Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Chairboy on April 16, 2002, 04:58:11 PM
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Hi guys,
I have an idea for a thrifty way of implementing forest cover in the game (for GVs). In areas designated as forests, add an additional polygon layer that hovers something like twenty or so feet above the forest floor and has a texture mapped to it with green noise for the 'covered areas and transparency set for the areas of the polygon that are open. Make this 'forest layer' so it is transparent to weapons fire so that its major purpose is to provide cover, not protection.
This could make GV vs. GV engagements more interesting because we could hide a little, and it would make aircraft vs. GV stuff more interesting too because a clever GV pilot could slink through forest with the intention of avoiding aircraft instead of just setting off on a straight line towards his target.
The advantages of this are that forested areas would be more then just obstacles to GVs, they would also have a slight benefit.
Regards,
Chairboy
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You mean.. do it just like IL-2 does it? ;)
AKDejaVu
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Well, I haven't seen IL-2, so I thought I was being pretty clever. Heh heh...
So, what do people think? This could really add some fun play to the game.
:eek:
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It works well for the air to ground appearance for camoflauge... but its cheezy as all getout from the ground.
AKDejaVu
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i think the best way to do it would be to fundamentally change vehicle and aircraft front ends. when selecting an aircraft, you would get a less detailed ground modeling with much higher visibility range (30 miles or whatever we have now). for GVs switch it to 5 miles visibility and up the poly counts accordingly.
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Do the math on the terrain download size zigrat.
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Here's a quick visual representation of what I mean, just in case there's any confusion.
(http://hallert.net/images/gvidea.gif)
One reason this might work is that it doesn't require making huge, sweeping changes to the UI.
It would probably be most effective to have the opaque areas be where tree concentration is high. If the game engine can deal with alpha channels, you could even have partial transparency to simulate partial coverage (ie, branches, etc).
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i think we discussed this in the TE forum over a year ago.
NUTTZ
Originally posted by Chairboy
Here's a quick visual representation of what I mean, just in case there's any confusion.
(http://hallert.net/images/gvidea.gif)
One reason this might work is that it doesn't require making huge, sweeping changes to the UI.
It would probably be most effective to have the opaque areas be where tree concentration is high. If the game engine can deal with alpha channels, you could even have partial transparency to simulate partial coverage (ie, branches, etc).
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hitech well clearly your goal of keeping download sizes small is admirable. its great that users on slow connections can download ah in not too much time. but for users like me who can pull down 150 megs an hour no problem download size is really a non issue. with the advent of htc offering cds of aces high for 5 dollars i seedownload size becoming less and less of an issue.
your competitors all have download sizes at least 4 times as big as aces high. like i said, excessive download sizes are certainly not desirable but at some point of the game is going to be able to complete visually with the other flight sims out there.
personally i think while download size should be a consideration, if a 56k user (who can pull down 10 megs an hour) can download the game overnight (ie start up a download before going to bed and have it in the morning) then its pretty much a non issue (other than the added cost of providing the bandwidth on your end - i have no idea how expecive this would be for you).
hitech, please take my advice as a longtime customer who must have paid hundreds of dollars over the few years ive been playing. when i first started playing aces high in 2000 visually it was competing with the likes of european air war. but the standard has changed a bit. In aces high right now I maintain a steady 70 fps at 1600x1200 32 bit resolution. I think I could afford to have some more eye candy and still nto break teh performance budget (which is a testament to you really since I get fantastic performance at such a high resolution)
Just as a final example hitech, there are tens of thousands of players playing a modification for half life called counterstrike. this downloadable mod has attracted these thousands of users despite the download size being nearly a hundred megs.
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Come on, we have had the same 4 maps for the last 15 years. I think we could handle a few big downloads.
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I agree with Zigrat it's a nice attempt to keep download small for users with slower connections(like me) but even I at this time many of the new updates I have to leave downloading overnight and with new programs that let you resume your download even if the connection is dropped . Large downloads are an issue in the sense that I can't play right away, but I don't mind much and if it means adding more cover for Gvs increases the size of it, I have no problem with it, considering that in 1.10 we have a new Perk GV I think it would work well if vehicles had somewhere to hide or at lease conceal themselves much better than they can now,nowhere.
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IF they DO implement this, I smell nasty 'U'NOE flying :D
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The download will only be a problem for the people who actually have to pay for their dialup time ($1/hour) and who can't get the cd because they live in europe..
But many of us europeans have cable or dsl connections just for the reasons mentioned above so I agree also, downloads can at least double from present without creating a single problem for 85% of current users.
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2D treelines simliar to the smoke rounds the tanks fire now.
Oh, and I would rather have the trees and download more than not.
Hans.
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Definitively download size should not be the problem. I remember downloading 70Mb patches with a 56k modem as surelly most of us have done.
Now imagine, two more months til 1.10 and then 80Mb patch available, are we really going to consider that a problem? IMO, not at all. Obviously, if we have a 100Mb patch every week, then I agree, that would be a problem.
About FPS, what AH really lacks is a flexible system to configure the detail level, and this mandatory option is available in any other sim as far as I know. Changing screen mode doesnt help at all when the problem is derived from the number of polygons. In the other hand, ground battles are not so dependant on FPS as air combat, so, a more detailed terrain for groun units wont hurt the playability.
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Uh guys, you are all thining about the last mile for the download (i.e. your end of the Internet connection). There is a real cost for downloads from the ISP side.
You already knows what happens when HTC does a release, now multiply the download problem by several magnitudes. A single DS3 can barely handle the downloads and give resonable download rates. Double the size of the download and suddenly we need to have 2.5 DS3's.
Now we are talking about hurting HTC financially. When you talk about other products that are huge in comparison, most of them sell the product as a box, and/or have higher subscription rates, and/or are not massive multiplayer games.
HTC would be forced into one of three possible decisions, in this case.
1) Eat the costs of the additional bandwidth. This would effectively put them out of business, in my opinion.
2) Raise the monthly subscription rate accordingly. I know many of you would pay more, but many would not. I think this would effectively do the same as number 1 in the long run.
3) Sell the game and increase the monthly subscription rate, but not as much as number 2. This would hamper thier growth as one of the main attractions to AH is you can try it with no risk or obligation. For the client who has had cursory thoughts about trying a game like this, it would serve to deter them from even considering it. So subscriptions would drop and we are back to number 1 again.
There are really no good solutions to this problem. At least, none that would not require extra costs that HTC would have to eat.
From what I have been able to determine, HTC is one of the few companies in this genre who may actually be doing well at it, from a financial point of view. One the prime reasons is the download size. While they do eat the costs of the download pipes, they can keep the pipes resonable and in tune with the growth of the customer base.
Ther are no services available on the Internet today where they could place thier files for downloads that would not cost them an arm and a leg, save the few players that use thier personal Internet service for mirrors.
More and more ISP's are moving to bandwidth pricing schedules for commercial entities and even for personal use. This type of pricing pretty much mandates HTC keep the download as small as possible.
HTC cannot afford to think about today, without thinking about tomorrow.
Now, as fasr as video options go, the same problem as above applies. To offer the high end guys options to allow higher poly counts and nicer eye candy, HTC would double the size of the download, at least. The art would have to be revisited and it would take probably twice as long to get a version done than they do today.
Remember how impatient everyone got about 1.09? Double the time and ask yourself, would you have waited? Many would, many would not have.
You guys need to understand that eye candy costs. It costs in file download size, time to release, and support. Nothing is free when it comes to 3D graphics. There is a price to pay for all of it.
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HTC, just send out CD's like AOL does - one about every 45 days :)
I promise I won't use it as a coaster :)
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While you may be joking Eagler, you bring up another point I missed.
Sending out CD's to everyone is not cheap. Who eats the costs of the CD? The cost of shipping? The cost of the additional man power to handle the logistics of this?
How do you solve the above problems without bankrupting HTC?
And they still have to deal with the new downloads, as you just cannot blanket the world with a ba-zillion CD's (AOL not withstanding, but if HTC had the revenue stream of AOL,..well a bunch of things become possible then).
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skuzzy,
well like i mentioned in my post i said bandwidth of the download might be a consideration. but htc is ging to face a problem in a year or so. for right now i am content with the current graphics etcera. but i can guarantee you that at the end of 2003 if the terrains here are still comprised of a total of 5 256x256x256 bitmaps i wont be here. at that time 3 ghz machines will likely be standard.. so why should we be playing a game that runs well on 600 mhz???
hitech has talked about adding infantry etcera in the past, but they would be laughable without a terrain mesh that is at least an order of magnitude larger than the current one.
i own il2 and just the patch for that game to fix some bugs was 60 megs..
as for the cds well a cd costs less tan a dollar and media mail costs like a dollar so if there are four updates a year it costs htc mabye 6 dollars per customer to send em out. out of the 180 bucks we pay em a year this isnt that bad really -- like 3%. It might be cheaper for them than wasting the bandwidth.
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If the goal is to make GVs harder to spot from the air when they are in a forest, just turn off their (enemy) icons when they are in the trees. Maybe make the dot harder to see, too. Don't know if it would be easier on the CPU, but it wouldn't increase the D/L size.
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Zigrat, you are talking about a year down the road and comparing that to today. No one has said HTC would not improve the graphics. They have done so over the last 3 years.
HTC does a good job watching the market to get an idea of the men average CPU and codes appropriately for it. This is just good business sense.
I have not seen anyone from HTC say they would not improve the graphics and have seen them improve the graphics over the last 3 years.
I will tell you that IL2, which seems to be what everyone wants HTC to do graphically speaking, could not support 500 players in a single arena today. The physical costs for the Internet and servers would be astronomical and would require every client to have a full duplex T1 to do it,..today.
Tomorrow, who knows?
Zigrat, if you really beleive HTC is not going to do a thing about the graphics quality in the next year, then why stay? I do not mean for that to sound harsh, but people keep talking about improving the graphics without realizing the costs for doing so,....today. You cannot have IL2 graphics in a 500+ arena. It cannot be done without sacrificing something,...today.
Now, if you want to know what HTC is going to do tomorrow, ......don't hold your breath. It would not be in thier best interest to let the competition know what they plan.
HTC has talked about adding some first person shooter stuff, but I have not seen it, nor has anyone else. With that, I have to conclude we will not know what it will look like and it is rather pointless to try to 'guess' what it will look like. When it is doen, we will either like it, or not. Simple.
On CD pressing, it would costs them about the same for the pressings as a month of download service, but ther associated costs of adding another person to the staff to handle the logistics of the CD operation would put the costs over the top.
If it were cheaper to do than using the Internet, HTC would have done it a long time ago. Would it be cheaper if the file size was 200MB's+,...probably. But to get the game to that size, and support it in the manner everyone is used to, would double or triple the manpower costs, which would negate any savings and in fact may add the overall costs significantly.
One of the things HTC is well known for is the ability to get out timely releases and updates, which keeps the game/sim intersting and fun to play. If they went to annual or semi-annual releases, would they be as successful? Maybe,...maybe not.
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Originally posted by Saintaw
IF they DO implement this, I smell nasty 'U'NOE flying :D
This seems to be off where the subject is going but… Exactly ;)
20 feet, I can get under 20 feet. Hell under it, what would it look like if you were flying in it?
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Well, I'm a 56K user and I appreciate that the downloads are small.
Mostly because my internet connection decides to randomly quit and disco, this makes downloading a large file difficult if I can't monitor it.
Sure, I could use GoZilla.. but then that's another download.
Besides, AH is the only program that has impressed me with what it does while being extremely small.
And to say that HT will leave it stagnant in terms of graphics is a joke.
You've been here long enough to remember the texture overlay introduction, individual clouds, cloud banks, storms, sunrise/sunset, and static ground clutter all being introduced as part of the game...
None of those existed in the beginning when a PIII 300Mhz machine was the standard.
-SW
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ASW have you considered Download accelerator? much better than gozilla go download it small too :-D
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No Glassess, I've heard about it though.... I thought you had to pay for it?
I'll start checking for it... thanks!
EDIT: Found "DAP" Download Accelerator Plus- free. This the one? The other ones I found cost $29.95.
-SW
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having a 50H/month Account ....
Il-2 made a 8 hour ponction with the last patch ...
Great I 'll fly less :(
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Aye m8ey it's free although the other plus thingie dunno what it does but the reg version is free.
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Chairboy... that is what Il-2 currently does.
It looks pretty neat from the air... but it looks very bad from the ground.
And... I have to agree with everything that Skuzzy is saying. Its too easy for us to make decisions/criticisms regarding things directly affecting HTC's bottom line without weighing all the impacts.
Increasing download sizes drastically is a bad thing. Especially for an on-line only type of game. Especially if it can affect gameplay itself during those download periods.
AKDejaVu
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zigrat,
You want the mesh to be bigger ( dimensions ) or denser ( resolution )?
// fats
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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Ah, touche....
:)
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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 ...
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and that smoothing code was run successfully along with graphics on 266 mhz p2s so i dont know why all of you guys think it uses so much overhead.
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I've always enjoyed listening to folks critique other folks businesses.
Zig...what do you do for a living....just curious.
HTC is successful...others speak from time to time of their competition...what competition? Warbirds? IL2? FA3?
Whats really amusing to me Zig, is how you find fault with AH and at the same time think in such a small box. Do you really believe that HTC has not already thought of what you speak of? Do you not understand that they most certainly have a business model which they are following? Do you really think that they would discuss future plans in any detail with any of us....it's none of our business as consumers. They offer a product...we make the choice to consume it or not.
If Dale is ever at the courthouse filing for bankruptcy, I doubt seriously that the prominent thought at that moment will be..."if I just would have listened to Zigrat".
I know first hand what it takes to run a successful business...what it takes to make payroll....cover operating expenses...to grow a company one step at a time.
Talk is cheap Zig...sittin outside the ring telling others how it should be done is at best, common.
I'm sorry, but I just don't have the stomach for crap like that....offering suggestions to HTC is fine...arguing with them on this board regarding issues which THEY feel are important to THEIR success is, at best, pathetic.
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... now you are still discussing if ppl with a 56k con would mind Dl'ing hundreds of MBs.
Just wait till their slow connection has loaded this thread entirely and they can respond :D
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MMOG's graphics are always a couple of years behind their single player equivalents.
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Rude I am an aerospace engineer. What are you?
As for the rest of your topic I will not respond because your lack of objectivity shines through.. you have proven youself to be a cheerleader in the past and you will likely remain so in the future. You should go over to the simhq boards and join the Oleg worshipers, they are hewn from the same block as you are. I do not understand cult worship of video game developers. When there is a shortcoming in a product its your right and responsibility as a customer to point it out. Every business has a suggestion box, whether they listen to the suggestions is the business' perogative.
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Originally posted by Zigrat
and that smoothing code was run successfully along with graphics on 266 mhz p2s so i dont know why all of you guys think it uses so much overhead.
Didn't say it was much overhead.. just saying it was.
Now.. when you start forcing mega graphics operations... is it possible you could affect something like the smoothing code? As you ad requirements for more and more processor use in order to run the game... what might those effects be?
It doesn't seem to me as if you've actually given it much thought. Too many things are being flippantly dismissed.
AKDejaVu
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Originally posted by Zigrat
Rude I am an aerospace engineer. What are you?
As for the rest of your topic I will not respond because your lack of objectivity shines through.. you have proven youself to be a cheerleader in the past and you will likely remain so in the future. You should go over to the simhq boards and join the Oleg worshipers, they are hewn from the same block as you are. I do not understand cult worship of video game developers. When there is a shortcoming in a product its your right and responsibility as a customer to point it out. Every business has a suggestion box, whether they listen to the suggestions is the business' perogative.
There is a huge difference between making a suggestion and arguing with what the game developer deems correct for his product. The assumptions you make regarding what we currently have, compared to what you feel should be the norm, displays a simpleminded mentality. To your suprise and yours only, do not you think, that perhaps HTC already understands what might be the most practical path for them as a company to follow...that Dale might have already given hours of thought and experimentation to ideas and concepts mentioned by you, as well as ones which you have yet to even recognize, coming to conclusions, all backed up by years of hard data and experience?
You may certainly call me a cheerleader if you choose to do so...I personally would agree with you. What is there not to cheer about? This product offers many things to many people, of which a very very small percentage complain, all for the ridiculously low price of $15.00 per month. I can overlook aspects of this product which I might find less than optimum, mainly because I have faith in the company based on it's track record.
Now, your occupation, in relation to the skills necessary to compete successfully in business, might or might not be relevant. I am not your judge, however, it requires much more than a slide rule to succeed in business.
What do I do? I am the Director of a $180,000,000.00 real estate development company. The fact that I have been involved directly in the development, aquisition and operation of real business for 25 years, might or might not speak to you. However, one thing has always remained very clear to me...Dale has earned the right to follow his instincts regarding the growth of HTC...you have the priviledge to complain about it, not the right.
I'm along for the ride...cheerleader you say...I'm ok with that. I just choose not to crap on what I feel is an excellent effort. Make suggestions? Ask questions? I have had many conversations with Dale, offering what I thought would be wise to implement. He has always been gracious and always listened. What more can a customer expect than that? You mentioned you would not be around if AH did not change to suit you...that is your true perogative.
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My two cents ,
I think Ace's High is the best damn Flight Sim . I am with HT as long as he will let us contiune on his "road trip" with him . It's been a nice ride so far .
HTC , your doing one hell of a job !
spro
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Originally posted by 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
That's true, but it doesn't involve polygon count; it is scaled by number of planes in the vicinity. (And note that this task already has a clever level of detail routine built into it: planes far from you appear to follow very coarse paths while planes near you have much finer representation of the actual path.) This task would be no different if the terrain has more polygons and each plane had more (there is also, I assume, a LOD routine for plane rendering meaning that far planes are rendered with only a few polygons).
Those that say, in effect, that "we don't need no stinkin polygons" might note that, with plane models anyway, HTC is already increasing the polygon count. Look at the latest screenshots in the News section: the engine nacelle of the F4 is made of 12 sides. This is reaching the level of detail of other sims, like IL2. Old planes in AH, like say the C47, have much fewer polygons- the engine nacelle of the C47 is a boxy looking hexagon. All we're suggesting is that the terrains evolve in this manner as well. It might be that they already have increased in detail? The current CT terrain is very nice looking (although I suspect that comes from extremely clever use of textures and not necessairly more polygon detail).
Finally, the initial issue of this thread was increased ground clutter for GVs to hide in. That increases screen polygon render overhead, but it doesn't really increase download size much. Afterall, the terrains don't save each polygon of each tree- all the trees are identical and only the tree x,y,z location is saved along with a single copy of the tree polygons which is cloned all over the place for forests. It might even be possible to decrease download size by placing trees etc using a deterministic mathematical algorithm that would have each FE place them on the fly at the same place as everyone elses FEs. Maybe that's the way it's done already?
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Er, that's not... entirely correct. I wasn't suggesting adding more ground clutter, I was suggesting a method that would provide GVs with some cover WITHOUT the processor overhead that adding more ground clutter comes with.
My suggestion was that in areas determined to be 'forested', there should be a single polygon hanging 30 or so feet above the ground with transparency set as the background color and a simple texture representing forest being opaque and applied across the texture. This would have the benefit of blocking (or showing) GVs as appropriate to aircraft without having the massive CPU impact that forcing all planes to render trees from far away would have.
Minimal CPU hit, minimal code change, etc.
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I can do what you ask In the terrain now!!! The way HTC's program works I could DO this easily with very minimal to probably NO frame rate hits. IT is pretty easy but would require HTC to do 1 minor thing ( a one mile square would take about as much frame rate hit as 4 tree clutter objects), I would bet it wouldn't take Pyro 20 minutes to do and there would be NO additional downloads, and NO additional coding from HTC. It also would look good from ground and air. I discussed this In the TE forum over a year ago, and from working with the TE, and the way Objects are 1 way ( invisible from the bottom side) this would work PERFECTLY!!!
Now, How do I go about asking HiTech nicely, without being demanding or pushy?
OK, here's the gameplan...
Monday EVERYONE send HiTech a bottle of craggenmore, and we need to send Pyro, Ronni,Natedog,Superfly,and the sweet voiced "bases are under attack Lady,,Yankee" a bottle of thier favorite brew, OH, and a few pizza's I figure about 4ish they should be pretty mellow and then I'll called the offices. Unless anyone has some Pics or dirt we can extort HTC with???
NUTTZ
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It's not that simple NUTTZ, you are forgeting a few issues.
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What getting you guys n gals Mellow in the middle of a work day? :)or The issue with the Gv cover? Hitech, you've always been straight up with me and given my limited knowledge of "issues" i do not or cannot understand that effect the "code". BUT, i'm sure as HOW the TE works with objects, now I am almost certain this could be done with NO frame rate hits and looking first class! I am Used to your Simple NO's as an answer and again don't want to Ruffle your feathers. IF you would Like I could fire off an e-mail to you explaining ( with visual's how to do this) Then by all means you can reply with a simple NO, and My feeling wouldn't be hurt.
I have a feeling what The "issue" is ( different Alt's in the vortex's within 1 tile clipping it) and it would be no problem. In fact, if errored it would show up in the Error log. LOL, you know your getting my E-mail, whether you read it or not is completely up to you:)
NUTTZ
Originally posted by hitech
It's not that simple NUTTZ, you are forgeting a few issues.
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Originally posted by Chairboy
Er, that's not... entirely correct.
Ah.. I realize that Chairboy. But as others have pointed out, IL2 does it exactly that way and it does look quite good from the air (which is OK as IL2 is an air only game). But, again as others have pointed out, it looks horrible from the ground level. And from the tree top level- it can entirely disappear. I have found that out to my detriment: and yes, you can run into those texture layers and blow up ;)
I was referring to creating ground cover by just adding more trees to the forest. Sorry- I should have made that more clear.
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I think one thing that you overlook Zigrat is the fact that HTC hasn't put any serious DirectX 7+ effects or use of advanced libraries into the game yet.
By this I mean of course Lighting effects. The engine in AH still does all it's own the way it did when I looked at it 3 years ago. One of the updates that has to be coming up will be a move to DX 8.1 (winXP standard) and the resulting effect that AH will have more lighting effects in it.
I have seen you ask before for Particle effects and such, well the truth is AH is currently in limbo land to do these. It doesn't seem to have any way of utilizing the GPU (besides what the GPU picks up automatically through DX anyhow) and as a result uses polygons for everything- right down to sprites for hit flashes and poly based tracers.
Now I think it's safe to assume HT isn't a dummy. And he works like crazy as any look at HTC's progress with it's current staff shows.
My question to you Zig, is imagine AH with lighting effects for hits, explosions and flashes. Imagine replacing sprites, bumpmaps and poly's wherever possible with lighting effects. Imagine the sun effect you see in Il-2 here (it's a simple trick- almost all DX games do it).
Would you suddenly consider AH to be VERY state of the art again?
The fact is that I think this is where HT is headed. It just is the only path that makes sense. Offloading more work to the GPU can finally be an option for him since almost all cards for 2 years have had one integrated. Of course such a major upgrade to AH would need allot of work, bug checking and programming.
I open my crystal ball and what do I see? I see a few small plane & terrain updates this summer to flush out the plane set... and a major release to upgrade the graphics ability this fall/christmas.
That would be a probable dev path. But one way or the other- you can hardly blame HT for not wanting to discuss it. He won't want to talk about any features in case they don't end up appearing and look like promises. He might be struggling with the update and find this kind of thing an annoyance? And finally letting WB or TK know his dev plan in detail of any sort would allow them to play havoc with his business.
I reccomend not being a fanboy- but rather just enjoying the game as you have... and if your unhappy stepping out until it comes back to the point you enjoy it again.
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BTW choir-
Il-2 uses a more complicated way of doing this than what you describe.
They layer 5 or six in progressivly larger circles to represent flying over a conifer forest. This gives a feeling of depth and truly appears to be a forest until you get close enough to see the edges of the layers and the gaps in between.
Arguably with AH's ground clutter it might not look as bad- there would be vertical elements dispersed through the layers. But seeing those knife edges of death does indeed look terrible in Il-2.
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http://www.getright.com
great download utility...even allows segmented downloading (a plus for the broadband privledged such as myself) while also featuring download pause and resume for later finishing. its a great utility.
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Use of the GPU and DX8 enhancements would really improve the eye candy of AH, but wouldn't that entail a very major and expensive rewrite of the AH graphics engine (which, I believe, currently makes no use of the GPU)? At $14.95/mo is there really enough profit margin for that big of an "R&D" effort? And then there is the issue of disenfranchising people without Radeon or GeForce graphics cards.
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It couldn't be that we already tried puting more stuff on the GPU and it slowed things down could it?
Nah we would never think that far ahead.
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One of the most impressive things about AH, to me, is what you get per megabyte of download - far more than any other game out there that I've seen.
Whilst I'm a bit of a "realism nut" and I'd love photorealistic visuals, all I NEED are visuals sufficient to make my subconscious suspend disbelief about the reality of what I'm seeing. I'd rather extra megabytes go into new planes, or improved strat - or forests GVs can hide in - than in unecessarily fine-meshed terrain or other purely visual frippery. This is where HTC has gotten things so right with AH - just the right level of visual detail so that it looks as good as it works and doesnt involve overlarge downloads.
Gameplay matters more than pretty visuals - WB2 2D is a shining example of this. Looks very poor by todays standards, but plays well enough to be immersive. AH works visually well enough that it seldom jars on the eye, and so the mind sees a world it can treat credibly. More thn that ay be nice, but isnt necessary at all.
Esme