is the ability to see planes realisticly represented in game?
 

movies are just that, movies, but in the game the planes are damn near invisible until within 500 yards and I think this is unrealistic.

sure the paint schemes are designed to make them harder to see but I think its way way too hard to see them to the point of being unrealistic.

never mind your opinions on weather you should be staying on the surface and looking for planes or not, but stick to the question at hand. I don't think the planes blended in any where near as well as they do in the game.

I have seen in person many ww2 planes with the correct paint schemes flying around at air shows and they are not very hard to spot at all even at a good distance.

im thinking the color schemes might need to be tweaked to darken them for more contrast against the sky colors or maybe its a question of the distance rendering of the planes but they seam to be invisible even when you know exactly what direction they are coming from and then they just suddenly pop out into thin air when they are right on top of you.

im not looking for unrealistic neon flashing lights on them, I just want to be able to see a plane at distance the same way it is in real life

opinions and or files to mod suggestions to correct this issue please?

I think there's a problem with how largely things are rendered, and how far away. It's possible this is hard-coded to accomodate the GPUs of yesteryear. Capn_Scurvy has ben doing some work on visibility for his Day of Infamy mod, and I suspect he will have a more technical answer.

No, not me! :doh:

I'm at a loss to tell you anything about the planes distant rendering. I'm guessing it would have to do with the Mip Maps that should be within the modeled graphic file. The Mip Maps create a compounded smaller image of the object, so at various distances the image will keep details clearer than a single image would. There are usually about 5 separate images, each smaller in size than the next, within the Mip Maps. The game renders these images at certain times to allow for the observed object to be seen clearly. Least that's how it's supposed to work.

Just how, when, and at what level this takes place in-game is beyond me. :dead:

See, way more technical

I think visually we're really handicapped. It's very difficult to find a plane spotted on radar that's five miles away, when action report after action report shows submarines visually sighting aircraft and routinely staying on the surface to assess whether the plane will pass overhead.

In the game this is only possible with radar. Time after time my crew spots a plane and I can't find it. Often the crew doesn't spot the plane and the first I know about it it's in its final run. I think visually sighted airplanes in SH4 are really broken.

But I can live with that and doubt that it can be fixed.

well I hope someone can think of something to figure this out, if its just a size rendering thing maybe the texture can be changed to a black dot so it can at least be spotted and located

I have never looked into the Mip Map function from the nVidia DDS Plugin for Photoshop (which is what I usually use). In the documentation, there are a lot of filters that can be added to Mip Maps (making them darker.....lighter.....progressivly so; making them sharper....dull, etc.).

Would any of these filters do something that would help in visual appearance for the player? I don't know. The only thing I've ever concerned myself with when thinking about Mip Maps is whether to use them or not......Dial images don't need Mip Maps, ships and planes do. But, I've never ventured away from the default selection of parameters for Mip Maps.

I don't see a parameter for "sizing" the Mip Maps. But, maybe the lighter filter would create a brighter plane at greater distance? Sounds like further study and testing is needed?

Anyone have a little time on their hands???

sounds like you have the best ideas on this.

I "think" however that making them darker rather then brighter "might" be easier to spot against the light blue sky but maybe not, definitely something I hope you can solve

Aircraft at a distance tend to appear darker than the sky because they are not luminous like sky. On a sunny day, though, you should also be able to see some metal/glass glint if the angle is right

Related to this but does anyone else think the ability of the planes to spot you is unrealistic as well? Often times i'll be chugging along and a plane about 10 miles away pops up on radar. Well no biggie as it should pass but then a few moments later it suddenly starts heading straight towards me, alarm sounds and crash dive occurs. Really ticks me off when i'm shadowing a convoy waiting for night.

Mods? A moving sub and its wake could be visible from an aircraft far off. A lot of the detection stuff gets changed in various mods

Rendering
 

I always put it down to a game-imposed issue in that the actual appearance of the aircraft (i.e. the 'object' being rendered in the 3D space) was 'broken'.
As stated by others, the crew "spots" an aircraft but you can't see it then suddenly it shows up. To me, the actual visual representation of the aircraft was being "switched on" at the wrong range by the game ergo the player would always 'see' it at the last minute so to speak.

I'm not sure if I explained that well but hope it makes sense. I don't think it's a matter of texture or skin of the aircraft blending into the background but rather the actual rendering itself. For example, in IL-2, you can spot an aircraft from quite a distance. It initially appears as a simple dot but as the distance shrinks the aircraft grows in pixels and beings to take the shape of an actual aircraft as more details are rendered. It's been my experience in SH-4 that the dot-to-pixels part has always been missing and what you get is the fully detailed plane showing up at a relatively short range. :doh:

that makes sense and explains why it "appears" out of thin air like it does.

do you think its fixable?

Vanilla and mods both have that problem.