27.11.2007, 06:37
ok, please consider the following:
- the main target of this mod was to make the AAA smoke clouds last longer, because the duration they're lasting in the vanilla game it's a joke. please see the following pictures, from US Navy's military archive, battle of midway, second japanese attack on the CV-5 Yorktown carrier:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020526.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020520.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020517.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020516.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020518.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020519.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020521.jpg
(foto links taken from here http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/05.htm)
- secondly, I HAVEN'T modified the shape of the particles used (ie the smoke could texture), nor the AAA smoke cloud particle emitter (the way AAA smoke clouds appear, are positioned and disperse after that), which actually is a part of the code, and can't be moded otherwise than by reverse-engineering the IL2 executable. also, the game ONLY uses a single texture for this effect (no random textures from a list of available clod smoke textures) for all the AAA particles in a hit, for any hit, and doesn't at least have some variables to randomly alter the dimension of it (making the explosions randomly bigger/smaller between some values), so it's VERY limited from a particle's emitter point of view
- considering the fact that I've lengthen the duration of AAA smoke clouds appeared after an AAA hit, that would allow a much greater dispersion of a hit's smoke clouds textures (which in vanilla are 4 for the 25mm and 8 for the 85mm) - a simple math, if you'll have an object keeping it's speed constant, but moving a greater time duration, a longer distance will be covered. resulting that in order to keep as close to the original dispersion of an AAA hit, the particle emitter's speed must be slowed
- also, considering that I've modified the duration to be 1000 times longer, in order to achieve that, I should have made the particle emitter's speed 1000 times slower, but from testing, even with only a 10 times slower dispersion speed, the AAA hit smoke clouds would remain compacted, like big cotton wool balls (as someone who probably only tested the Effects_1000longer_2bigger_10slower version observed), so I had to lower the speed little than 10, and in order to balance that, I've added the versions with 2 times more particle (smoke clouds textures) for an AAA hit
- I've also doubled the dimension of the emitted particles (the smoke clouds of an AAA hit), because they've seemd too small (compared with a fighter plane) to me. considering a wingspan of between 10 and 15 meters for a common ww2 fighter, the explosion of an 85mm AAA smoke cloud seemd way to small. please see again the ww2 AAA smoke clouds pictures
- regarding usage of this effect in some other parts of the game, I pretty much doubt that's the case, because these effects are in a subfolder named AIR in the EFFECTS folder, so I don't think they're used for anything else. and the ONLY modified material this effect is using is the WhiteSmoke.mat, which I've taken from fly_zo'sFire and Smoke Viewable Distance Modifier mod. I could have do this modification myself, but as he found were that needed to be done, I thought that's better ton include his files and give him credit for that. you can safely remove he MATERIALS folder from this mod, though I don't know how far could you see the effects with vanilla distances (though, the commentary from WhiteSmoke.mat file sid that the values must be between 0 and 1, so fly_zo's 10000 shouldn't have any different result than a simple 1 value, so if 1 was the original value, then his 10000 will still have the same effect). And even more, you can rename that WhiteSmoke.mat into something else (and change the name accordingly in the filelist.txt), and call the file with the new name from the AAA clouds smoke effects, thus making SURE you'll only use modified AAA effects.
- I haven't seen any color ww2 AAA artillery barage pictures, to can tell for sure the color of the smoke clouds, but from the black and white pictures, they appeared too dark to have a lila color, and besides, from all the ww2 readings I remember, everyone was talking about them as beeing black rather than anything else. perhaps a chemist knowing AAA shells chemical composition may tell us more regarding the color such an explosion should have. until then, I find the black color definatelly more appealing to me than the vanilla one
- and finally, yes, this mod MAY be a FPS hit to your game, even I haven't noticed any problem on my rig (intel core 2 duo, bfg 8800gts with 640M vram, 4 GB 800 MHz ram). considering that there are (for the 2 times more particles versions of this effect) 8 particles for 25mm AA hit and 16 for the 85mm AAA hit, that results in a media of 8+16/2 = 12 => 24 alpha triangles per AAA hit (for mixed 25/85mm AAA), and at a default rate of 1 hit per scond for an AAA gun, that will result in 600x24= 14400 alpha triangles for a single AAA gun for a continuous fire during 10 minutes. further more, assuming you'll have around 10 guns at the assault place, that will result in around 144k alpha triangles for a 10 minutes long, 10 AAA guns artillery barage. and considering today's graphic cards power, which can render hunderts of millions of polygons per second, I wouldn't say that should be a too much FPS hit. and also please consider that a LOT of these polygons won't actually stay on screen for 10 minutes, that many of them will be too far away to be rendered anyway (as you'll went away from the AAA barage site), and that most probably the total number of AAA particles might have a hard cap somewhere.. and suddenly the FPS drop isn't even noticeable, as you might think
and lastly, I'm working in gaming industry, as lead game designer and producer for a gaming developer firm, making PC games, so I "relatively" know what I'm talking about
- the main target of this mod was to make the AAA smoke clouds last longer, because the duration they're lasting in the vanilla game it's a joke. please see the following pictures, from US Navy's military archive, battle of midway, second japanese attack on the CV-5 Yorktown carrier:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020526.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020520.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020517.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020516.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020518.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020519.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020521.jpg
(foto links taken from here http://www.navsource.org/archives/02/05.htm)
- secondly, I HAVEN'T modified the shape of the particles used (ie the smoke could texture), nor the AAA smoke cloud particle emitter (the way AAA smoke clouds appear, are positioned and disperse after that), which actually is a part of the code, and can't be moded otherwise than by reverse-engineering the IL2 executable. also, the game ONLY uses a single texture for this effect (no random textures from a list of available clod smoke textures) for all the AAA particles in a hit, for any hit, and doesn't at least have some variables to randomly alter the dimension of it (making the explosions randomly bigger/smaller between some values), so it's VERY limited from a particle's emitter point of view
- considering the fact that I've lengthen the duration of AAA smoke clouds appeared after an AAA hit, that would allow a much greater dispersion of a hit's smoke clouds textures (which in vanilla are 4 for the 25mm and 8 for the 85mm) - a simple math, if you'll have an object keeping it's speed constant, but moving a greater time duration, a longer distance will be covered. resulting that in order to keep as close to the original dispersion of an AAA hit, the particle emitter's speed must be slowed
- also, considering that I've modified the duration to be 1000 times longer, in order to achieve that, I should have made the particle emitter's speed 1000 times slower, but from testing, even with only a 10 times slower dispersion speed, the AAA hit smoke clouds would remain compacted, like big cotton wool balls (as someone who probably only tested the Effects_1000longer_2bigger_10slower version observed), so I had to lower the speed little than 10, and in order to balance that, I've added the versions with 2 times more particle (smoke clouds textures) for an AAA hit
- I've also doubled the dimension of the emitted particles (the smoke clouds of an AAA hit), because they've seemd too small (compared with a fighter plane) to me. considering a wingspan of between 10 and 15 meters for a common ww2 fighter, the explosion of an 85mm AAA smoke cloud seemd way to small. please see again the ww2 AAA smoke clouds pictures
- regarding usage of this effect in some other parts of the game, I pretty much doubt that's the case, because these effects are in a subfolder named AIR in the EFFECTS folder, so I don't think they're used for anything else. and the ONLY modified material this effect is using is the WhiteSmoke.mat, which I've taken from fly_zo'sFire and Smoke Viewable Distance Modifier mod. I could have do this modification myself, but as he found were that needed to be done, I thought that's better ton include his files and give him credit for that. you can safely remove he MATERIALS folder from this mod, though I don't know how far could you see the effects with vanilla distances (though, the commentary from WhiteSmoke.mat file sid that the values must be between 0 and 1, so fly_zo's 10000 shouldn't have any different result than a simple 1 value, so if 1 was the original value, then his 10000 will still have the same effect). And even more, you can rename that WhiteSmoke.mat into something else (and change the name accordingly in the filelist.txt), and call the file with the new name from the AAA clouds smoke effects, thus making SURE you'll only use modified AAA effects.
- I haven't seen any color ww2 AAA artillery barage pictures, to can tell for sure the color of the smoke clouds, but from the black and white pictures, they appeared too dark to have a lila color, and besides, from all the ww2 readings I remember, everyone was talking about them as beeing black rather than anything else. perhaps a chemist knowing AAA shells chemical composition may tell us more regarding the color such an explosion should have. until then, I find the black color definatelly more appealing to me than the vanilla one
- and finally, yes, this mod MAY be a FPS hit to your game, even I haven't noticed any problem on my rig (intel core 2 duo, bfg 8800gts with 640M vram, 4 GB 800 MHz ram). considering that there are (for the 2 times more particles versions of this effect) 8 particles for 25mm AA hit and 16 for the 85mm AAA hit, that results in a media of 8+16/2 = 12 => 24 alpha triangles per AAA hit (for mixed 25/85mm AAA), and at a default rate of 1 hit per scond for an AAA gun, that will result in 600x24= 14400 alpha triangles for a single AAA gun for a continuous fire during 10 minutes. further more, assuming you'll have around 10 guns at the assault place, that will result in around 144k alpha triangles for a 10 minutes long, 10 AAA guns artillery barage. and considering today's graphic cards power, which can render hunderts of millions of polygons per second, I wouldn't say that should be a too much FPS hit. and also please consider that a LOT of these polygons won't actually stay on screen for 10 minutes, that many of them will be too far away to be rendered anyway (as you'll went away from the AAA barage site), and that most probably the total number of AAA particles might have a hard cap somewhere.. and suddenly the FPS drop isn't even noticeable, as you might think
and lastly, I'm working in gaming industry, as lead game designer and producer for a gaming developer firm, making PC games, so I "relatively" know what I'm talking about
