AH3 terrains

[hgtonyvi]

I guess we will have new maps with wide trenches and such. Like flying in from the sea to land. I hope we can see small trenches as we approach land or riding the trench going out to sea and such. Can we also be able to fly through bridges and such? That will expand dogfighting and ACM's. I know AH3 will rock regardless. 

[Greebo]

Other than the improved look of textures and objects there are a few practical differences that players will notice in AH3 terrains.

The horizontal distances between altitude points is closer in AH3 so terrains ought to be able to have narrower canyons etc. However that will only happen in existing terrains if the designer takes the trouble to edit those areas after the terrain has been converted.

For MA terrains there are two new types of field. One is a large two mile square V field that blends better to underlying terrain and the other is a four mile square super-large airfield with a built in town. Whether these new fields appear in existing MA terrains is down to whoever is updating the terrain, by default the AH3 TE keeps the existing types of fields when it updates an AH2 terrain. Also there may or may not be a new task group for the battleship, its not clear what is happening with that yet.

There is the possibility that terrain designers will be able to create GV choke points using either bridges or shallow fording points across rivers. This stuff isn't finished in the alpha yet, but is rumoured to be on the way. In AH2 using water this way in a terrain was a problem because GVers who turned down their game's graphics down to minimum would lose the shorelines and so get stuck in invisible water.

[hgtonyvi]

Rgr that greebo. By the way i haven't seen ya in a while. I still remember thos epics fights we use to have with me in my f4u and you in the f6f. They were just unforgettable fights.

[Easyscor]

Also, the shorelines look much nicer and rivers are coming as well but they're not in-game yet.

[715]

In addition to the new version terrains having finer possible resolution in the NS and EW directions they also can have much greater resolution in the vertical. Before there were only 256 possible altitudes for AH terrain, now you can set the altitude of each point to within 1 ft.  This won't have much effect for planes, but I think it will be game changing for GVs as there will be many fine structure hills and gullies for tanks to hide in (vs the large flat planes of AH2).  This will be especially true for terrains that import actual DEM (Digital Elevation Map) data.  I've played with importing the DEM data around Kursk, Russia.  The steppes of Russia look extremely boring and flat, but in fact there are lots of shallow erosion gullies everywhere that can hide a tank.