Pedantic Question about Paint Schemes
 

Howdy!
I was just re-reading Silent Running by James Calvert and a question popped into my head; does anyone know if the different paint measures used by the USN have any bearing on detectability of subs while running on the surface in the game?

I ask because there are a few paragraphs in the book that describes how when the USS Jack changed from the early war all black paint to the medium grey, it became far less visible on the surface at night. I don't know if it's in the game right now, but would it be something that could be mod'ed?

There are some different sub skins here in the mod section.

Yep, I understand that, but what I'm asking is do the different paint schemes in vanilla take into account the fact that the late war measure was less visible to the enemy. It's really not a huge deal, I'm just wonderink.

I daresay SH4 might be capable of a mod to take stuff like that into account, after all SH4, like every other program, is just running numbers and making basic yes/no decisions.

Whether it does it as standard is another matter. Actually, that would be quite a cool feature if your scheme affected visibility and ranging for the AI, that way all the flamboyant skippers could have a 'bring it on' attitude that actually made a difference!. It's certainly true that paint schemes make life hard for for us when using the stadimeter, with any lightly-coloured masts proving dificult to find the tops of, which of course is why they were painted like that, and disruptive camouflage schemes also make ranging and AOB calculations harder for human players, as was their purpose in real life.

I'm guessing that the AI has specific radius for each ship, then factors in sea state, lighting, weather and depth etc, in order to determine how close an enemy has to be to spot you. It surely couldn't be that hard to alter these, but whether the game has the mechanics to factor in having a skin choice alter these things on the fly within game is debatable.

We are getting to the point in computer games and simulations where the graphics are damn near to the appearance in real-life and whilst that is cool, it does tend to point up the fact that the AI routines are a lagging a long way behind in terms of emulating real life as well as their graphical counterparts manage to do it.