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View Distance Error


Mirzayev
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While messing with the Challenger 2 on the tank range, I found that some targets are completely invisible when looking at them with thermals. I decided to further test this and found inconsistencies between "what could be seen" with various sights at roughly the same distance of around 2,300 meters.

 

M1A2 View - Daysight and Thermal WFOV:

237917350_M1A2ViewDaysight.thumb.jpg.76ad6ebfd7dcc9dc7a8ff182b1051013.jpg

275707033_M1A2ViewThermalWFOV.thumb.jpg.f297235f32f62a9ff4efe8fad7ba09a2.jpg

 

M1A1 View - Daysight and Thermal WFOV:

 

387539953_M1A1ViewDaysight.thumb.jpg.87e0a503bccd98e2383c43d72227281c.jpg

1967023106_M1A1ViewThermal.thumb.jpg.fc778997f060ba8f8d33a399a1f34c1a.jpg

 

Challenger 2 View - Daysight and Thermal WFOV/NFOV: 

760881325_Challenger2ViewDaysight.thumb.jpg.b5aab757a834df85e28ec7ab7b37296b.jpg

1422718653_Challenger2ViewThermalWFOV.thumb.jpg.c7a4f92de7c7a4e048bf11bfb4bd033c.jpg

604437108_Challenger2ViewThermalNFOV.thumb.jpg.2abd5d0cd339e649d354d58d29654c25.jpg

 

Test scenario is attached. I first discovered it on the tank range. 

Test.sce

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Yeah. It doesn't take too much movement to affect the viewing angle and it's especially noticeable with long focal lengths and objects at a relatively close horizon. I've experienced it while using my SCT for terrestrial viewing and its swing radius is only around 3 feet. Not that it couldn't still be a glitch as it does seem a bit exaggerated if that is modeled. I guess the lower resolution of the thermal sight could also add to it. Just a guess from someone who has never crewed a tank.

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24 minutes ago, SippyCup said:

Yeah. It doesn't take too much movement to affect the viewing angle and it's especially noticeable with long focal lengths and objects at a relatively close horizon. I've experienced it while using my SCT for terrestrial viewing and its swing radius is only around 3 feet. Not that it couldn't still be a glitch as it does seem a bit exaggerated if that is modeled. I guess the lower resolution of the thermal sight could also add to it. Just a guess from someone who has never crewed a tank.

 

Yeah, height shouldn't matter here since it is on a completely flat map. Neither should thermal imager resolution or quality, especially since all three targets can be seen in the M1A2's daysight, but one vanishes when using thermals. Targets shouldn't disappear from this plane of existence based on magnification at only 2,300 meters... there should be some sort of signature.

Edited by Mirzayev
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Found that this phenomena is related to terrain draw distance, specifically extremes on the low end. When joining an MP server with different settings, the terrain draw distance will use those settings, but will not reset to prior user specifications. Temporary fix is to just reset these each and every time to default, or whatever your preferred specifications are. Having the ability to save a "preset" that automatically reverts between game sessions might be a nice patch.

 

Resetting them to default seems to have fixed this particular issue as a whole. Again, not sure why they are radically different based on the platform being used with the same settings applied. 🤷‍♂️

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Didn't catch the part about the tank range, looking on my desktop now I see it's flat. But things like grass or slight rise in the foreground will do this in reality. The visual angle of a 2.5 meter tall tank 2.3 km away is only 0° 3' 0.74''. That tiny slice of vision can easily be diminished just from lowering your perspective, even just a couple of feet. Obviously this is common sense and I'm not trying to insult your intelligence, but long optics act like they exist in another dimension. They magnify not only the image, but our perception of the physics involved. Things that happen constantly that we don't notice because our eyes are stuck at such a short focal length.

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2 hours ago, Mirzayev said:

When joining an MP server with different settings, the terrain draw distance will use those settings, but will not reset to prior user specifications.

That's the bug (now registered as #10240), as far as I can see.

 

The rest seems to work as to be expected (I think I covered some of this in the final appendix of the user's manual when it's about the resolution of the human eye and the resolution of monitors ... which, in all fairness, have made great progress over the last two decades).

 

Excursion into the basics: For each thermal camera, Steel Beasts uses the resolution that represents the sensor best. If the thermal sensor is 200x160 pixels, to give an extreme example, while you're running Steel Beasts in 4K resolution on a fancy graphics card and monitor, then clearly you can see more detail in the daysight (almost 300 times as much, since the 4K monitor is about 9 Megapixels while the thermal sensor in the given example offers just 32K pixels in resolution). And if the apparent size of the target shrinks below the pixel resolution in the thermal view, it may effectively vanish.

Let's say your sight has a field of view of 5° (88.8 mil); if our thermal sensor were of 200x160 size, the angular resolution of a single pixel is .44 mil horizontally and .55 mil vertically, and anything smaller than that will only appear as a subsample on your screen; if it's not particularly bright, it might get completely lost in the sensor noise. 

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8 hours ago, Ssnake said:

The rest seems to work as to be expected (I think I covered some of this in the final appendix of the user's manual when it's about the resolution of the human eye and the resolution of monitors ... which, in all fairness, have made great progress over the last two decades).

 

With respect to your excellent and in-depth technical explanation, no, it doesn't work as expected.

 

Again, I draw your attention to the difference between the Daysight WFVO and the Thermal WFOV with the M1A2. Notice how the center tank dissappears completely at less than 2.4 KM? That shouldn't happen.

 

Nor should there be such a significant difference between what is seen between the Challenger 2's Daysight compared to that of the M1 series, since there is no thermal resolution leading to degraded visuals to speak of. All three targets are not able to be spotted with the Challenger 2's daysight, when they can all three be clearly viewed by those on the M1 series. This shouldn't happen. 

 

Again, we are talking around 2.3 KM here. That isn't a massive distance even for the Mk1 Eyeball in regards to spotting something as large as an MBT in an open field. 

 

 

Edited by Mirzayev
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But in WFOV the situation is even worse, as the limited sensor resolution has to cover triple the field of view. I'm not saying that this is the explanation for what you're describing, but WFOV in general makes targets disappear at a third of the range than NFOV.

Now, let me re-read what you described, seems like there's something that I overlooked.

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Like you mentioned earlier the Terrain detail distance General setting needs to be very low for this effect to be so obvious. It happens sooner with the C2 daysight because it's got a bit wider field of view, making the angular size of the tanks smaller so they drop below the threshold at a shorter distance compared to the M1 daysight.

 

SS_12_37_36.thumb.jpg.2cdc721dc75757f619a7a9d5f21b64dd.jpg

 

SS_12_38_05.thumb.jpg.d07f01569225d4b747d860204653e499.jpg

Edited by Rotareneg
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12 hours ago, Ssnake said:

if the apparent size of the target shrinks below the pixel resolution in the thermal view, it may effectively vanish.

 

This is exactly what I was referring to. Great to know it's modeled (or just an inherent byproduct at any rate) because it's important. Are the resolutions of any of these systems classified, forcing you to guess?

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