I've been spending some time reading at a website dedicated to professional level builders for first person shooter games. So far I cannot find any for air and tank combat simms. FPS game companies have level(terrain) building teams and it still takes months for a "team" to produce a ready for prime time level. And their production tools are purpose designed for teams of techs to work on the same project producing different aspects of it from a master project plan. The site has web casts and articles from industry professionals who try to give tips on how to get through the time required. One point blank stated you have to develop the habit of putting a few hours every day into your project or you will never get very far at any given time. I don't have to install as many active objects and object structures as an FPS level design, And Hitech has taken care of the lighting engine for me. I'm just building a physical world 100x larger than many of the FPS levels which operate on a different scale of focus than AH3 but, with the same or more objects in a smaller space.
As far as I can tell other air and tank combat games use the two side protagonist model and pull in geo maps to create their terrains how ever large or small. Kind of like our AvA, FSO, and special events WW2 scenarios. We are the only combat simm that uses a three side protagonist model on such a vast scale and as far as I can tell. GV spawns and micro combat design has not been high on anyone's priorities until Greebo produced the AH2 craterMA and located the towns and GV spawns some distance from feilds as a strategy choice to separate the two combat types a bit. And a limitation in the AH2 terrain polygon mesh kept him from producing the tank combat crater he really wanted to put in the center. What we have in AH3 is more like he originally envisioned if I remember a conversation we had during the beta testing. Many of our AH2 best spawn and GV micro terrain combat areas were pretty much fortuitous boo boos. But, really fortuitous....
I also watched a 2017 film from an IL2 version(maybe the dev team) where they have player manned tanks and a duel between a lone T34 and a Ju87-G2. Twelve hits with 37mm AP and the T34 was not destroyed. I noticed they had bridge objects the tanks can drive over rivers in the film. Gaijin makes extensive use of destroyed static tanks and convoys set persistent on roads, along with quad 20mm auto guns that have static or AI German crew on them. And the airfields appear to have AI personnel walking around. They probably have the same max number of active players limit they always have to offset the object and detail debt. Wonder what that FPS hit would be in our MA....even in AH3 everyone's FPS starts grinding down when three or more C47 kick out troops at the same time in the air over a town. Makes me wonder what wwIIonline is sacrificing to have so many troops running around with active tanks and planes in their battles. It looks like they are using as dense of trees and clutter as we use. But, it's our planes that really run into problems in small areas with a large number of active objects and passive objects.
From watching tank combat videos from all of our competitors, our default density of trees and bushes on our terrain tiles, or how we implement them is degrees thicker than other games. In the other games there are ample locations to hide and ambush, there terrains were pulled in from geo maps but, the open spaces and country side at the same time is full of open space that a tanker can see for miles. And the occurrence of types of rolling hills stands out from game to game. Fortunately I tested texturing patterns of 1x1 mile squares to rapidly produce different sizes of AH3 rolling hills.
There are times on this current terrain that the bulldozer tool would work better by letting me pull a line, then pull it into curves, then trigger it to cut or raise it's furrows. It pulls only a straight line. But, once you discover how to texture a 1x1mile square, it's pretty fast creating rolling hillock landscape. Or you go nutz with a tiny brush and the raise hill tool.....first you paint dots, then you use the raise hill tool and click on the center of each dot.
