Bullet impacts of other clients in multiplayer

[krzychuzokecia 717]

Not sure if I should post this here, or in Multiplayer forum, since it seems to be a feature, not a bug. Nonetheless: lately I've been messing with long-range shooting in Arma in multiplayer. I noticed, and so did my pals, that if we're shooting at targets past 1000 meters distance (or so, we haven't been able to precisely measure the cut off range) only the shooter is able to see hit effect particles - whether it's dust from misses, or blood from hits on targets. Which naturally makes spotter useless (and the whole shooting rather difficult since with some of the guns the recoil is just to big to allow shooter proper observation).

 

We've tested it with a bunch of guns both vanilla and modded (it should be noted that we're using ACE since it contains features relevant to the whole long-range shooting simulation). At first we thought that maybe the caliber of the weapon is the limiting factor (we first noticed the issue while using RHS M2010 rifle), but not only bigger caliber rifles did not behave any different in this regard (bullet impacts being invisible for players other than shooter), but the issue is present even for vehicle weapons like 30mm cannons when firing AP rounds. Ammo with defined splash damage (HE rounds) display explosion effects properly, regardless of range.

 

Note that changing video settings doesn't seem to have any impact on this, nor do view distance settings. My terrain VD is set at 5km, with object VD set to 3km, and I can see my own impacts within that 3km range no problem, even with particles set to low. But seeing other players impacts past 1km is impossible, regardless of VD or particle setting (even maximum setting of very high). I've encountered two Reddit posts describing same issue, and only answer was to use Blastcore, however it doesn't seem to work in our case (I think people answering to those Reddit posts were not really understanding the problem).

 

This makes me think that it's intended behaviour, designed probably to optimize multiplayer performance (we are playing on dedicated server). So question is: is this a hard-coded limit, or is there somewhere a parameter which allows to change this behaviour (in server config? or in particle config for bullet CfgAmmo class?)?

[pierremgi 4850]

On 12/29/2023 at 7:13 PM, krzychuzokecia said:

This makes me think that it's intended behaviour, designed probably to optimize multiplayer performance (we are playing on dedicated server).

Probably:

http://killzonekid.com/arma-scripting-tutorials-fired-projectiles/

Not sure you can do anything but creating some extra thingies (which one?) on each PC...

[krzychuzokecia 717]

I mean, I'm aware of the general locality issues with bullets, but that doesn't seem to be "the" reason of my issue, as within that 1000 meter range the impacts from other clients' shots are visible. If it would be just locality, then I wouldn't be able to see any hits apart from mine own. IMO it's related to optimization of local particle rendering performance in MP, than purely optimization of networking.

 

In theory one could make a script that would add globally executed particle effects on impact, but that would end up with double effects on impacts within 1000 meters of player.