Fog Visibility Range

[Cyber]

How to change the visibilty range 1.3 on like 2000m that I can view the whole map?

[Red Devil]

sky.visibilityrange

sky.fogrange

[Cyber]

Yeah... I know the console-commands, but they arent working.

[General BlackDragon]

Those commands only work in the MAP EDITOR. Dirty cheater

Also, fog range takes 2 values, start and end to control the fade.

[MrTwosheds]

In 1.3 this max setting can only be set by the map maker in bz2 edit.exe, it cannot be extended further than that locally. In older versions it could be set locally on any map and was obviously used by some strat players to gain a visibility advantage over other players.
So tough Cyber, we did that deliberately. Have a nice day
Nice to know that everyone has the same visibility though isn't it.

[Cyber]

D'oh, was thinking so.

[Zero Angel]

Aye. On 1.2, I made a post about newkeys encouraging everyone to add the visibility range bind because it improves playing experience -- especially on some maps that have really low draw distance (450m is good, but some maps use distances as low as 250m). So it would be nice if visibility range boost was a server-side setting, as in % (ie: 75%-150% range) and it increased visibilityrange, fogrange, and multiworld.neardistance accordingly -- so that everyone could benefit from it, and people who cant handle higher vis ranges would be able to set a limit via gameprefs. Just one of those 'would be nice' kind of things.

[MrTwosheds]

Making it server side, would cause problems for those with lower performance pc's and probably result in more "bad games".
Certainly in strat having a greater visibility range than your opponent is a very big advantage. I can clearly recall the game when I first figured out that people were doing this, they carelessly told each other what I was doing in my base on all chat, me I could only see 1/3 of the way down the map, they could sit in their base and watch me in mine, I was intercepted every time I left it, and as a client the server performance was very poor.
A level playing field is a good thing. If people want to see far, it is simple to alter a map, upload at bz2maps and play it as much as you wish, with people who can also see that far.
If you set it to 2000m, you probably won't get many games on it, those who don't just quit because of the poor performance, may well crash out as their Pc's overheat.

[Red Devil]

i added dynamic visibility range alteration to G66 awhile back. if you want to see it in action, run G66 and set Mission Start Time to something other than off and set Planet Rotation to something besides off.

[MrTwosheds]

The best maps are the fast maps, visibilityrange between 250 to 600, further than this will make Bz2 work very hard.

[Zero Angel]

Making it server side, would cause problems for those with lower performance pc's and probably result in more "bad games".
Certainly in strat having a greater visibility range than your opponent is a very big advantage. I can clearly recall the game when I first figured out that people were doing this, they carelessly told each other what I was doing in my base on all chat, me I could only see 1/3 of the way down the map, they could sit in their base and watch me in mine, I was intercepted every time I left it, and as a client the server performance was very poor.
A level playing field is a good thing. If people want to see far, it is simple to alter a map, upload at bz2maps and play it as much as you wish, with people who can also see that far.
If you set it to 2000m, you probably won't get many games on it, those who don't just quit because of the poor performance, may well crash out as their Pc's overheat.

That's odd, because almost everyone I play with has FPS's that are regularly in the hundreds. Far higher than their screen is actually able to provide.

Also, server side means -- if your FPS hurts too much -- set your local limits. That ability already exists in gameprefs. As does the ability of the game to adjust settings on the fly if FPS gets too low. Players who have PCs barely capable of running bz2 could just host their own games, with reduced visibility if it ever became such a problem.

[MrTwosheds]

That's odd, because almost everyone I play with has FPS's that are regularly in the hundreds.

Yes that's because of the great work GSH has done on bz2! and that most of the maps are still set to 1999 pc capabilities, often set to around 250m, I am simply trying to make 2 points, a level playing field is a good thing, and how to not over do it, 2000m will reduce the performance of an online game and it may well be much more obvious to the client than it is to the server. I like my bz2 fast and recall with a shudder how some games used to almost grind to a halt and become unplayable, its still happens if there is allot going that needs to be drawn, some GH maps for example.
In my own estimation (from bz2edit) visibility ranges of up to 600, should maintain good performance for a strat game on most peoples machines, after that performance will start to drop off noticeably.

[Ded10c]

A few months ago my framerate in online play would never go above 40Hz. If I was having a particularly bad day it could drop below 10.

[Zero Angel]

A few months ago my framerate in online play would never go above 40Hz. If I was having a particularly bad day it could drop below 10.

That's pretty bad. I've noticed that your ability to react to situations begins to decline at about 30FPS. For myself, I was getting a low framerate only because I was running BZ2 at a very high resolution (1920x1080). Lowering the resolution helped. Also it's good to check that nothing is running in the background that chews up your CPU. There's probably some changes to 'advanced' graphics settings (ie: framebuffer stuff, bit depth etc) in the BZ2 graphics options but who knows what those do.

I recall that at least for 1.2, lowering the bit depth (to 16-bit) seemed to have improved framerate for some people. I don't know if it's different in 1.3.

[Ded10c]

Just an old PC, thats all.