Fog adjustment
 

Way to adjust the fog in TMO? I had noticed there is nearly always a light fog, this of course messes with visual sensors and affects the overall AI performance. Could lower the fog factor in cfg but then they would have x ray vision in the fog lol. Something fouled up in the environment settings(?) seems when get a weather report prob 60 percent of time it reports a light fog, its a bit much for the pacific.

I think it's one of SH4 little quirks. There's a lot of light fog and it's not that light. The fog is controlled from scene.dat I think, but you have to be really careful, as the sensors also take into account latitude (further form equator you are the worse the sensors get), time of day, time of year, clouds, phase of moon, rain etcetera. I also think whether the target is silhouetted against the moonlight is also a factor, but not 100% sure on that one.

You can test detection in one test mission and get perfect results, but in other locations / times you can easily get a situation where you can see a target clear as day, but the crew can't. The environment settings 'interact' with the sensors, but aren't 'connected', e.g. the crew can sometimes see things you can't, or vice versa.

You can 'reset' the weather as well with a shortcut key.

Moonlight and light in general are definitely factors in visibility for the AI. Confirmed this when developing my Update for TMO, making it so realistic night surface attacks could be carried out. I did countless hours but amounts to roughly two months of tweaking and testing visuals so could operate on surface as subs did at night, but without blinding the enemy. Having the overall night be darker (thanks to the darker nights mod) got it started, but then had to tweak various things in .cfg , it was a task to find the balance. Like I said, countless hours.

I had no idea the sensors took into account latitude...interesting.


I have adjusted the player sub crew visual sensors, they are now not so blind, will be in next release. They can see basically what you as the captain see can and vice versa, for most part. This will be in the next release. It is nice because it was annoying when I could see smoke on horizon at ten miles, but they could not , when should be able to. Made tracking obscenely difficult, esp without radar or when playing without map contacts. Even then, the map contacts did not really stay because crew was so blind. Now, they can see large ships at 8-11 NM typically, which is distance I can see the smoke (vickers smoke mod) on a non foggy day, of course, fog night etc reduces this for both of us. I may tweak their night vision a little, its a little too hawkeye at times.


Yes, sometimes I use the weather god shortcut to reset it esp when weather gets tuck on a storm cycle or heavy seas cycle like its the north atlantic lol. I dislike having to use such a feature when on patrol though. I may just reduce the fog factor from 1.0 to 0.8 or something, see how it works.