16km visibility
 

Just installed the 16km mod, and loving it, as I can now see much further. The only "problem" I have now, is that my crew have what i like to call " super-binocular vision". As when I get a "ship spotted" call, I look in the direction that the ship was spotted, and see nothing, that is unitl the ship get within about 12km, when I see just a faint dot on the horizon.


Looks like i'll have to invest in a magnifying glass for my monitor, or get a bigger monitor.

My card is broken 7800 GS i use now my old 420 MX so i don't see water or horizon, i have to wait until i got my new card back.
I was wondering what mod sould i use SHIII combined_scene_atmos, ore OLC_environment_final ??????

I cant live without 16km visability. Sometimes on very clear days with perfect seas, I can be spotted at about 12km, while running flank speed. It's great to have the almost "mast on the horizon" appeal to 16km vis.
I have the regular 19in monitor and I can barely make out the ship on the horizon, which gives me more time to gather information and perform a sort of Target Motion analysis on the ship. Also, I have a geforce6800Ultra graphics card, so I'm not sure if any improvements to sighting a ship will increase with a better card. My system runs great except with a slight, almost unnoticable decrease in frame rate while near ports.
Have fun with 16km vis., I believe that it will save you some trouble many times.

Yes, the crew spots them so far away that you can't even lock onto them for identification. On the other hand, if I can't tell what they are at that distance, why should my Weapons Officer? I like it that way. It feels more real, and it gives me plenty of time to make decisions.

Never used the 16km mod, are there any FPS related drawbacks using it?

Nemo

Only if your computer is memory-challenged, like mine. I think it's so much better that I use it anyway.

Still looking forward to that upgrade, though.

16K mod is great.

Thanks Sailor Steve, I think my computer might fall into the same category as yours memory wise. I have 1 GB of memory and not the best graphics card, an ATI Radeon x300se with 128MB, which I understand has 32MB built in but grabs the rest from system memory. Having said that it runs SH3 with GWX without any major issues to speak of.

Nemo

At periscope depth I have the opposite problem: I can ID a ship and get its general AOB long before the AI will spot it.

The major difference between the 8 and 16km kods is the radius of the rendering area in the SH3 world.

The 8km mod renders everything for a range of 8km around you and the 16km renders for.......hang on I'll get back to you :lol:

The memory 'hit' usually comes into play when there are an increased number of objects being scripted at the same time in your 'world' http://www.psionguild.org/forums/ima...s/thumbsup.gif

That makes sense. I might give it a try when I get back to port and see how I get on.

Nemo

Have you tried increasing you periscope and/or binocular zoom to 10x?

Bob Chase, ETC

As far more objects have to be rendered in a doubled radius around you, this should also have a significant impact on the workload of your graphics card.

It depends on how the rendering algorithm works. If it just renders every object in a 16km radius then this mod can have a significant impact on the peformance.

Ships can't always be seen in 16km distance (due to bad weather for example), and a clever rendering algorithm should exploit this by not rendering everything in 16km distance but everything in range of sight, which is now increased to a maximum of 16km, but doesn't have to be that large all the time.

Also, what could have an effect, is that for example a convoy within rendering range should be much more difficult to calculate than one somewhere else.
A convoy near your position has to keep track of every single ship, so that the escorts will stay at their position and so on.
If a convoy is still more than 16km away from you, the game justs needs to see it as an abstracts number of some certain ships with a certain speed and destination.
So a 16km rendering range should also have a noticable impact on CPU workload, too.

EDIT: You should also note that the 16km range should not be a big problem on the open ocean. If your machine is able to render a whole convoy within 8km range, then it will do so within 16km range, too. Just that the heavy work for your computer begins 8km's ealier ;).
But near land, especially in a harbour, there should be much more ships within a 16km radius than within a 8km one.
That's why I didn't use the mod yet. My computer already has its poblems with harbours even with the 'Light Harbour Traffic' mod enabled.

Good Luck mate http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/9...humbsuprw5.gif