Can This Be A Work Around For The 8 KM Visibility?

[Manuel Ortega]

Fog values for game engine (visually speaking, not for AI) are in scene.dat file, at least in part.
Changing those values could increase or decrease max visual range. For example:

Smoke in horizon. This is from a ship at about 8.4 km with default game values:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/fog01.jpg

Moving the fog start a little more far away we could see this, the same smoke but visible at 10 km:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/nofog01.jpg


A comparison of two Gibraltar images from the same place in a clear day:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/nofog02.jpg

Gibraltar in a day with medium fog:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/fog02.jpg

But it seems that game engine only draws as far as 10 km (clip distance). We can't see any object further, even removing all fog. I haven't found clip distances in any file yet, but changing them could be a good step in increasing the visual distance.

There is a small problem with the dynamic ocean. It only covers about 1000 meters from player's eye. From there to horizon, there is a flat pseudo-ocean that fades with the fog. I can make the dynamic ocean grid bigger easily, but it is practically at the same height that the pseudo-ocean, less than 1 meter of separation. This makes Z-fighting polygons, as we see here:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/renderengine02.jpg

It could be fixed by lowering that plane a little.
I supose that the main reason of making a too short viewing distance was to maintain a minimum fps. I know this because making the dynamic ocean grid four times bigger eats about 20% of the fps. Surely the dev team had the same problem and that is why they limited the range.

This is how world is rendered in the game:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/renderengine01.jpg

A draw to explain it:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/renderengine03.jpg

I hope this would be useful. I don't know about the AI part, only researched how increase the player sight.
I will put the hex addresses that I found, if interested.

[Duke of Earl]

@Manuel.. count me in, I'm interested...

Cordialement, Duke of Earl

[CCIP]

Thank you! I'll check out Scene.dat.

In general though, we can live with 10km visual ability, provided our WO can see a bit further. Now if we could also shift the light fog back a little bit, say, to near those 10km, that would be a good enough solution for me. That way we could realistically take advantage of better visibility on most clear days, excellent WO visibility on fog-less days, and the same good old unforgiving visibility in storms

[jasonb885]

I'll give it a go tonight.

[Manuel Ortega]

The fog distances are here:

I don't know exactly which type of data is it, but it seems to be two 32 bit values.

And the dynamic ocean size here:

[Immacolata]

Amazing work. There is a chance that the devs could fix this for a future release, if they somehow think it is important and someone tells them that it IS

Would it be possible to lower the pesuod ocean a bit and that would fix the z-buffering fight creating polygon flicker?

[Lanzfeld]

Hmmmm...

I put the sensors file in my data/library folder and on a clear day my WO still cant see ship farther then 8000 meters.

[timetraveller]

CCIP,

Let me know if you need a little tweak for the scene.dat rule.

Note that Manuel's displacement values are in decimal format, not hex. 2992=BB0

TT

[R48]

CCIP,

Does your Sensors.dat include the snorkel detection problem that Jungman mentions fixing?

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by timetraveller

CCIP,

Let me know if you need a little tweak for the scene.dat rule.

Note that Manuel's displacement values are in decimal format, not hex. 2992=BB0

TT

Sure, if you can - I'd be happy.

Actually, I've looked through scene.dat yesterday and I couldn't find anything concrete as far as fog - maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. But if that distance can indeed be adjusted - that's good, and maybe then we can also adjust underwater fogging distance (which would be a huge plus for some of the 'real water' modding as well).

R48 -
I put in the fixes for the radar bearings that Jungman mentioned, but I didn't see anything about that snorkel radar. If someone can point me to what other value (if any) needs fixing there, I'll put it in too.

[Manuel Ortega]

Originally Posted by timetraveller

Note that Manuel's displacement values are in decimal format, not hex. 2992=BB0

Mi mistake. Here they are in hex:

Fog distances:


Dynamic grid size:

[Manuel Ortega]

Originally Posted by CCIP

and maybe then we can also adjust underwater fogging distance (which would be a huge plus for some of the 'real water' modding as well).

It's pretty easy indeed.
Default underwater fog:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/waterfog_default.jpg

Modified values:
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/waterfog_increased.jpg

Here is the hex address:


First 4 byte pairs are fog start (-4 in float, don't know units). Next 4 byte pairs are fog end (float 18, I modified to 10 to make the screenshot).

[CCIP]

Hmm, is that based on distance? If so, that's definitely very interesting. Up to now, water color modding has been based strictly on colors and transparencies at certain angles only.

[Manuel Ortega]

Yes. Objects at a distance higher than fog end value are totally hidden by fog.
The same with start fog. If you put a negative value, the fog starts behind the camera. This is useful in games for making a thicker ambient.

In this pic I modified the fog start with a value of -100. This shows as more dense water.
http://www.mp-labs.com/sh2mods/waterfog_dense.jpg

The scene.dat file has a lot of modification capabilities.

[R48]

CCIP,

The only reference I saw was

I also changed MinSurface size to fix the stupid Snorkel detection problem....

I'm guessing he is refering to the AI's ability to detect your snorkel too easily. I could be wrong though.