At least with these later updates there is a more obvious visual difference now. I can recall earlier looks at previous versions of the "HD" update, and it seemed hardly different than just turning on anti-aliasing in your graphics card.
From the preview of this 2021 update, I'm not sure it's exactly what I would have called "high definition". But "graphics pack" is definitely an apt and accurate name for it. But still, need to install it, and it's certainly worth a look!
I don't know the definitive answer and haven't installed yet, but what I expect is that "fog" is a logic change, not a graphics change.
The fact you can't see as far in some places and maps more than others isn't "because they hung a bunch of fog textures in the middle of the air that you can't see through, and now those fog textures are different / more transparent / less transparent" by installing this update.
As far as I know, fog is just logic in the game for how far out a players view should be rendered & how opaque things should get as the game reaches that limit. Not "a texture thing."
I might just be talking out of my ass here and will entertain anyone who says different...
But wasn't fog used so you couldn't snipe across the entire map, and to give some relief to the hardware in your PC with this "monster" game at the time it was released? So that your puter wasn't struggling to load a metric shit ton of graphics all at once?
It would seem logical that "something" from the original BF1942 (which is all this modification directly replaces) is currently visible to us in DC, and therefore whatever change was made here will be visible to us in DC.
e.g. Although it can't really change anything about the DC-specific vehicles and textures, maybe the ground, some of the buildings, etc., still get affected because what we're seeing in DC right now are still the original BF1942 textures that didn't need DC-specific replacements.
Just a guess on my part though. Will be interested to know if anyone gets a chance to actually see it before I do.
Both pics looking at South from the top of Blue Main
This is why we chose El Alamein Day 3 for our helo training map.
View Distance was greatly improved and we modded in auto-reload in the air.
We literally spent hours practicing without having to go reload.
~ tona
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BlinkofanEye wrote: ↑September 9th, 2021, 3:57 pm
So I still don’t get if view distance is per client side map, ssm or what?
I would say SSM.
I've seen players on public servers who have changed their game files to manipulate this view distance.
We always treated it as a hack and promptly banned said player(s)
I believe bfmods had a discussion of how changing the fog and view distance in an SSM did not affect clients, and they continued using the values in their client-side maps. (Which is presumably in line with the idea they could try and hack their client-side map to have a value different than the other players using the unmodified maps; and different from whatever value the server-side map has.)
Changing the value in an SSM did have an effect, but only for things that the client relied upon the server for. For example, although changing the view distance in an SSM didn't affect how far the client player could see visually, it did still affect how far away items would appear in the mini-map being shown on the client.
The first rule of UA is we do not talk about Slavic's soggy health packs.
The second rule of US is we do NOT talk about Slavic's extra soggy health packs.
BangBangOw<CP*SF> wrote: ↑September 8th, 2021, 5:40 pm
Yeah you're right about the buildings.. those are all custom/mod related objects... only a few vanilla objects are used in DC.
All the trees/bushes will be from vanilla, and then of course on you vanilla maps almost all of those buildings are from vanilla...
But take nas, basrah nights... oil fields... urban siege.. were talking l a lot of buildings that probably won't be affected by the graphics enhancer.
We will have to see.
I think we should be glad that the graphics update is at least available for the base game. On a map like Lost Village one could really see the texture changes since this map uses 99% vanilla assets.
I think such a conversion for DC and DCF would drastically increase archives' file sizes and would have quite an impact on performance.