After thinking about it I suddenly came to a theory what it's (I mean parabolic equation) all about and by looking on the formulas again it seems I'm right. I still will need lots of study, but at least I have SOME idea now. I'm also trying some very naive and rough wave based simulations. Which leads me to this: we really need just approximate what's going on. It means faking. For example if you say SSP has not much effect on low frequency, which means passive sonar, we can say OK, let's ignore SSP for passive. Level of the approximation is one thing. We can have simple methods, which will be frequency dependent, as well as complicated methods which wont. I'm trying to understand as much as possible, so I can decide 'this effect can be approximated by such and such simple curve, no need to simulation' or 'this could be simulated quite well, even quite fast, and it will help the game' or 'this is impossible to simulate or fake, and/or unimportant for the game, let's ignore it (but state in manual, of course)'.
It's not that frequency dependent effects are impossible or would require complex simulation. We don't need to be much true to the real world, we don't design real-world sonar set or something. We just need to catch the basic nature, the most important factors.
Which again reminds me one cool idea. Sonar is about listening right ? Even these days. Then why the hell does DW use few samples for all that boats and subs ? Why those samples are speed independent ? Why there are no transients ? It would be great fun to be able to HEAR: 'it's typhoon, doing lets say 10 kts .. ah ! changing depth now .. opening silo hatches !' Imagine tutorial missions teaching you to tell 2 screw from one and so on.
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