CPU thrifty way of adding forests

[SKurj]

Any method that improves GV playability is good by me.  

GV's have ZERO cover vs aircraft at present.  

GV 'dots' visible at extreme ranges,  trees do not hide gv's from AC... trees invisible at ranges GV's can be spotted...


SKurj

[Zigrat]

i mean denser. currently i am not sure what resolution the mesh is but it is very coarse. if ground vehicles are ever to become a non gamey non dweeby aspect of aces high and compare with the fidelity of the air combat, then the terrain mesh's resolution will have to increase to around a 100m DEM ( I believe it is much higher now like around 500m - 1km but i havent measured it).

as for graphics improvements well they are better. but really not that much.  I will go through your examples:

texture overlay introduction - on my system this looks like crap and pops in/out very annoyingly. the gradual effect present in some other games is much better

individual clouds - these are kind of cool but are very lame because you can still see icons through them

cloud banks - these look like toejam and i dont think anyone can argue with this. the borg cube effect is just lame

storms - wtf are you talking about ?

sunrise/sunset - these look cool. the sun glare effect is really lame tho, il2 does it much better

static ground clutter - not very impressive


hey i am not a programmer and no i couldnt do better but lets get real. I like aces high which is why i keep paying. I like the flight models and i like the ability to log on and instantly find people to play with without having to wait to join a coop game etcera. thats why I play. But I am not a fanboy and lets get real, aces high looks like the 1999-2000 sim that it is.


skuzzy please explain to me why front end graphics would impact bandwidth in any way ( i mean during the game not the initial download). Whether a model has 10 or 10000 polygons is irrelevant. Its updates from the server would require the same number of bytes.

[AKDejaVu]

Originally posted by Chairboy
AKDejaVu, my suggestion would specifically NOT have a large size impact on the game, either in performance or file size.  The suggestions that would dramatically increase the size of the downloads were the ones that involved radically re-writing the engine to support super fine ground detail.

Using this method, we could get the benefits without hardly any of the costs, assuming the HTC engine doesn't render hidden polygons.

I didn't say your suggestion would affect the size of the download... Zigrat's would.  I said your suggestion looks totally hideous from the ground.

AKDejaVu

[Chairboy]

Ah, touche....

[Skuzzy]

It is not neccessarily about the number of polys Zigrat, it is about processing power.  Simple:  The more polys, the more processing power needed to render it and the less available to digest the network side.
This is why traditional box games with high end graphics only offer limited network play.  There is just not enough processing power to do both for the majority of people that want to play.

In any simulation, you have to be able to get through the entire frame loop in a certain period of time or things get really funky.  Now, when we talk about time in for any given frame we are talking about milli-seconds, and not many of those.

A simulation that has any high speed objects has an even higher degree of problems if the frame loop takes too long.  Do the math.  Find the velocity of any given round and see how far the round will travel in X number of milli-seconds then you may start to see the issue.
Graphics engines have to determine a collision BEFORE it happens.  You cannot do it any other way for high speed objects or you end up with severe clipping issues.  The more polys you have, the more collision work has to be done.  The damage packet gets more and more complex as you increase the poly count of a model, if you want to be able to display a reasonable collision to a player.

Now, take 15 or 20 high poly count models and put them in one frame.  I really do not know of a typical desktop computer that could handle IL2 in that scenario without severe frame rate drops.  Oleg is a sharp guy.  If he could have rolled out massive multi-player in IL2, he would have, but he knows why it will not work at this time.

These are just design tradeoffs.  Until the mean average computer system is over 1Ghz and mean average video cards are GF3's (Non-MX) or Radeon's these tradeoffs have to be made to allow the most people a good time in the sims.

There will be a time when IL2 will look bad and we will be able to have 500+ players in a single arena, but it is not today.  Hopefully, Internet backbone connections will drop in price so companies can afford to eat an OC3 for the downloads.

[AKSWulfe]

Originally posted by Zigrat
texture overlay introduction - on my system this looks like crap and pops in/out very annoyingly. the gradual effect present in some other games is much better

Maybe so, but to have it gradual, then you effectively quadruple the size of the download. Il-2 is well over 600MBs on the CD...

Originally posted by Zigrat
individual clouds - these are kind of cool but are very lame because you can still see icons through them

On my system, sometimes I can, sometimes I can't..

Originally posted by Zigrat
cloud banks - these look like toejam and i dont think anyone can argue with this. the borg cube effect is just lame

I meant the larger cloud systems that circulate the map. But in response to how they look... tell me ONE game that has realistic weather patterns that you can fly through and that circulate? There aren't any... they are all predetermined... In Il-2 you have a choice to play the map in particular weather systems... but they don't move around the map. You take off in a weather system and it stays like that until you land and do a new mission.

Originally posted by Zigrat
storms - wtf are you talking about ?

The ones that are grey underneath.

Originally posted by Zigrat
sunrise/sunset - these look cool. the sun glare effect is really lame tho, il2 does it much better

Maybe so, but this is AH and not Il-2.

Originally posted by Zigrat
static ground clutter - not very impressive

Maybe... but Il-2 doesn't have static ground clutter that effects tanks or planes either... the game you keep comparing to AH.

Originally posted by Zigrat
But I am not a fanboy and lets get real, aces high looks like the 1999-2000 sim that it is.

I'm not a fanboy either, but I apparently have a better grasp of what can be done versus what should be done... Aces High looks nothing like it did way back in beta. The new plane models are 10x better than they were in the beginning. The effects I described above make it look even less like the game when it was first developed.

It's probably the gradual updates that cause you to believe it looks the same.. but it doesn't.


Il-2 just released the new patch, 1.04, and it has many new bugs in it including bugs with the new planes. None of these will be fixed until the next patch... unlike AH where most of these glaringly obvious bugs would of been fixed by the following week.

Storch can fly with no rear fuselage.. it just kind of glides to the ground.
109F4 can fly with no horiz stab.
P11c- when pilot dies, there's just a head floating in mid air above the pilot who's slumped over the controls... and at this point the plane is still controlable too.

Eye candy might be what you place as a big factor in flight sims, but you really shouldn't compare Il-2 unless it can support a huge arena like AH does.
-SW

[Chairboy]

Ok, maybe the implementation would be different from what I suggest, but I would like to see some method implemented for providing cover for GVs.

In the current game, GVs are easy to see clearly from miles away with no regard as to whether they are carefully navigating through jungle or blasting across grass plains with the throttle jammed forward and the driver reading a book.

If adding a texture layer that's more opaque when the tree density is higher isn't the answer, I hope that something is found.  AH is already super, don't get me wrong, I just think it's possible for it to be even better without alienating the 600mhz crowd.

[Zigrat]

skuzzy i do not understand what you are talking about. warbirds netcode ran fine on pentium 1s and as far as i know it is essentially the same as what we are using in ah today (obviously it has been incrimentally upgraded/updated but I think the principles are all the same). When you hit someone with a bullet as far as i know the damage is computed on your front end and then the damage is sent to the server (which is why you can sometimes be hit even though bullets are missing you on your fe). Would higher poly counts require more power form the front end? Yes. But i dont see why they would require more bandwidth.

SW i never said il2 was better in gameplay or in multiplayer than aces high did i? obviously these are the two most important things and obviously thats why i play ah alot more than il2. And yes the graphics have gotten slightly better in ah compared to its release (the new planes look better than the old ones) but just take a look at the explosion from a bomb blast next time and think about how similar that explosopn looks to the ones we saw in aces of the pacific ten years ago.

[AKSWulfe]

I never said that you said anything about gameplay... but to compare the two graphically means you have to compare them in terms of multiplay as well. Afterall, we could have the bestest kick bellybutton single player game ever.... but since multiplayer comes into the equation in EVERY boxed game now-a-days, then that plays into what you can do graphically.

Either they can stop devel on multiplay and make some of the bestest graphics ever, or they can stop on the graphics and make the bestest multiplay ever. Or they can try the bestest to get the best compromise between the two... which AH is doing.

Sure, the explosion bitmap looks like AOTP explosions... but the explosions in AH actually have debri which match the plane that just blew up.

Also- in order to get those perty explosions, ala B17II (the best explosions... Il-2's are childsplay compared to B17IIs explosions), then you have to make a trade off at some point.

Point is you can only push graphics so far before something else has to be done away with, and then on top of that (and something I have covered before), in order to offer two versions of the same game... a "super-stoopid-fast-PC" version with all the eyecandy you could ever want and a "super-stoopid-slow-PC" version for those with the average and below average PC would put a big hurtin' on HTC's devel time.

Instead of 3-6 months between updates, we push that to 12-15 months devel time for a single update.

You can't have your cake and eat it too with such a small team developing the best MMP game out there.
-SW

[Wlfgng]

sorry.. Ziggy's right.  IL2 blows AH away in terms of graphics and immersion.  Rain, snow, lightning, realistic graphics, fog, etc.

We all pretty much like AH better.. but to campare graphics makes AH look dated.

[AKSWulfe]

No one ever said the graphics aren't better in Il-2.... just that Il-2 would be unplayable on any anything below 1.2Ghz if it had to deal with the network transmission/recieving/encoding/decoding/processing AH has to.
-SW

[fats]

AKSWulfe,

No need to have two different FE versions for slow and fast PCs to make best out of both. Tessalate objects dynamically according to allocated time for tessallating.

You can even guarantee, up to a point, that both PCs result in same line of sight. So one doesn't see a house behind a hill while the other does.

There's a way for making the terrain more smooth that doesn't change the size of the download. Well it does but we're talking about probably quite small change here, what ever the new algorithm would take compared to the old. You can tessellate beyond the resolution of your height map to smooth stuff out. It won't add detail ( terrain features ) really but just make stuff smoother. This would of course have to be subject to LOS calculations to guarantee similar LOS for coarser and finer meshes.

Oh yeah I have no idea what kind of data structures AH uses for its terrain, and thus have no way of knowing what is already done by AH's terrain.


// fats

[715]

Originally posted by AKSWulfe
No one ever said the graphics aren't better in Il-2.... just that Il-2 would be unplayable on any anything below 1.2Ghz if it had to deal with the network transmission/recieving/encoding/decoding/processing AH has to.
-SW

That made me curious, so I just measured the network transmission overhead for AH.  I flew online at a very busy airfield (something like two dozen nearby dots on dar) while System Monitor ran in the background.  The network traffic was actually more that I had suspected but it was still pretty minor: sending 200 bytes/sec and receiving about 600 bytes/sec.  Surely processing that small amount of data is not particularly taxing for todays GHz CPUs?  

Besides, if the graphics engine is properly written, most of the polygon overhead is offloaded to the video card's graphics processing unit (ie hardware transform and lighting) thereby not taxing the CPU.

[AKDejaVu]

Actually 715.. it does add cpu overhead.  Every aircraft in sight is subject to a smoothing code that somewhat predicts the aircraft's path between updates to make the flight appear smoother.

AKDejaVu

[gatt]

Download size dont matter anymore. AH's d/l could be 80MByte with no difference. This cannot be the reason. A better terrain and real trees/bushes for tanks would be great .... then new cockpits and then ... ok, ok ...