Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: SELECTOR on January 10, 2004, 01:33:40 PM
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i like the way things are slowly comming along.. BUT the trees look so bad.. from any angle... why do they look like a privet hedge all flat on top.... i for one have never seen trees like these..
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They used to be worse.
Before:
(http://www.onpoi.net/ah/pics/users/ah_135_1073847059.jpg)
After:
(http://www.onpoi.net/ah/pics/users/ah_135_1067694976.jpg)
Nice-looking high poly trees are hard to do in a flight sim and would KILL any sytem with low framerates. Unless you want a terrible framerate, the trees have to have a low poly count. The only other way to do it would be to have a couple spread out really nice trees.
would you rather have a few spread out nice trees or vast, expansive forests of "flat" trees?
I would rather drive through a large forest of trees for cover and immersion.
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IMO they look pretty good considering the limitation they are dealing with (i.e., frame rates and relatively small pc's). I'm guessing its going to add a lot to the usefullness of gv - otherwise the fuss doesn't make sense. The canopy looks very impressive within the limitations.
Consider the cpu power used to make effects in Titanic and the fact it looks terribly outadated and obviously computer generated after about six or seven years. Computer graphics are like keeping up with style. You do, but you always look goofy in old photographs. A good reason to stick to blue jeans and plaid shirts :D
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I don;t know if it'd cause a performance hit, or how much of one if it did, but IMO, if the horizontal planes used in the trees were given a little - just a little - visual thickness, it'd help. What makes things look quite so weird from ground level is that our systems often find themselves trying to render the side of a textured surface of zero thickness.
Perhaps giving those bits of teh trees a little "solidity" might help.
The only other thing I can think of that might would be to ensure that the vertical bits of the trees contain bits that spread out to conform with the horizontal canopy. That might be easier to implement, but would take work by the modellers/graphics folk to get the trees looking as "right" as they can.
All that aside, I think the trees are great, considering. They will do the job of giving GVs a chance to hide from planes, and with the extra terrain stuff generally, it should make ground battles a lot more interesting.
Esme
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The treetops are 2d making them 3d would be a huge framerate hit.
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Aye, I know that. I wasn;t suggesting actually making them 3D objects. But what I don't know is whether the clever stuff in the rendering software can be told to make a 2D plane look as if it had a certain thickness (default black, or if there's a choice of colours, green) when seen edge-on anyway. If it can, that should be much quiicker, surely?
Esme
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There isn't esme, and to give you an idea to make them have an edge would take 6 polies instead of 1. Huge FPS hit
HiTech
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hitech,
What would the hit be for making the tree trunks a "+" (when vied from directly above) instead of a "-"?
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- is one poly
+ is 2 polys
Logicaly it would be twice the hit that trees are now.
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LOL! Enough already! Gentlemen, I didnt ever suggest making the horizontal bits 3D objects! No extra polys! Just kind of wondering whether the 3D standards these days are smart enough to allow a 2D object to be extruded a teeny bit so that it appears to have a small amount of depth in the third dimension. I'm happy to take your word for it that it isn't, Hitech. And all else aside, I still think teh trees as they are are a damned nice improvement over what we've had before!
:-)
Esme
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Just remember something i learned from doing graphics in school.
There's a way to give the impession of depth of a 3d object drawn on a 2d surface whereby you have the forword edge of the object have a slightly thiner and slightly lighter coloured outline, and the back edge a slighter darker coloured thicker outline.
Is there any real time rendering filter(?) that can do this and not pork the frame rate?
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Kooky question, does the DX9 support for bump mapping support the concept of extreme bumps? Eg, you draw a single 2-dimensional polygon and you apply a bump mapping with a single bump in the middle that happens to be as tall as the polygon is wide. Using a 2D circle as an example, you would end up with a shape that looked like a bullet or a bell from the side, and the game wouldn't need to do any extra processing, only the video card.
Is this feasible? On non-DX9 cards, it would look like it does now, on DX9 friendly cards, the trees would look full.
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Originally posted by zmeg
The treetops are 2d making them 3d would be a huge framerate hit.
Planes need a very far horizon, but vehicles do not need more than half a "detailed" mile around, farther than that may be nice the way it is now. How about that "extra detailed" half of a mile only for GVs? GVs do not roll and do not turn fast, frame rate is not so critical for them.
BTW, look at the picture post by brady here:
Name this 736 (http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=105760)
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Simple fewer trees and more detail= same polys?
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Enable flame trowers and axes?
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Well, from what I've seen posted on these boards, AH players have relatively weak PCs, as compared to players of other Massively Multiplayer games. I think HiTech is doing a really good job of cutting the nessasarry corners in the right places.