Visibility question

[allthumbs 0]

I see the default visibility is set at 1200. Is there an advantage/disadvantage to raising it? What is the distance most people set this to?

[franze 196]

View distance represents how far you can see in meters. The higher the view distance, the further out you can see. This is pretty resource intensive, so most settings are typically 2000-3000.

[allthumbs 0]

Thanks for the help

[wipman 1]

Hi, the advantage is that you can see the enemy aproaching or just iddle at longer ranges wich allows you to take the time to make a plan to ambush 'em or to react to their advance; the disadvantage of the higher view distance is the performance, if you suffer "hardware lag" then it'll be harder for you to control you weapon, to give orders to your AIs or team mates or basically, play. But, with a smaller view distance... your reaction time and actions could be performed at a natural smooth speed; with the disadvantage that the AI can see you but you can't see 'em or their shots until they or their shots reach out the view distance that you've setted up; a good valance between distance and performance is the best commonly, which don't saves you from suffer a huge "hardware lag" from time to time depending on how many particles "are in the air", how many units and objects on the island, how many addons you're using and how many units you've under your control, more AIs = wrost performance, more human players = a bit less bad performance. I hope that this helps you too, i use to have the view distance set to 2500m because i don't use to take anything with wings, choppers and much less planes as i don't have a joystick. Let's C ya

[sEveron 10]

1st thing: I play with ACE only, as without it Vanilla Arma isn't really worth playing anymore. All data are gathered from my ACE Domination games.

1200m is the effective range of common infantry man and you probably wont be able to hit or otherwise affect anything further than 1200m away, so for common infantry it makes no difference, you can stay at 1200m.

If you are sniping with M107/M109 or KSVK you are able to hit targets at 1200m and further, so it would be nice to be able to see them, in that case viewdistance of 2000m is probably sufficient.

Now the real application of larger viewdistance comes to live where you are manning vehicles. With BMP/Bradley cannon you can engage targets at 2000m, with tank cannon (T72/T90 as the Abrams even in ACE doesn't have proper optics and aiming at anything further than 1.5km is a wild guess bussiness) you can actually hit stationary targets up to 5km, so range should be set accordingly.

With choppers, it seems that 2-2.5km engagement range is most comfortable, as it is just out of range of strela/stinger missile, therefore in serious gunning it is a must that pilot and gunner have viewdistance at 3km+ so they can see enemy vehicles on the radar BEFORE they get in their effective firing range.

In my personal experience, flying any kind of jets with viewdistance lower than 5km makes no sense. A10, beeing relatively slow can be flown pretty well at 5km viewdistance, but if you fly Su27 with speeds exceeding 600units it can become too short, and I sometimes find myself flying jets with viewdistance set to 10km for better orientation.

The further you see, the more time you have between spotting the target on the radar and being to close to it to properly engage, so larger viewdistance is often better.

Flying a jet with 1200m viewdistance results in crashes quite often, because you have very little time between spotting a mountain and hitting it, same with ground/water etc.

[wipman 1]

Hi, the View Distance do not have a direct hit on the radar when you fly a chopper or a

plane, same for the tanks but with reserves... the only change is that if you handle some

Fire And Forget weapon like the AGM-114K Hellfire... the ground targets will become active

sooner than with few view distance, same for the OPFOR planes or choppers and the AIM 9

Sidewinder; with the tanks, APCs and IFVs is the same but they show as active (red on the

radar) a bit later. The problem is that the draw distance for objects don't goes directly

related to the view distance, wich is bad... because you wont see any tank at 5000m

maybe at 4000m from the air, and like 3800m from the ground. This is a big problem.

And by the way, i don't use ACE or any other big overall mod, i preffer stand alone addons

and signed replacement addons for those stand alone addons, this don't haves a so big

impact on the load times or the game's performance on my mid-end computer. Let's C ya