Reto.Christiano

Are you experiencing this currently? There was a hotfix released this morning to address the issue. If anyone are still experiencing problems, please take a screenshot where the sun/moon is visible and post it, that way I can identify what weathersetting you are having issues with, and I will continue the investigation. Also, if you were previously experiencing problems, and it is better now, I would also like to know.

There is a bug that causes the game to look darker on some systems but not others. I think I'm able to replicate the problem now, and I'm looking into fixing the issue.

There is a bug that causes the game to look darker on some systems but not others. I think I'm able to replicate the problem now, and I'm looking into fixing the issue.

The short summery. A long time ago, the sky had all the elements it does right now, sun, distant clouds, moon, and stars. And a sun-glare effect that passes through the sun element to, well, create sun-glare. But at some point, many many years ago something broke in the renderer and these elements disappeared. It looks like the temporary solution was to increase the glare intensity so that the glare would be visibe even without the sun, so that there would be at least something resembling a sun in the sky. This however had a problem that whenever a sprite element was drawn in front of the sun, it would bloom exessively, as seen in the screenshot above. This would not happen too often, but it could be a problem when a low level cloud passed in front of the sun, or if engaging in a shootout with someone on a roof with the sun behind them. The problem became worse with the introduction of flamethrowers, which creates a larger volume of particles. This became a real problem en the down and dusk weather settings where normal use of the flamethrower would cover the sun and trigger the bloom. A temporary workaround was to move the sun higher up on the sky so that it was less likely to be covered by the flames during normal use. The issue with the missing sky elements has finally been fixed recently, thus fixing the glare issues. Fixing the sky elements required the weather settings to be reworked, otherwise the result was as shown in the screenshot above. And with the fixes the sun could be lowered once again to the location it was before that workaround that was done for the flamethrowers. And with the sky elements fixed the sky could be made to look a lot more interesting than the flat blue constant that it was before. Like I've said, there is a second iteration of changes to the weather system in progress, this one changing to how the fog system works. Feedback on the current settings are welcome, just make them in a seperate thread from this one, and please keep it specific and constructive. For example "everything is too dark" is not very specific, instead something like "the shadows are too dark on the sunrise and sunset settings" is far more useful.

I know that you don't believe me when I say that it is not that easy to do, but here: This is a screenshot following your instructions exactly. This is the exact old light settings with the fixed sky elements and the growthsize of the muzzle particles set to about 60%.

The muzzleflashes have three effects. Third-person, First-person-hipfire, and First-person-aiming. The two first person effects are significantly less intense than the third person, which is why I am inquiring about the conditions in which people feel the smoke is obstructive. Because if the problem is that targets are getting covered up by their own smoke when they are shooting, or if the smoke from other players are covering up your screen in close quarter combat, then it doesn't help anything if I try to reduce the first-person smoke effects. Then the issue needs to be addressed in the third person effect.

Lowering the ParticleIntensity does not make the particles less visible, it makes them darker, which makes them even more visible. The particleIntensity value needs to be at a sweet spot that corresponds with the various light settings to make the particles as neutral as possible. If the value is set lower than that sweet spot value they become darker and more visible, if the value is higher it becomes brighter and more visible.

Let me just be clear, I would be happy to give the muzzle flash effects a workover, but while you might think that this is easy to do, you are just gonna have to trust me when I say that it is not. What I am trying to get to, is some specific examples that I can reproduce and use for a baseline for where the effects are bad. It is not a simple matter of just removing the particles, that would remove the flame effect as well. Nor is it as easy as to just reduce the intensity, that would mean that the effect would become darker and even more visible in some conditions. Nor can it simply be scaled down, that would make it more intense in other conditions. And for you who complain about the new weathersettings, claiming that wasn't broken and therefore shouldn't be fixed, might I remind you that the sky was severely broken before. all sky elements were missing (and only visible in the water reflection), and whenever a transparent effect went in front of the sun, the entire screen would light up like a nuclear explosion. There has been several comlains about that, and that the game doesn't look good enough. Now those issues are fixed, and many people had been asking for just that. The fixes to the sky box also required the weather settings to be redone. The old settings would not work with the fixed sky. I am still working on a second iteration of the weather system where I'm making some changes to the way fog works. so there will be further changes to the weather in the future, and I'd be happy to get user feedback from the current settings. Just keep weather feedback in a seperate thread from this one, or give it directly to reto.hades who will collect and generalize the feedback. But please keep the feedback constructive and as specific. Just saying "everything is bad" won't help anyone.

I've made a test setup of this example. Here it is with the Thompson firing infinitely toward another character who also has a thompson firing infinitely toward the player in the different weather settings. And here it is using STGs firing toward a non-shooting character with another character next to him firing an STG back. Does these represent what you are experiencing in the game? What I am trying to get to is if this issue needs to be addressed in the renderer for each weather type, or if it needs to be addressed in each individual particle effect, or if the issue is somewhere else. For example, I would say that 01 Clear Day is fine in this scenario, but 04 Clean Night is problematic. So at least part of the issue needs to be addressed in the rendering for that weather type. It is not as simple as "just decrease the smoke". It looks to me like most of these examples actually show the impact effects obstructing your view, and not the gunsmoke. So here decreasing the gunsmoke would not solve your problem. Also, I will be ignoring all examples where people are using brightness settings beyond the normal ranges.

There are more than 3000 variables for all the muzzle flash effects. When all I have to go with "it is just bad", all I can do is to start up the game myself, shoot the different guns and conclude that it doesn't look so bad to me. I can't see how the game looks on your computer, on your monitor, with your settings. And if people are increasing the brightness values to more than 3 times the range in which the game is designed for, then that should definitely not be what sets the standard. And if the problem that people are complaining about is that other players becomes covered in their own gunsmoke, then it doesn't matter how much I reduce the smoke from your own gun (which is already significantly less than the smoke you see from other players), it won't fix the problem that people are actually complaining about. Or if the smoke is only a problem on a certain weather setting, or in certain conditions, then it also doesn't help that I reduce the smoke, then I would need to fix the issue in the rendering for that particular weather type. The gun smoke serves a purpose in that it allows you to see where other players are shooting from. And smokeless powder is not smoke-free.

Can you clarify what you mean by brightness value of 5? The brightness slider in the game menu brings the brightness value between 0.5 and 1.5. Are you setting your value higher than that in the config file or console? Because if you have set the ingame brightness to be 5, then yes, that will severely reduce the details you can see in the game.

Are you talking about the smoke from your own weapon when you shoot? Is it worse when aiming or when hip firing? Is there a particular weapon you experience the problem with? Or is it the smoke from other players weapons when they shoot? Or the impact effects when the bullet hits? What weather types do you experience a problem on? What direction relative to the sun are you facing when you experience the problem? What is your graphics settings?`(specifically if you are running with fast particles) These are all factors I need to know before I can address the issue.

I do. I made the current hill skirmish map (based on an earlier map of similar design)

How do you imagine that the JU 87 would be in the game? It is a very iconic dive bomber, but stats-wise it is not much different from the HS 126 Recon plane. It is slightly slower but with better climb rate, has one extra forward machine gun, and it can carry four 50 kg bombs in addition to the main bomb. The Stuka has been requested for a long time, but I fear that people would be very disappointed with it's performance. Having a class of ground attack aircraft is something that was brought up a long time ago, and some planes have been tested ingame to test different concepts (as well as escort missions for heavy bombers). But that project has been on the shelf for a long time. The ground attack planes I had my eyes on back then were more direct-fire autocannon armed ground attack planes rather than dive bombers (since, as mentioned above, the actual performance of divebombers in the game would be a bit underwelming) So something in the lines of: JU 87 G "Kanonen Vogel" - Armed with two 37mm auto cannons with 12 rounds each. Sources differ a bit on weather or not the forward firing machineguns were removed on the G series, with the majority of sources claiming that they were removed. Which would leave the JU87G with only anti-tank armaments and not much to do against infantry. It is of course entirely plausible that the reason for the differences in sources is that the machine guns were removed on some planes, but not neccesarrily all. The IL-2 is an obvious choice for the Soviet. Can't go wrong with a pair of 23mm auto cannons. Not quite as powerful as the 37mm, but faster firing and with 150 rounds of ammunition to compensate. For the US I had the P-39Q in mind. Strictly speaking not a ground-attack aircraft, but it was often used in that role and excelled at it with a 37mm autocannon and 30 rounds. One thing I did experiment with, back when we did concept testing on these things, was to have the guns fire at a slightly downward angle on the ground attack planes. This would make them more suited for strafing runs and give them a handicap in air-to-air combat. But like I said, this plan has been on the shelf for quite a long time, and there are no emidiate plans of picking it up again. The M36B1 was actually planned from the very start when the Heavy Tank Destroyers were introduced. The plan was to have two heavy tank destroyers for each faction, and the M36 was made as the M36B1 from the beginning, with the intend that it could be combined with the M10 hull to create the regular M36 (which was then released first). The plans then changed, and the second tier of heavy tank destroyers were neven made and the nearly finished M36B1 has been sitting still ever since. Another ulterior motive for making the M36B1 was that the hull could be used as the basis for updating the M4A3E8 model (which is one of the earliest assets in the game, and one that was in need of an update) So that was the original plan all along, that was put on hold, and that I've just recently started to resume working on. In the meantime, the M36B1 asset has become so old that it was using our old material system, so resurrecting it meant that I had to redo the textures, which in turns meant that I also had to update the regular M36 as well as the M10 materials. The M36B1 was planned to be released in this update, but an issue emerged quite close to the release date as there wouldn't be enough time to properly test it before the release. My current focus is more with addressing older issues with the game and not so much new content. (For example fixing the broken LOD models for the buildings, which has been partially released in this update.)

It was used during the war under the name Hider, Flash, T23. Then after the war it was redesignated Hider, Flash, M3.