So many aircraft i fly in the sim (typically older aircraft) have engine/exhaust trails that stop far shorter then they should, produce far less smoke then they should & also stop abruptly when they should fade out at the end.
Combined, it just looks a bit comical & unrealistic. The Mriya, F-4 Phantom, Concorde & now the Vulcan for example. It’s just a bit weird. Personally, i think the heat haze needs to be dialled up substantially as well but that’s another issue.
I know it’s easier said then done but it would greatly up the realism if these things were seen to.
If the smoke effects are coded anywhere similar to previous sims, editing the lifetime of the effect isn’t hard. The issue is that it might have a negative effect on frames with weaker systems.
I’m not currently on my flight rig, but if I remember right, the syntax in the effect files resembles the cfg files. You’d have to have multiple effect files in multiple effect folders for something like that to work.
Not everyone has an unlimited budget. My first flight rig was the laptop I’m on currently. It only has a 1060 mobile card, but it ran the sim respectably with settings optimized. This is why there is a minimum required spec set, plus a recommended build list.
Third party developers’ textures and effects add-ons (REX Texture Direct, HiFi Sim ActiveSky Cloud Art or Toga EnvTex) for other sims already do this. You choose the quality of texture and effect lifetime and they install into the sim. No technical reasons stopping Asobo from giving these options.
True. Though the people that can afford top-of-the-range PCs (I’m not one of them) shouldn’t have their experience hamstrung by the sim being made capable of running high or even ultra settings on more modest systems.
The settings page has the ‘Ultra’ option next to individual settings for a reason. Asobo needs to stop continually sacrificing quality and draw distance on the altar of performance at all costs. Might as well get rid of the settings page entirely if TLOD is the only setting that has any noticeable impact.
I agree with you but I think this caused by LOD or how you call it.
I fly the IRIS PC-21 a lot and it has smoke pods which work pretty well while flying aerobatics (or formation with a few friends)
Currently not sure of the endurance of the smoke trail and I have to check that.
What I do know is that there’s no visual effect/influence of wake turbulence while flying close behind eachother.
Let’s hope that this will be implemented someday in the near future
Yea, i will say that the Just Flight Hawk has a very decent smoke pod trail in the Red Arrows variant but that is obviously treated technically differently to engine smoke trails. Also i agree with your second point too.
Then this is a one time selection and done, so if you want to change, you have to reinstall? I was thinking you were talking more along the lines of a menu option to change the quality at will, such as the cloud quality setting.
I recently discovered how to change the “sim rate” (speeding up, or slowing down time). So on long flights, I speed up time, and when you do that, the contrails get MUCH longer.
The sim could install all the textures and automatically swap to the desired ones when choosing a different quality option in the Settings page.
A folder naming convention to separate the textures / naming the files differently / using a file suffix (.off) solves this ‘problem’.
You’re making it sound much harder than it is. These solutions are already widely used and without problems by third party mods.
