Visibility limts (Fog of War)

[WildBill1337]

The whole "fog of war" deal, where you can only see 300-400 meters on most maps is very irritating. I mean, I can't even see as far as the marksman and sniper rifles are zeroed in for. I know its a flaw with the original bf2 engine, and I'm not bashing the great work the PR team does, but I know you were able to allow sight for about 600-700m on Kashan Desert. I'm just wondering if you could possibly extend the visual range on all of the maps like you were able to at Kashan, as it would make the game and enviroment look a lot more realistic. I noticed that some of the screenshots of Jabal al Burj and Zetar Wetlands, you can actually see the US carrier, and it looks a lot better than the terrain just fading out. It would also influence gameplay as you would be able to target enemies from more realistic ranges.

[WildBill1337]

mine are all the way up, but i can only see so far on most maps, but Kashan seems to have a longer visual range. I guess if they can make it better there, they can make it better anywhere.

[CodeRedFox]

Its all based on performance. If your (or players) computer cant handle it then we drop it down. If you notice Kashan has nothing really on it.

Get it now? If we had it our way most maps would have NO fog of war.

[Conman51]

i heard its cuz lag...they did it on kashan because theres not much on it..just lots of sand...but if yoy did it like on sunset city...ull lag

[WildBill1337]

ok I gotcha. If only......

[jayceon515]

View distance depends on many things. You can't have a very long view distance on maps with a lot of statics and/or high quality lightmaps because it would cause a lot of lag. As simple a that. Kashan ie. has something around 1000 statics overall which is really not much (vBF2 karkand has more than that IIRC) so the view distance can be up to 1000m. However you can't do that on Basrah which has around 3800 statics and poor lightmaps but its lightning eats up a lot of resources so your PC wouldn't handle it as well as Kashan.

Fog is basically your friend even though you may not recognize it as such. All statics etc. don't render at the same time so it makes it a lot easier for your PC to handle the game without lag.

[Drav]

and don't forget, sometimes in life it is foggy or dusty.....

[Japub]

If we had it our way most maps would have NO fog of war.

I thought you could turn the fog off in the bf2 editor. Or is that just an option to ease the actual making of the map?

[RedRusky]

How did they do it in wookie mod, Bacuase they kept all most all staticss and it still ran fairly smooth

[Waaah_Wah]

Smaller maps...

[Spec]

PR Maps are have MUCH more statics than vanilla maps and are MUCH bigger. Plus all of the other complicated changes PR made - All the smoke and stuff. Destructible buildings. All that...

[Masaq]

Basrah
2km x 2km map, around 4000 statics
Static density of 1,000 objects per square kilometre, or 1 object per square metre.


Kashan
4km x 4km, around 1000 statics
Static density of 62 objects per square kilometre, or 0.062 objects per square metre.



Now, do you see the difference? You can have a view distance that allows you to see a full square kilometre because then, your PC is only rendering 62 static objects.

If you have the same view distance in Basrah, you'd be rendering over 1,000 - and that's not including things like vehicles, players, their weapons, explosions, smoke, dust...



So in order to make PR playable for low-end rigs (and we still have many players who currently can only run maps like Basrah on 20 FPS), you have to have view distances that are scaled appropriately.


And what we do have is still much better than vBF2.

[Sabre_tooth_tigger]

If we had it our way most maps would have NO fog of war.

Sounds good but then I'd want more dust to stop perfect views because we lack weather, heat haze, etc

[Cyrax-Sektor]

Also, sometimes the fog of war is for gameplay reasons. Imagine MEC on West and East Beach with HATs, RPGs, Sa-7s, Stingers and in .8 the new deployable weapons, the carrier a ripe little target for base camping.

I thought you could turn the fog off in the bf2 editor. Or is that just an option to ease the actual making of the map?

Yep, it's just to make mapping easier. If you want an overhead view of the creation, you won't have fog obscuring the view. A thing to note in the Editor, with fog off and plenty of statics in your map, it'll lag more than without the obscuring fog. Unless my comp is just having probs.

[Rudd]

There is a great picture someplace of kashan without the view distance, its pretty epic but wouldn't work well like every1 says.

[zangoo]

there is 1 line of code that will allow you to make any object draw at any distance. the devs use it on all the vehicles right now so they only draw at 1000m. So the only thing that is holding pr back from huge view distance is the fact that some peoples computers cannot handle a increased view disance.

[Arnoldio]

Well, i dont really care about the fog since i'm not sniping, but, what bothers me is the box fog field. (You have to look with the corner of your screen to see further)

If that could be changed to sphere, much appreciated.

[Sabre_tooth_tigger]

Dont objects scale in complexity with distance. I know thats not a perfect system but doesnt it help alot

[Garmax]

i suggest. 2 more gigs ov memory and a new video card. replace your modem to one that runs at 1 gig..

reset your computer. choose a new server. and you'll be good to go