**RELEASED** Improved Skies & Reflections

[rulle34]

Originally Posted by Manuel Ortega

Redwine, you have said it: why not increase AI to 18km instead of reducing visual to 16km?

I didn't make my mod to get a limited visibility of 18km, or 17, etc... I basically increased all parameters to get more distance, as much as possible, and when I obtained an equilibrated parameters balance I could say: 'now we can see ships at 17,500m. But there is not any hex value called max_visibility_distance=17500 that can be tweaked as you wish, it would be a lot esier this way.

I don't know how to reduce the visibility to 16 km. In fact the present 18km was by chance. Instead, I would encourage all of you to investigate how AI ranges work and tweak it to get those 18 km. And still better, to found how to fix the visual limits at night (super-vision). I think this research would give us more possibilities to reach realistic visibility distances. We must increase it, not reduce it.

Please don't misunderstand me and don't think that I don't want to collaborate. All the opposite. It's only that I think that for obtain a future 30km mod, for example, we must reach the 20km, not 16km. And the limit is now imposed by the 'partialy unknow' AI engine.

Hello Manuel!
I have full respect for your work and thoughts about increasing the visibility and in this I agree in general. But as it is now "visibility" is devided in to two different things, and it''s important to sort this out:

1. When crew reports "ship spotted"
2. When you actually can see something in the horizon

With the 16 km visibility these two things have the same distance. , and that's was what i wanted to achieve with this mod. Personally I dont think it's realistic or fun to have my crew report a "ship spotted" at a distance of 18000 or 20000m when I can't see anything myself. First after setting the boat at flank speed in the direction they reported and first after a viewing distance at about 16000m Im able to actually see the ship my self.

About nightvsion, I and others have made lots of tweakings in sensors.cgf to obtain some realistic nightspottings, and I think we are close to a good balance.

Im in for an increased visibility, but Im not in for an increased visbility where only my crew can see anything. I want these distances where we both can see something to be the same. And if it's possible to do this Im in for that. But I don't want this to be some arguments abut what is better 16km or 18km or 20km etc.

But I do want to keep in mind what we mean by "visibility".



With this as background, I have a question for you Manuel and Redwhine:
Do you want to increase the visibility range for only when crew can report a "ship spotted" and you self have to wait several kilometers before you actually can see something in your binoculars, or do you want to increase the visibility so the distance is the same when crew reports and you self can see it in your binoculars?