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Chock · 04-20-07, 08:07 AM

With regard to the appearance of the rain from a graphical standpoint, I think it does actually look okay in the daytime, where one would expect things to look very grey and diffused, but at night it looks far from convincing, the grey colour clashing terribly with the blackness of the night.

However, the thing that p*sses me off about the rain, is not so much how it looks, as its duration and how it affects your watch crew's abilities.

I've had situations where I can quite clearly see targets, yet the system has 'decided' I can't, as evidenced by no eternal view being available of them (external view being my one concession in the realism settings at the moment, since I want to check out FSAA). Consequently I can't get a TDC lock and my crew fails to report ships until we're practically fending the things off with a bargepole.

'Ship spotted sir!' - 'Yes, thanks for that Hawkeye, I wonder what we'd do without your uncanny ability to spot ships that I've been stalking for the past six hours.'

Given that I live in Stockport, England, which is approximately eight miles south of Manchester (otherwise known as The Rainy City), I'm very familiar with how visible things are in rainy conditions, and while distant objects might be not very clearly delineated, I can still see them. In actual fact, the County of Staffordshire, to the south of me, gets more rain, but even then, on the many occasions I've been driving there in bad rain conditions, there have only been two occasions where I recall rain affecting visibility drastically, forcing me to pull over and wait it out, but the wait was not long.

So, the visibility issue in SH4 is compounded by the fact that the rain storms last far too long in my opinion, yes I know it can get bad in the Pacific, and there are rainy seasons, but since it appears to be a global setting for the sim, I can't do what a real skipper would do, which is monitor weather reports and head for somewhere that has better visibility, which is the obvious thing to do if the weather is so bad that it's affecting operational capabilities. My last career patrol had me in rainy weather from Pearl all the way to Honshu and back to Midway, that's a hell of a raincloud that can cover 3000 miles of ocean and blow in two different directions, and it certainly never happened a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In such circumstances, I'd be abandoning my sub and considering building an Ark, as that is weather of Biblical proportions.

I'm going to see if I can modify the rain a bit, but I suspect that the duration and how it affects crew visibility is more in need of modding than the appearance.

04-20-07, 08:07 AM	#8
Chock Sea Lord Join Date: May 2005 Location: Under a thermal layer in chilly Olde England Posts: 1,842 Downloads: 0 Uploads: 0	With regard to the appearance of the rain from a graphical standpoint, I think it does actually look okay in the daytime, where one would expect things to look very grey and diffused, but at night it looks far from convincing, the grey colour clashing terribly with the blackness of the night. However, the thing that p*sses me off about the rain, is not so much how it looks, as its duration and how it affects your watch crew's abilities. I've had situations where I can quite clearly see targets, yet the system has 'decided' I can't, as evidenced by no eternal view being available of them (external view being my one concession in the realism settings at the moment, since I want to check out FSAA). Consequently I can't get a TDC lock and my crew fails to report ships until we're practically fending the things off with a bargepole. 'Ship spotted sir!' - 'Yes, thanks for that Hawkeye, I wonder what we'd do without your uncanny ability to spot ships that I've been stalking for the past six hours.' Given that I live in Stockport, England, which is approximately eight miles south of Manchester (otherwise known as The Rainy City), I'm very familiar with how visible things are in rainy conditions, and while distant objects might be not very clearly delineated, I can still see them. In actual fact, the County of Staffordshire, to the south of me, gets more rain, but even then, on the many occasions I've been driving there in bad rain conditions, there have only been two occasions where I recall rain affecting visibility drastically, forcing me to pull over and wait it out, but the wait was not long. So, the visibility issue in SH4 is compounded by the fact that the rain storms last far too long in my opinion, yes I know it can get bad in the Pacific, and there are rainy seasons, but since it appears to be a global setting for the sim, I can't do what a real skipper would do, which is monitor weather reports and head for somewhere that has better visibility, which is the obvious thing to do if the weather is so bad that it's affecting operational capabilities. My last career patrol had me in rainy weather from Pearl all the way to Honshu and back to Midway, that's a hell of a raincloud that can cover 3000 miles of ocean and blow in two different directions, and it certainly never happened a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In such circumstances, I'd be abandoning my sub and considering building an Ark, as that is weather of Biblical proportions. I'm going to see if I can modify the rain a bit, but I suspect that the duration and how it affects crew visibility is more in need of modding than the appearance.