About the new terrain

[wpeters]

Just put a tank town in the Gv part of the map

[earl1937]

The current stuff I am working on has a 660 Foot vertex res, AH currently has 2480 res. I doubt will will go denser then this.

The new system has 16 + 4 base texture types the 16 are base types like rock grass snow ext.... the 4 types are higher res and are things like fields small towns excreta.

There is also a color per vertex that is blended with the terrain textures, along with a detail mask type like rows, rock excreta that is blended in as you get closer to the terrain.

The terrain does cast shadows. I devolved a new system for doing this that is extremely fast. Ill try post a screen or film later today.

There will be a converter for existing terrains , but some clean up would add a lot to the terrains.

Water will be change to have full 3d wave effects.

We are dropping support for fixed pipeline, and will require shader version 3.0 minimum. On last count before we started this, I saw less the 20 accounts that have played in the last year that did not support 3.0 shaders.

Clouds will have a small rework that will improve frame rate because we can depend on shader style implementation.

The terrain editor will remain basically the same for implanting objects. But for the look of the terrain features,textures and tree type features,  it will make much more use of image editing tools.

I very much doubt trees will be destructible. Simple math of approximate 3000 objects per square mile and 512 x 512 miles creates over 1 gig of objects.  This creates many issues with both memory and speed on displaying the status on all front ends.

HiTech









 

Outstanding and  to Hi Tech!

[WWhiskey]

Just put a tank town in the Gv part of the map

that's what I was getting at,, updating the GV area of the DA

[Easyscor]

Like Artik, I'm hoping for some advance information on the file formats if possible.

Please clarify; is the elevation file format going to be a plain 16 bit binary file, or perhaps some tiff format? I think I can deal with the rest if I have that question answered.

[hitech]

Like Artik, I'm hoping for some advance information on the file formats if possible.

Please clarify; is the elevation file format going to be a plain 16 bit binary file, or perhaps some tiff format? I think I can deal with the rest if I have that question answered.

Elevation is a 16 bit file.

HiTech

[detch01]

...
We are dropping support for fixed pipeline, and will require shader version 3.0 minimum.
....

HiTech

HT,
Just out of curiosity.. Are you going to support up to version 5?

Cheers,
asw

[Easyscor]

Elevation is a 16 bit file.

HiTech

Thank you. Thank you very much. 

[Waffle]

Here is an example of the color per vertex tint map Hitech was describing.

This Gif animation involves only single terrain type - sand/dirt.

The tint map can be modified to colors of the creators choosing and will affect the overall color of the entire terrain.

[Easyscor]

I look forward to playing with that. Thank you Waffle.

[CASHEW]

will frame rate get crappy?

[Tinkles]

will frame rate get crappy?

What system do you have?

[ImADot]

will frame rate get crappy?

If anything, I'm hoping frame rates will be a bit better since they will no longer be limiting themselves to the oldest most out-of-date graphics rendering modes:

We are dropping support for fixed pipeline, and will require shader version 3.0 minimum. On last count before we started this, I saw less the 20 accounts that have played in the last year that did not support 3.0 shaders.

Clouds will have a small rework that will improve frame rate because we can depend on shader style implementation.

[Bino]

Awesome!  Thanks, you guys!   

[Babalonian]

This looks great!

What about airfields and vehicle bases, will they see a remodel or more/different variety of them?  Destroyable trees within the immediate area of the fields (the couple dozen or so) or runways?

[shoresroad]

And how about switching to real maps of Europe, North Africa and the South Pacific to make Aces High more like a WWII flight combat simulator.  AH has a fantastic plane set and FM's but these Fantasy Island maps and chess piece enemy combatants really hurt immersion no matter how good the game looks.  The MA is like flying WWII planes at Disneyland for crying out loud.

What do we have...about 12 or 13 fantasy maps we rotate through.  How about 12 or 13 different regions of Europe, North Africa and the South Pacific instead.  And what about those guys called the Allies, Germans and Japanese.  I think they had something to do with WWII also.