't affect the AI at all, but it will affect our ability to see a lot. The idea with the AI is to get it to just about compare with a human's ability, but if a human's ability varies wildly depending on what ENV colours files we're using, it's going to be impossible to get the AI to match. That's basically my point.

test results
 

OK:

To test out the visual sensing range of the AI with the visibility mod enabled precisely, I set up some custom missions set at different times of day and with varying weather conditions.

First, I wanted to test out Gammel's tweaks to sensors.cfg that he lists earlier in this thread. Albeit with one change of my own - I left the fog factor to 1 rather than 0.5. The setting of 0.5 made them see maybe 10% further, but also allows your crew to spot ships through fog, which is silly.

In the first missions, I set up a Coastal Merchant, 21km away from the Uboot, angle of bow 180, stationary. I then just accelerated towards it and noted the time the crew spotted it, as well as noting when I could actually see it. Several tests I re-ran to get a battery of figures. Results:

<u>Gammels Settings</u>
Daytime (12pm), No Fog.
Ship spotted at:
11,100 m
11,200 m

Visually, I could start just about seeing this at about 15km. Nevertheless, this is an ok figure.

Nightime (12am), No Fog.
Ship spotted at:
5,200 m
8,900 m
9,500 m
4,600 m

Sort of realistic, but quite random. I could visually see the ship at night at about 11km.

Night, Light Fog.
Ship spotted at:
1,600 m
-1,500 m
2,500

The minus sign on the second figure means that it was only after I'd past the merchant and it was 1500m behind me that the crew spotted it. Visually, I could see ships from 3-4000m. Very random, and not at all realistic.

Day, Heavy Fog.
Ship spotted at:
200m

Since you can see the ship easily at 600m, this is really nerfed.

Night, Heavy Fog.
Ship spotted at:
N/A

Ship wasn't spotted at all, despite being clearly visible at 300m.

Conclusion:
Gammels values that he posted in this thread are clearly unusable. Time to test with the RuB defaults.

<u>RuB Defaults.</u>
Daytime, No Fog.
Ship spotted:
11,300 m
11,300 m (512x)
11,300 m (1024x)

This is more like it - and a surprise. As in earlier posts Jungman stated that with the visibility mod enabled his crew were spotting up to 19,200m during the day, straight away. Odd. And in fact, this was the case in my career save I had going before I ran these tests. I even restarted the computer, to check no values were lying in memory - and got the same results. I also checked with various time compression options, from 256x to 1024x, and got the same each time.

Night, No Fog.
9,400 m
9,500 m
9,800 m
9,400 m
7,000 m
10,400 m

Well, that's interesting. The values are generally realistic, the crew spotted the ships when I could. It seems at night the SH3 detection algorithm is to make detection chancier - as was probably the case in reality. Regardless, these figures seemed acceptable to me - a straight 10% reduction at a minimum, and not the 19km vampire vision reported by Jungman! Again, my career had different results - vampire vision with no garlic in sight - and I began to get suspicious.

Day, Light Fog.
Ship spotted:
8,800 m
8,800 m
9,600 m
9,500 m
9,100 m
9,400 m

This seemed perfectly reasonable. After 11k, the ship becomes almost impossible to see. Remember we're seeing a coastal merchant with her ass turned to us.

Night, Light Fog.
Ship spotted:
7,800 m (256x)
4,300 m (1024x)
6,300 m (1024x)
5,700 m (256x)

Not much to say here: other than the light reduction means a chancier detection rate and a 10-15% reduction in sight.

Day, Heavy Fog.
Ship spotted:
600m (256x)
600m (1024x)

All is correct here, as it should be - these fog distances aren't changed from normal.

Night, Heavy Fog.
Ship spotted:
N/A

Ship was not spotted at all. I hear this is common behaviour, though.

Well, these values seemed reasonable to me, if a little on the high side for night. But then, I haven't read any primary data on how far uboot crews could spot a ship at night.

All I know is that SH3 does an incredibly crap job at simulating the sea and sky at night, making the sky appear far darker than it was in reality and the sea far brighter, while the moon casts *no* light, which is a really stupid mistake. And with Ail's clouds (and I believe, with the stock ones), the clouds appear grey at night, even with no moon! Which is absurd unless you're a big city dweller and don't know what a real night looks like. ;) Thus players may have the impression that detecting ships at night was harder than it was in reality.

Most interesting was that these values were at variance with Jungman's reports and my own experience in the career after enabling the visibility mod. This leads me to the conclusion that the campaign saves the sensor data in some sort of way, freaking out when you edit them and reload the career save, whether you save in port or not. I haven't started a new campaign to test this conclusively though, not yet.

Anyway, I decided to re-run the tests but with a Revenge Class BB at an AOB of 90 (side on) to replace the coastal merchant.

<u>Battleship, RuB Sensor Settings</u>
Day, No Fog.
Ship spotted:
19,700m

Aha! So the spotting is heavily influenced by AOB and ship size, which is good. What's not good is that I couldn't see the BB at all until 16,400m. Not even smoke, though it was stationary I guess.

Night, No Fog.
Ship spotted:
15,300m
17,500m

Visually I could only spot the BB at 15,300. Whether these values are realistic or not I have no idea. A Revenge class is a pretty big silhoutte. Certainly, again, they're somewhat reduced from daytime values.

Day, Light Fog.
Not tested, because of user error! Presumably would be 12,500m, which is the max distance with light fog.

Night, Light Fog.
6,000m

I could spot this visually at about 9,000m.

So, conclusions:

1) The RuB sensors seem to work in single missions at least, perfectly reasonably in gameplay terms. Except in one respect - with no fog, a ship can be spotted before a player can see anything. I suggest that the ABSOLUTE maximum view the AI's see to be set to around 16,500. Currently this seems to be set to 20km. This is in sensors.dat, I believe. Can Jungman confirm? I'd like to change the appropriate value and would appreciate info.

2) My thesis that the new values only work when you start a new career needs to be tested, nevertheless I have a feeling this is what was causing Jungman's vampire vision results.

3) Further tests need to be made in regard to changing the light factor value in sensors.cfg and seeing if this results in more realistic spottings at night. This I will do maybe tonight but more likely in a couple of days; I'm in the throes of moving house and am very busy.

4) The night sky is completely at odds with reality and badly needs to be fixed. See my other thread.

BTW, As a postscript to Beery's earlier post:

Since you changed the AmbientLight value in EnvColours_xxx.dat's, this means that your ambient light change in Rub remains unaffected by the the Visibilty Mod, which only changes the skycolors_xxx.dat files. As mentioned, I fixed the glowing water by reimporting the RuB sky reflections into the .dat's. So now it should be just RuB but with 19km view distance.

I've tested the scene.dat changes in my version of the game (RUB 1.43), and I don't see anything wrong with that except the spotting distance - as has been established here, the AI spots much farther out than we can see, and it screws up the other sensors.

Can someone explain to me exactly what changes the following files make:

Sensors.cfg.
The three Skycolors files.
Cameras.dat.
Sensors.dat.

Because I don't really see what their use is.
Plus, is there no way of getting rid of the horizon fog other than by changing the Earth radius (it looks like that's what was changed in the scene.dat file)? It seems kind of drastic to me.

Hi;

Sensors.cfg contains the values for the algorithms SH3 uses for your crews sensing abilities.

The 3 skycolors files, as you probably know already, contain sky and water reflection textures, and I believe some sort of cloud mapping information - when I tried to use the stock RuB skycolor files with the vismod, the clouds disappeared.

Cameras.dat isn't visibility mod related.

Sensors.dat contains lots of info but most relevant is that I believe (according to Jungman anyway) it contains the maximum distance your crew can spot to. In RuB, this seems to be set to 20km. It also contains some info on maximum height planes can be spotted which is interesting, but by the way.

The main tweaks in order to make this mod good to go are:

1) Change sensors.dat to make the maximum crew spotting range 16km. The game doesn't render anything beyond that distance.

2) Alter the sensors.cfg values to make the lightfactor slightly more important.

Would have a go at doing these, but I'm moving house at the moment, its all a bit of a mess...

more
 

I did a couple more tests.

As before, BB Revenge class, 20km away, broadside.

This time I decided to tweak the light factor value in sensors.cfg. This should affect how lack of light affects the crews spotting ability. Note that I, the player, could only see the ship visually at about 14km, its too dark. Further, the game doesn't render anything beyond 16.5km...

Night, No Fog, Light factor 0.8 (default)
Ship spotted:
17,200m
17,900m
15,000m
12,200m
13,500m

Night, No Fog, Light factor 1
Ship spotted:
12,700m
13,600m
19,600m
19,700m
14,600m
19,500m (!)
15,100 (1024x)
12,800 (1024x)

Night, No Fog, Light factor 0.5
Ship spotted:
19,000m
14,500m
16,000m
15,200m
18,700m (1024x)

Conclusions:

Seems to be a high degree of randomness at night spotting. Setting the light factor to 1 seemed to give a good result at first, but then I got sightings at 19,700. Odd. Setting at 0.5 results in the ship being spotted earlier, no doubt of that. Time compression also seems to be a factor in spotting; in marginal situations, having the time compression at 1024x decreases the range at which your crew will spot, generally speaking.

So I need to do more tests. However I'm a bit lost in scene.dat and sensor.dat editing, I have a hex editor but am unfamiliar with the procedure.

Dunno if it has been mentioned here (Sorry, no time to read the whole 16 pages of this thread backwards :P , so ignore if already mentioned), but 16000metres max rendering distance is 100% correct for a U-Boot. Explanation: The conning tower lies so low on the water that earth's curvature will not allow you to see behind that any ship or his masts, even the tallest ones. BUT what the U-Boot crews did see in WW2 at nearly 25-30.000 metres was in fact the smoke plumes of the convoys, floating in the air some 40-50 metres (or even more-depends on the wind) above the convoy. So as long as you can have the ships be rendered till 16000 metres and the crew detect smoke till 30000 metres (Both in optimal visibility conditions) you are historically correct :up:

Yeah, but I don't think the game renders the smoke either. In any case having a crew occasionally see out beyond 16km at night is just impossible.

I´ve made a combination of Beery´s new water and Manuels mod.
Here´s the readme:
http://rapidshare.de/files/4635080/V...tible.rar.html

Hi, I have tried to make my terrain mod compatible with the visibility mod.

http://rapidshare.de/files/4647122/T..._v2_1.rar.html

I allso made the snow more white, after suggestions from kpt. Lehman.

Will someone test to see if there still are problems with this mod and the visibility mod?

This is the correction I made in terrain.cfg:
TexTilesPerKM=3 (was 6 before)

I think it's a shame if people start to use my mod without the terrain.cfg, because I allso made some corrections to the transparency of the textures so they blend better together.

/Kriller