Beach transitions!
I guarantee, that with beach transitions the terrains would suddenly look really great.
My opinion is that there are two largest reasons why people feel AH2 terrain is bad.
1) Even though they might not know what it is exactly, they still can sense that something is wrong when they fly around the terrain.
Frankly, seen from the sky, AH2 terrain isn't that bad at all. It's not as good as IL2/FB, but it's really not that bad.
However, at a glance, immediately your brain notices that something's not right. Something just doesn't look real...
There aren't any beachs around!
Here's a mockup pic I hastily did,
is the current AH2 coastline. The mountains and hills look terrific.. but the beaches.. terrible, I'm, afraid.
There are no beach transitions.. and look at the coast line - it's a "Rias Coastline", otherwise known as a "Sawtooth Coastline". Usually, this kind of 'sawtooth' pattern does not manifest unless seen from very far away. The coastline is way too exaggerated in the 'sawtooth'.
is the hasty mock up. The coast line has been smoothened, and green-beach-water transition has been added. Immediately, it looks a whole lot better.
2) The second problem is a simple one.
The terrain makers exaggerate the variances in terrain levels too much. Mountains are too high. Canyons are too deep. High hills and mounds everywhere.
In short, when we fly through the terrain, it doesn't look like a real-sized terrain. It feels like we're flying through a miniature terrain.
If AH terrain was a city, we're not flying through the skylines in a helicopter sized plane. We're like Godzilla sized planes walking through a city.
The hills and mountains need to more smooth, less exaggerated. High mountains will run smoothly for miles, low hills might not even be noticeable.. however the terrain is so bumpy everywhere that it just doesn't seem like a real world terrain.
You may not realize it, but your eyes and brains realize that no real world terrain would be so exaggerated in such a manner.
For instance, look at the above posted picture. A high, bumpy mountain region, right next to a mass of water.
In real life, for a mountain/hill region right next to an ocean region, to look that way, the scale of the pic would be like 100 miles x 100 miles. However, the above picture is an area not bigger than 5 miles x 5 miles.
We don't see mountains and hilltops shaped like pyramids at that distance... we'd see something like that when we are looking at the Himalayas from the foot hills of Nepal. Not when we fly right on top of them.
The exaggeration of terrain is too high. That's why it doesn't feel realistic.
Correct these two problems, and AH2 would feel a lot better.
