Just watched a bunch of WT videos again to observe the terrain and objects in the terrain. Along with everything setup like an FPS shootem up game with all the HUDs you can imagine, live time aimbots, live time info on target damage, enemy detectors, on and on and on. It's trading a human in a special ops suit for an airplane suit, or a tank suit.
Our terrains are 1 sector = 25milex25mile, either 20x20 or 10x10 where as their terrains are 10 klick x 10 klick or 15x15 depending on the amount of objects that will be stuffed into the terrain. Our world is 24x7 persistent theirs is how ever long the match period runs. So in their tiny world they can have killer graphics and "round" things everywhere. Trees that can be knocked over, designated structures that can be knocked down and run over, and so forth. They even have realistic tank tread paths in dirt that stay persistent due to this.
I'm not sure what the maximum number of objects are that can be present in our terrains, it looks like in a space smaller than one of our sectors they are pushing that number to give a very limited number of guys at a time, the illusion of COD with wings or treads. Not a bad trade off if your audience only wants boom and bling while looking like keystone cops chasing chickens using shotguns with aimbot lazer sights. Everything else looks rockin and baddddddd. I wish our tanks were as durable as their tanks, our tank world is a grim incredibly dangerous place compared to their keystone cop world. But their tanks got all that bling like working exhaust flaps and exhaust, tank tread paths in the dirt, sinking in water when they drive into it that looks like sinking into the water. They can kill each other by ramming a tank and pushing it off a cliff into water. I wish we had that tank damage modeling so our tanks could drive up to each other and slug it out round after round in the 10v10 melees they have. In the end it looks like 10 keystone cops surrounding an elephant and beating it to death with .22s. Buuuuuttttt, it gots allllll datttt BLING..... Oh thier M4's with rockets have an aimbot so they can zero in all of the rockets on a single tank, WoW...I'm still not sure what constitutes skill in that game with all the computer aided everything.
It also looks like they use two terrain editors, a macro editor for air combat a bit like ours with the same terrain tile boo boos I run into when I cut farm tile with a river. You see a road run to the river, then pickup again on the other side because the tile was laid down with a broad brush to put in all the farm land in a few strokes. They clearly expected the current generation of gamers to not notice or care while they were going bling, bling, bling at each other. And a micro editor for tank combat terrains to create very realistic micro geological features with town objects that look like some of the Pro high definition 3D town packages I've found on the internet. The clutter and tree tiles used for both types are different, the tiles for air combat are more like ours while the tiles for tank combat are optimized to tank combat. Seems everyone in computer tanks wants long vistas to see the enemy and shoot at them unless they are inside of a town or village.
It looks like they worried about the issues we have with tanks disappearing under trees. They have obvious open vistas, trees limited to having a bit higher canopy and low density, or only clumps of trees like pines, then long open spaces in between. Once you build terrains for tank combat, you can see those things in other terrains if that was a concern by the creators. Because their arenas are so small, they can use higher detail interactive objects and more of them. And then you have really strange flight profiles, like an Hs129 with a 75mm cannon that can go vertical right after rapid firing the cannon and pull G inducing turns with that thing strapped on. The Hs129 with 75mm could barely stay in the air when it fired the cannon and had to fly straight for a bit after firing to gain back momentum. It didn't do any high G maneuvering.
So they cannot stuff 100 or more guys into their tiny arenas and have all the bling, or keep all of the interactive objects in a damaged state after a tank rolls over them for 24x7. They have to timer control combat periods and not allow other players to wander in and out of the arena during the combat timer period. More players means more objects your PC or laptop or whatever has to process for and the experience starts becoming one of diminishing returns. And watching combat in that game is watching a bunch of COD players in airplane or tank costumes flying or driving around going bling, bling, bling. But, it's not as grim as our world, you can see in WT the physics modeling has been tweaked to keep xBox, PS2 and gameboy style players happy and clueless.
It will take time to get people back into our world, the magic is when a base capture turns into 30 players or more contesting that space in an orgy of combat constantly re-upping to get revenge or defend. Or a giant furball takes place like at furball island in NDisles. Time\distance needs to be adjusted for a while so people can organically create that on their own. It's what keeps you coming back to this game. We are not WT, and I like our keystone cops better, they actually use the sights on the shotguns to aim.
