Originally posted by Sabre
At the risk of sounding ungrateful, what about the issue of colliding with trees and other terrain objects? Since you've gone to the trouble and expense of creating new objects for the ground war, it stand to reason that this issue will become even more important to resolve. It makes no sense to create an earthen berm to hide your tank behind if everytime you bump into it your vehicle explodes. The same goes for all the other cool looking TB-objects added in the last TE. Grasing the corner of a building or tree happened regularly in real life. If we have to be that cautious around terrain objects, there's little incentive to trying to use them for cover and concealment.
Also, particularly with the introduction of permanent ground features, an issue of visibility comes up.
When you're out tooling around in a GV, you don't see all of the trees, rock formations, sheep, or whatever the terrain designer has picked for random ground cover; at a certain range from your vehicle, the ground cover doesn't get drawn.
Unfortunately, it appears that when it doesn't get drawn, it doesn't
exist. On a number of occasions in all of the terrains that the MA rotates through, I have observed that tank cannon rounds are stopped completely by trees, even if the shell trajectory just touches a leaf. However, if the tree is not drawn in your view, your FE doesn't perform collision detection against it, so you can fire through a tree that is blocking your target's fire back to you, simply because they're close enough to see it and you're not (and the converse, taking hits from shells that fly unconcerned through trees that block your outgoing shells).
Particularly with the giant boulders in the AKDESERT map, you can
think you're safely hidden behind a terrain object, but because your opponent is far enough away for the terrain object (but not your GV) to be ignored, they see you sitting there in open terrain with your bellybutton hanging out begging for them to shoot you.