[TEC] Ranges going mad

Not yet - but thats the next test. The ONI references is actualy top of mast/funnel to deck anyway, so its a piece of cake

Have anyone of you tried to take stadimeter ranges on distances around 7500 to 9500 yards. It seems to me that one pixel change in stadimeter makes pretty significent jumps in range readout. Although it does read out correctly given the correct placement.

I tested the above mentioned range takes by using the mast height only. Its doable if you take the reading from the mast top as the mast bottom is the lowest part at all visible, then it gives the correct range.

[Nisgeis]

OK, so it's definitely the premature sinking effect I mentioned above, where the waterline is changed, rather than the position on the horizon? I wonder if the range at which they start sinking into the water is moddable in a file somewhere, though I haven't seen anything that might be the control for it. They definitely start sinking into the pseudo horizon before they actually get to the horizon.

Correct Nisgeis.

I would start searching in the cameras.dat or the scene.dat files. I would belive those to be the most likely that such a thing would be settled in.

If you have SHIII installed, could you make a check to see if the same sinking is present in that sim as well.....

If its not we could make comparisons between the two sim's files.

[Hitman]

This all reminds me of a problem I found some time ago, with patch 1.3, when raising the visibility to more than the stock 9000 yards. I placed the maximum visibility at 20000 yards with mini-tweaker, but the result was not good in that what got moved to 20000 yards was actually the horizon line

I did some tests and concluded that the visibility parameter in SH4 didn't work the same as in SH3. Seems that the physical horizon line -which for a fleet boat watching from the deck should be around 9000 yards moved to 20000, and thus ships did not show "under the horizon" effect until they reached that distance. :hmm: i.e. the hull, then superstructures, finally masts wouldn't get hidden by the horizon line until reaching the visibility limit, and then they would just fade into the horizon fog slightly after.

Theoretically, when watching from the bridge you should see any ship further than 9000 yards already "sinking" behind the horizon, and not be able to see the full hull. Of course, at periscope depth through the scope you should see the effect even much closer, -as it is only a few feet above the water-, say 5000-6000 yards (Which actually made distance mesuring above that distance problematic in real life)

That has nothing to do with the actual maximum visibility, as you should be able to see a tall smoke column above the horizon even at periscope depth or sea level.

But seems that despite actual visibility being 20000 metres in SH4, the horizon line and the earth curvature effect are not perfectly displayed in SH4

Each Camera in the camaras.dat file has an entry called FarDistance and is (in my file) set to 30000 meters.

I have now tried to set it to 8235 meters to see if that gives a difference. AND IT SURE DOES !


Now the horizon sits very near the location on the hull of the ship where it has sunken into the water too. It does need a little fine tuning to a lesser value (like 8000 meters) but its DEFINETLY better.

If you guys have problems still with the "Sinking into the water effect" you should try to change the FarRange value for the camera of the periscopes to 8000 (it's set to 30000 default).

This solves the sinking into the water problem.