Problem with Funnel Smoke?

[panthercules]

Well, decided to do a little more beta testing, so I uninstalled and re-installed SH4 and patched to 1.1 and did a few Sub school lessons. Things actually went pretty well - I avoided any CTDs and the Monolith of FPS Death, and I even managed to figure out the TDC this time around and actually sank the cruiser

However, I noticed that all the funnel smoke of the ships I saw in the lessons looked very anemic, compared to SH3 - see picture below:



I've got all the graphics settings up pretty high (except environmental effects turned off because of the Monolith problem), and running a GeForce 7950 GT with the latest drivers (I think - latest official ones anyway), and I didn't notice any change from what's shown above even when I was playing around with particle density and other settings. I thought maybe the warships might put out less smoke than commercial/merchants, but this seemed pretty thin even taking that into account. Is this normal, or is there something wrong I should be trying to fix here?

[Karl-Heinz Jaeger]

Have noticed the same thing, Panthercules. In SHIII, one could always spot the ships miles away on the horizon from the smoke, now it's virtually impossible to do so. Doesn't seem like it would take too much to fix, given the awesome and talented modders we have about. One has to wonder if this was intentional or an oversight. So, no you're not the only one matey.

[nattydread]

It depends on the fuel and powerplant used. If its a coal fired steam engine it will be really thick, but a diesel powered engine may not, espeically if its new and/or well maintained. Also slow speeds should allow for less smoke on a diesel powered ship.

A large, relativly new looking tanker like that could very well be a diesel powered ship...and it appeares to be going pretty slow, I'd bet 3-5kts.

So thick plumes of smoke was more likly to be on a merchant, but not required. The old small and medium ships I keep getting have thicker smoke, much more obvious. The problem is the max visibilty cap at only 8km that keeps us from using smoke to see ships over the horizon

[panthercules]

Well, good to hear that someone is seeing more smoke at least some times - after I posted my screenshot, it dawned on me to check out the screenshot thread, and there seemed to be very little funnel smoke on any of the ships in those shots, so I was getting a little worried there wouldn't be much.

Then, since I had a few minutes, I decided to do a little research (one of the reason I love these sims - always give me a good excuse to learn a little more). The shots below are pretty typical of what I've been able to find so far:





Looks like maybe the devs got this one right (way to go Devs! - see, some of us can say nice things about the Devs) - seems that the "modern" warships and fleet support ships (which are really all I've seen in motion so far during sub school) just didn't put out much smoke compared to the older, commercial freighters I'm used to seeing in the Atlantic. Sounds like the game has both the smoky and the not-so-smoky types in it, which is really cool that they thought to do that.