restore tracer smoke option?

[xanthus]

Not sure what the right forum was for this...

Per thread title; there used to be an option to disable tracer smoke, but for whatever reason it was removed from the game some years back.

Would it be possible to have this option restored?

Having seen plenty of tracer fire from e.g. hull and turret-mounted machine guns in real life, the current tracer smoke in the game is just immersion-breaking in its cartoonishness. The tracer smoke stays in the air for roughly a second or so (when in reality, it should be more like a 1/10th or a 1/100th of that if at all). Disabling tracer smoke helped immensely. 

While we're at it, decreasing the opacity of the tracer texture would also help. In real life, tracers are often not especially visible during daylight.Famous long exposure photos where the image is saturated by giant, bright tracers are extremely deceptive; these tracers are nearly instantaneous in terms of visibility (blink and you miss it), and very much unlike the current tracers in the game.

If it we're up to me, tracer *color* would actually be changed to be in accord with historic colors actually used even as the opacity is decreased (e.g. a much deeper, more visible red). It was the color of the tracer that made it worthwhile in terms of visibility, not the Wile E. Coyote effect of having a tracer and its smoke remain suspended in mid-air.

Edited June 18, 2018 by xanthus

[jwilly]

It used to be that disable-options had to be provided because some people were running borderline-capable machines. Not likely anymore.

Selectively disabling visual effects will tend to give the clean-screen player a visual advantage. That runs counter to CRS's best interests, which are to design a great-looking, great-playing game.

So if there's a valid complaint about visual effects, it should be directed toward fixing their realism...not making them able to be individually turned off.

[xanthus]

9 minutes ago, jwilly said:

It used to be that disable-options had to be provided because some people were running borderline-capable machines. Not likely anymore.

Selectively disabling visual effects will tend to give the clean-screen player a visual advantage. That runs counter to CRS's best interests, which are to design a great-looking, great-playing game.

So if there's a valid complaint about visual effects, it should be directed toward fixing their realism...not making them able to be individually turned off.

 

Just to clarify, turning off the tracer smoke would greatly enhance their realism and overall graphical fidelity of the game, as I hope I made the case in the original post. This was the one and only reason why I ever turned them off. Just like the post-render filter (which so vomit-inducing and visually degrading that it frankly should have been removed entirely from the game a long time ago).

I mention all of this because I just created a Youtube channel where I'll be posting 4k high bit-rate videos of WWIIOL. I play in 4k with 8x SGSSAA, some mild OGSSAA and -2.5 lod bias; finally found capture software that will maintain the visual fidelity (OBS studio wouldn't work). Barring an 8K monitor (which I can't afford), I believe that what you'll see on my videos is the best that WWIIOL can look visually right now (the exception is the lack of normal maps due to the longstanding black tree bug). The tracer smoke is really glaring in its unrealistic cartoonishness.

Could also mention that I have to drastically alter the color grading of the videos before I can upload them (unfortunately, this is also a long-standing problem in the game). But I digress...will get into all of that in a subsequent thread/

Edited June 18, 2018 by xanthus

[imded]

In preference at your 1st screen (persona level).