Forgive the wordy post – I posted a TL;DR below.
I’ve been working on a theater that allows helicopters to be flyable with a VTOL flight model. It was suddenly very apparent during my low-level flying that infantry were completely missing when we flew over them. One MP test-flight turned into an investigation into the infantry issue: I had someone in 2D confirm where the soldiers were. The battalion itself was visible to him in 2D in a position directly underneath me. He could recon the battalion, but he couldn’t see any models for the soldiers in the Recon view. I couldn’t see them in 3D as I flew right on top of them. This led me to think about the issue of soldiers in BMS not being visible for me.
They are missing in Recon, even if I recon an SA-14 directly and zoom in on it. I’ve flown over infantry, as mentioned, and they are missing in 3D as well. Manpads have almost always seem to have been launched from voids of nothingness. I’ve always thought this was intentional, that the attention to the detail of soldiers was just not a priority since we fly pretty fast to notice a man on the ground. I’ve seen soldiers before in 3D in 4.33, but they looked almost like low poly trees that stood around vehicles they were attached to. I believe I saw some soldiers in 3rd party theaters, such as Kuwait. I seem to recall that the 4.34 trailer showed soldiers on a jog. More recently, I can’t seem to remember seeing a single soldier in BMS 4.35 prior to this investigation.
I edited the DB of my theater to assign SA-2 models to the SA-7 and SA-14. This worked; they were visible in recon and in 3D. This led me to think that something must be wrong with the models assigned to the SA-7 and SA-14. Checking the DB confirmed that SA-7s and SA-14s had the same model – a soldier with a rocket launcher of some sort. This model was the most detailed I seem to ever recall in BMS of a soldier, but I can’t say I remember ever seeing it in 3D.
I decided to try a workaround to our problem. I reverted the models back to their originals, and make the first weapon of the SA-7 and SA-14 each visible so we could, perhaps, spot the weapon visually at least. In the DB VCD XML files, I changed the following from 0 to 1 for the SA-7 and SA-14:
<VisibleFlags>1</VisibleFlags>
The SA-7 and SA-14 were still not visible in recon, but to my surprise the soldiers were 100% visible in 3D!
In this screenshot, we can see this little dude aiming at me. Not only that, but by changing this across the board to all infantry (ie. Land, Vehicle, Foot), I can see friendly and enemy solders alike. Manpads no longer originate from an invisible source. I can actually creep up on a battalion and spot the soldiers with the TGP (thanks to thermal) hiding among the trees. This is a gamechanger for a theater that attempts to get as close to a helicopter flight model as possible, where hovering and scanning terrain is important. Not only that, but it seems I may be able to tell if they are aiming at me or just chilling.
Forgive my ignorance, but it seems to me that these soldiers’ models are somehow being interpreted as weapons. This is why they don’t show up in Recon, just like how the missile on an SA-2 doesn’t show up in Recon. If this is the case that the SA-7 vehicle is invisible and the weapon is the model, this makes sense. The DB seems to show the solider as the model for the vehicle itself, so this seems to contradict that theory. In conclusion, I just know this change has caused soliders to be visible for me. I have no idea why, and it doesn’t fully make sense to me.
I would appreciate it if some other people could confirm my findings. I’ve been editing a lot, and I fully admit I could have made a ton of mistakes here.
TL;DR:
- I don’t remember seeing soldiers in 3D in BMS other than low-poly, tree-like soldiers, except perhaps in 3rd party theaters.
- I don’t remember seeing SA-7 or SA-14 soldiers ever.
- I edited the SA-7 and SA-14 vehicles in my theater to have their first weapon be visible.
- The soldiers completely show up now in 3D with various animations. The battlefield is alive with troops!
- These troops are still missing from recon.
- Am I hallucinating? Is stock BMS missing these detailed, visible soldiers?