(REQ) Increased render distance of harbors

[Radio]

This is really annoying: My Sub was in an harbor and i could see 3 fat, juicy, stationary enemy ships through the Periscope, no obstacle, nothing between them and my ship. I happily launched 6 torpedoes at them and they all did never reach their targets. "Why?" you ask?

Because the harbor walls were NOT rendered until I got as close as 2000 yards!!!! The torpedoes had ran into the piers/walls instead of the ships.

Is there a way to change that behavior of the game engine? Stock 1.5 game here.

i hate that too, but its hard coded i think. (but marginal video cards dont always render everything so make sure your ok there)

i think it was something they did to get more detail or something by using smaller blocks of whats rendered visually.

bad weather makes it even worse (especially fog) because your rendered visual range of objects is even less.

[Radio]

Many thanks, Webster! Good to see that I am not alone.

I gonna check if setting my GPU quality controls to max in the Windows control panel changes anything. But I too have the feeling that it is hard coded that way. And I understand that they most likely did it for performance reasons. Still it is sad, because the harbors are so nice and detailed... What a waste that one can't see them properly.
As a solution I enabled the free camera for my careers and now take a quick look at the harbor area around the target ships BEFORE I launch any torpedoes. Fair enough imo.
Traveling all those thousands of miles in the game to shot my last torps into an invisible wall was very frustrating to say the least...

Originally Posted by Radio

Edited because of interesting discovery, see bottom of message!!!

EDIT:

I found some interesting entries in the CAMERAS.DAT file:
For the free camera the settings are: ClipDistance = 1.0
For the Periscope the settings are ClipDistance = 0.3 !!!!!
And for the Binocular it is 4.0...

Maybe this is the solution?? I will change the Clipsettings to 1.0 (or even 4.0) for the Periscopes, too, let's see if this works!

the clip distance is how close you can get to things or your position / point of view is and the point of measure is from the outer most point so for a sub its not the conning tower but the side of the hull so a 1 foot clip distance has you about 5 feet away is the closest you can get.


as for free cam try it with heavy fog and rain and you cant see anything untill your right on top of it so the fog is more like a wall then anything like the transparent haze it should be.

another interesting note i found out while testing single mission elements were working and generating as they should is if you get a certain distance away from your sub (in this case i was just outside tokyo bay and flew free cam over to tokyo harbor) the game stops generating terrain so all you see is grey in front of you. i found the ships but the port wasnt there and the land wasnt there either lol.

[Munchausen]

Originally Posted by Radio

As a solution I enabled the free camera for my careers and now take a quick look at the harbor area around the target ships BEFORE I launch any torpedoes.

Probably a more realistic solution would be to use the stadimeter and PK to plot the target's position on your attack map. You'd then know if the ship is behind a seawall.

[Radio]

Hm, yes, good idea, gonna do that instead. Thanks for the tip Münchhausen!

Originally Posted by WEBSTER

the clip distance is how close you can get to things or your position / point of view is and the point of measure is from the outer most point so for a sub its not the conning tower but the side of the hull so a 1 foot clip distance has you about 5 feet away is the closest you can get.


as for free cam try it with heavy fog and rain and you cant see anything untill your right on top of it so the fog is more like a wall then anything like the transparent haze it should be.

another interesting note i found out while testing single mission elements were working and generating as they should is if you get a certain distance away from your sub (in this case i was just outside tokyo bay and flew free cam over to tokyo harbor) the game stops generating terrain so all you see is grey in front of you. i found the ships but the port wasnt there and the land wasnt there either lol.

I edited my post but you were faster with your response! Yes, i saw something similar, too: I was flying around in free-cam mode and suddenly the island in front of me stopped being generated, it was funny to look at the inner side of mountains from the cut off side ...

[vickers03]

heavy fog and rain and you cant see anything untill your right on top of it so the fog is more like a wall then anything like the transparent haze it should be.

i've experienced thick fog in RL which was just like that.
things where coming out of nowhere and the fog really
behaves like a wall which moves in front of you.

[ColonelSandersLite]

Originally Posted by Munchausen

Probably a more realistic solution would be to use the stadimeter and PK to plot the target's position on your attack map. You'd then know if the ship is behind a seawall.

Careful with that, some of the piers drawn on the map don't match their real location. Wake island is a perfect example.

[Radio]

Ok will keep that in mind. Thank you ColonelSandersLite!

Originally Posted by ColonelSandersLite

Careful with that, some of the piers drawn on the map don't match their real location. Wake island is a perfect example.

i wouldnt use it for any sort of clearance issues for plotting course or shooting solutions because they are often just "in the area" they are shown so use it for general locating of objects kind of thing to know where things are.

you still should get visual confirmation before shooting