Hills

[Ball]

The new visuals look amazing, really good job.

One thing which continues to leap out at me suggesting Aces High's past... is the hills.

They look so pyramidy (if that is even a word).  Is it possible to round them off so they do not appear so clean cut?

I had a quick photoshop to show what i mean: -

Before: -



After: -




Before: -



After: -

[rabbidrabbit]

they would look a heck of a lot better with some sort of smoothing.

[Benny Moore]

That's a great idea, but I'm not sure it would work.  Aces High II has the best netcode I've ever seen, but the graphics engine stinks.  I'm not talking about it looking bad, I'm talking about the way you get terrible frame rates for a group of textures and shapes which, in another game, would have a great frame rate.  For instance, Lock On: Modern Air Combat looks better than Aces High in every way and has a greater view distance as well, and it still has a better frame rate than Aces High (on the other hand, Lock On has a mediocre netcode).

I think that if you added that many more polygons, the frame rate would hit the floor.  Right now a hill requires only three or four polygons.  Making them look smooth would require dozens.  Imagine how choppy the game would be if suddenly it tried to take up ten times the amount of resources for hills that it does now.

[Kermit de frog]

Just check the "optimize ground polygons".

Makes the hills look round.

[Krusty]

Kermit's pulling your chain.


As for "smoothing" the hills. For folks with 3D experience, they'll tell you it's a big problem. Say you've got square, or squares, made up of 4 triangles that meet in the middle. They tent upwards to make a "hill".

So, say you want to smooth this hill. You really need to start at the points to make it look smoother, so that means adding more "slices" to the pie. Say you now have 8 triangles making up the "hill". Okay it still looks like just a cone. You need to slice it vertically (add rings going up) and then gradually reduce it. Well even adding just 1 slice means you now have 16 polygons and it still doesn't look that much better than when it had 4. So slice it again vertically and double the "slices" in the pie, and you've got 16 pie slices and 3 tiers, that's 48 polygons and it STILL looks clunky.

So, imagine the entire terrain. Every bit of it is made up of squares. Now imagine that there's 48x as many squares all in the same area!

You get a very small visual improvement (still looks blocky and chunky, with truncated domes for hills) but you're now spending almost 50x the resources for very little gain.


I have no qualms with the way HTC does their terrain. It could be much worse.

[Ball]

I think HTC are smart enough to make a way of doing it without annihilating FPS.

[croduh]

Like this Ball?


I am afraid it would just lower the fps by 2x.

[Xjazz]

Originally posted by Ball
I think HTC are smart enough to make a way of doing it without annihilating FPS.

Land mass LODs?
Much shorter maximum viewing distance?

It's possible to made a very high detailed landscape with, less say, 25 vertices per square mile object, instead current 9 per square mile terrain mesh.

[Raptor]

I think this lies more at the terrain building level. You can get smooth rolling hills fairly easily, but if you have to level off a square mile to put an object on it, or do most anything manually in the TE you will get polygon-like hills if you don't take time to adjust them afterwards.

[Benny Moore]

I've found that's it's quite impossible to make a smooth hill in the terrain editor, unless it's a very great mountain.

[Serenity]

Originally posted by duh
Like this Ball?
[IMG]I am afraid it would just lower the fps by 2x.

So for those of us with frame rates between 4 and 20, we get no 2-10? No thank you. And are those screenshots from ToD or what?

[Krusty]

custom terrain.

[nirvana]

I recall HT saying that round surfaces would cause reductions in FPS, I believe it was when they put out the P47N people were talking about the octagonal cowl.  I think that was where it was anywa.