Visibility of tracers is determined by their location on the screen

[maturin 12]

This is a glitch, but has been generally regarded as a feature.

In Arma 2, tracers are usually observed either from behind or from the side. If you are more than a few degrees past perpendicular (a few degrees in front of) to the tracer, it immediately becomes invisible. But even if the angle between your line of sight and the rounds fired is a whopping 30 or 40 degrees, the light at the rear of the bullet is still supposedly completely hidden behind it, day or night.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=100467

The general consensus in the thread linked above is that this is excessive.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=685_1276890986

This video in particular demonstrates that while a tracer headed directly towards you will be invisible, wide misses and ricochets would not be. "Tracers work both ways," after all.

I made this thread because I discovered that this is also true in Arma, only the feature is glitched. The visibility of tracers is not a feature or a misfeature, it is broken by the game's camera. The primary thing that determines whether or not you can see a tracer is not the angle of the shot but the angle of your screen.

To reproduce, place a grounded UH-1y (or any other weapon platform with a high ROF and ammo supply). Place yourself, an enemy soldier with allowdamage false, 200 m in front of its gun. Then place another man, set to playable, 100m to the side. Set this up right and the vertex inbetween the shots fired and the second soldier's line of sight to chopper will be 22.5 degrees.

Start the game and fire on the chopper until its minigun lights you up. Then switch to the other man and watch the show.

If you look at the chopper as it fires, an angle of 22.5 degrees, all tracers are invisible.

Now look at your comrade so the chopper occupies the farthest corner of your screen. Now all the tracers are all visible immediately. They lead from the muzzle, through your hapless comrade, to disappear in the distance.

Now switch back to the targeted man, your original player. All incoming tracers are invisible, as it should be. But if you rotate your head to the side so the helicopter is in the corner of your screen, you will be able to see the tracers that fall short and ricochet above your head.

This also works if you watch through the eyes of a man 300m behind the targeted soldier. You will be able to see nothing if you look at the helicopter, but a plethora of ricochets and wide misses are visible with the camera offset.

The glitch is in the camera! If we could see dead-on what our virtual peripheral vision allows us to see, tracers would seem much more immersive and realistic. The angles I saw them at seemed to corroborate both the posted videos and the field manuals. You cannot see a tracer that has your name on it, but if someone is shooting wide or bouncing rounds off objects, you will see snatches of their fire, and it is damn scary.

The tracer issue is on the bugtracker already, but is has not been represented properly. BIS programmed tracers to behave as they should, but everyone has missed the camera bug. The game should regard your entire screen as one angle for purposes of line of sight. In real life, you do not see an object from different angles just because you move your eyes. You have to move your head.

Edited June 28, 2010 by maturin

[Uziyahu--IDF 0]

Thanks for nailing this down. I'll try to test out what you're saying. It reminds me of how you can see through fog in most 3D graphics games if you just look at the target on the edges of your screen.

I also would like to see this fixed. Right now it is KILLING the suspense in a mission I am making.

Any chance you can capture a video of this with FRAPS?

Edited July 2, 2010 by Uziyahu--IDF

[maturin 12]

I don't have fraps, but here's a picture. The helicopter is in the righthand corner, firing its minigun at a man 100m in front of it. The tracer is a low-angle ricochet flying towards you from a distance of 300m. I think most people will realize that they normally can't see tracers at this angle, and it's easy to test by setting up a similar scenario.

Really, just go pick a fight with a minigun while lying down. Type 'player allowdamage false' into the big text box in the unit editor and move your screen around watching the ricochets appear and disappear.

The helicopter is firing its gun in both these pictures. However, in the second picture I am looking at it directly.

Also, I couldn't see the tracers when it was occupying the lefthand corner of the screen. I haven't figured this completely out yet.

Edited July 3, 2010 by maturin

[MrDorf 0]

I'd love to see BIS put this at the top of their fix list as it really does kill immersion.

Not everyone plays this game for hardcore milsim all the time, in fact most probably don't, and being part of a platoon on platoon sized engagement resulting in not a single tracer coming at you is just...boring. I'm fine with a tracer deadzone in the front arc (though personally, and from various evidence posted in the dozen or so threads on this topic, I think this should be a very small arc), but the complete lack of tracers when under fire by anything that you're actually looking at just doesn't make any sense. At the least give us a server side option.

On a side note, though perhaps more important to the ARMA "Big Picture", the huge tracer deadzone is extraordinarily counter-intuitive and harsh for new players to the Flashpoint/ARMA series. This is a game after all, it's best to error on the side of useful visual flair and give the hardcore players the option to remove it if they wish. Besides, this game turns away enough customers already because they feel a complete lack of situational awareness during combat, why make it even harder because of an incredibly obscure and questionably accurate "feature"?

Edited July 5, 2010 by MrDorf

[IronTrooper 0]

I'm not sure how it's in OA, but in A2 I had noticed that tracers are not too often visible. Seemed to be bound to the distance from the camera and possibly the camera angle. Maybe optimalization reasons? Anyway, I don't like guessing just from the sounds where the enemy is.

[maturin 12]

I'm not sure how it's in OA, but in A2 I had noticed that tracers are not too often visible. Seemed to be bound to the distance from the camera and possibly the camera angle. Maybe optimalization reasons? Anyway, I don't like guessing just from the sounds where the enemy is.

If you turn down the view distance, I'll warrant that the distance you can see is also dependent on the angle of the camera. In other games, it is quite clear that draw distance extends slightly at the corners of your screen. It is a common issue, but I feel that BI should find a work-around in this case, which is so important for immersion, gameplay and realism.

There is a related ticket on devheaven, but it is old and lacks this perspective. I don't have an account, so if anyone would like to vote something up there, that would be great.