Smoke behaviour - a hint

[Moxica]

[speed-of-heat]

lol if you want to spin cpu and gpu cycles making that happen ... you are from the future... 

[unknown]

The calculations are there since the implementation of the wake turbulence effect:

 

 

[speed-of-heat]

and they have a massive perf impact as well 

[Dragon1-1]

That's an overstatement unless you're running a WWII bomber formation with a full escort. For a typical mission, it's not so bad. That said, our smoke behavior is rather primitive, it's not volumetric, so it can't really be made to do things like that.

[twistking]

19 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

That's an overstatement unless you're running a WWII bomber formation with a full escort. For a typical mission, it's not so bad. That said, our smoke behavior is rather primitive, it's not volumetric, so it can't really be made to do things like that.

You can do "something like that" with sprite based smoke. It's probably way easier with sprites even. ARMA 3 does it with sprites f.e. Of course it looks less cool than the video, because the sprites are quite big and the effect will be less detailed therefore. I would assume that the smoke sprites in DCS are again bigger than in ARMA, so first of all the smoke sprites would need to shrink. Then they would need to react to the wake turbulence calculations. Should be doable without extreme performance overhead. For fixed wing, it's probably still not really worth it, but may be nice for rotary wing!?!

[Dragon1-1]

If smoke particles shrink, then there'd have to be more of them, and at least in the current implementation that seems to be expensive. In ArmA it was a thing but not nearly that spectacular. Perhaps it can be done, but I'd wait for Vulkan first. There are probably better ways of handling this than what ED uses now.

[Vettecor]

Well, we have dust effects from helos now. I assume this is in works and not too far off from being implemented.