Just have to find a nice balance - Mind you, does the game take the crew experience into account?

Lanzfeld is right, though; very important indeed....

Please upload for us hex-challenged when you are done tweeking. :up:

Does this also effect the distance that aircraft are first spotted??? :hmm:

Well, as I said though - unless someone can find a way to shift the 'light' fog setting away from its' current 5km limit, the fix will only have any real effect on Fog:None. And that's probably 1 day out of a 100 in a 'real' campaign, if that...

If you'd like to check it out for yourself - that should be it:

http://rapidshare.de/files/3185013/Sensors.dat.html
(goes to data/Library)

I also included Jungman's fix for the radar elevation, though I haven't really tested that very much yet.

I am in a career now and it has been "fog=none" for over two weeks.

I really think it relates to time of year.

Wow, sounds interesting!

:up:

Don't know what you've done to the sensors.dat file, but
for sure it was a good thing!! After changing the file and loaded my career the unbelievable happend:
I spottet the smoke from a DD at range that must be over 10000 meters with my own eyes!
a minute later i asked the watch officer for range and he
reportet 9600 meters!! (I was closing to the target with a speed of 13 knots).


the closest sightings i had before with the stock sensors file where around 8000 meters. For sure there's no graphic engine limit at that range. I swear i saw the smoke! :yep:

Conditions where: no fog, calm seas, late afternoon mid-november 1939 near the english east coast.



(I managed to sunk the DD with a manual aimed salvo. It was the first warship ever i sunk in my career, but thats another story)


Please excuse my horrible english. Many thanks to all modders for their outstanding work and their huge effort of their personal time!.

Do I have to ask my WO if he sees any targets (if one is, say, 12000 meters?) or will he give me a "Ship Spotted!" callout with this modded sensors file?

havent testet so far, i was on 1x time compression and was faster at
spotting than my wo.
i asked him after i spottet the target with my eyes to check the exact range

If this is polished up I'll add it as a recommends: for ImprovedConvoys.

:up:

I would like to see both this mod and IC added to RUB (1.43 maybe???) :up:

T'anks CC and Jungman... :up:

Cordialement, Duke of Earl

Do you think if a bunch of us camp outside the devs office for a week in tents and protest they will release a patch to change the maximum visibility distance?

*daydreams*

I sent this to Beery to look at already. I think he'll agree that this is a good idea in general - the only question I have for everyone is:

Did you observe it doing anything funny to watch calls in fog?
(I haven't personally, and if that's so - then I think it's good to go, and the only "polishing" that remains is seeing if there's anything else Jungman or someone else may want to do to the sensors. I'm happy with these, myself.)

Yes, I'd just be looking for verification that there aren't any unintended consequences, like HDM and the conning tower blowing off, for example.

:up:

Well, that just needs a few days of gameplay to make sure. I'm more worried about my recent work to RUb's damage model having that kind of an effect, personally :roll:

Fog values for game engine (visually speaking, not for AI) are in scene.dat file, at least in part.
Changing those values could increase or decrease max visual range. For example:

Smoke in horizon. This is from a ship at about 8.4 km with default game values:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/fog01.jpg

Moving the fog start a little more far away we could see this, the same smoke but visible at 10 km:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/nofog01.jpg


A comparison of two Gibraltar images from the same place in a clear day:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/nofog02.jpg

Gibraltar in a day with medium fog:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/fog02.jpg

But it seems that game engine only draws as far as 10 km (clip distance). We can't see any object further, even removing all fog. I haven't found clip distances in any file yet, but changing them could be a good step in increasing the visual distance.

There is a small problem with the dynamic ocean. It only covers about 1000 meters from player's eye. From there to horizon, there is a flat pseudo-ocean that fades with the fog. I can make the dynamic ocean grid bigger easily, but it is practically at the same height that the pseudo-ocean, less than 1 meter of separation. This makes Z-fighting polygons, as we see here:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/renderengine02.jpg

It could be fixed by lowering that plane a little.
I supose that the main reason of making a too short viewing distance was to maintain a minimum fps. I know this because making the dynamic ocean grid four times bigger eats about 20% of the fps. Surely the dev team had the same problem and that is why they limited the range.

This is how world is rendered in the game:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/renderengine01.jpg

A draw to explain it:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/renderengine03.jpg

I hope this would be useful. I don't know about the AI part, only researched how increase the player sight.
I will put the hex addresses that I found, if interested.

@Manuel.. count me in, I'm interested... ;)

Cordialement, Duke of Earl

Thank you! I'll check out Scene.dat.

In general though, we can live with 10km visual ability, provided our WO can see a bit further. Now if we could also shift the light fog back a little bit, say, to near those 10km, that would be a good enough solution for me. That way we could realistically take advantage of better visibility on most clear days, excellent WO visibility on fog-less days, and the same good old unforgiving visibility in storms :)

I'll give it a go tonight.

:up:

The fog distances are here:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/hex_fog.jpg
I don't know exactly which type of data is it, but it seems to be two 32 bit values.

And the dynamic ocean size here:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/hex_scale.jpg