You did notice that those trees in there were made with at least four (4) triangles each (if it wasn't subdivided into segments) with a texture map right? If you want some interactivity the number of polygons would need to be at least doubled if not quadrupled for each tree. Still a big problem if you want collision detection with planes and trees. The additional geometry load in the game is really much better being used for the planes and interactivity between planes in the game.

If you are so concerned about trees then I think you are flying way too low and getting damaged too often :)

As You may be know, famous proverb in our community is this:

"...at altitudes at which this community is flying, diving is not an option..."
So not only I but many fellow pilots do have contacts with the trees.

Oleg is perfectionist, so the problem will be terminated.

I am not programer anyway.

BG-09

I think that we don't need the trees breaking at all, just a bit better DM when contacting a tree. If we can live with what we have now, we would sure be able to live with what we could have then :) And if tree makes a plane crash, just replace it with a burned tree texture ;)

I just don't want the kind of forests that we have now (3 layer textures). But from what we've seen so far, forests will be forests. That's cool.

Sure it would be possible to have trees with DM but as I said multiplayer number would have to be reduced to 6-8 at the most nothing more. Forget about doing 30-50 players with each player having like 5K polygon load each even with LOD. Thats crazy!

The poly's of the trees would be done on the client PC's, it would have nothing to do with the server, all the server would have to worry about is the events on the map.

I just wonder if Oleg was to 'use' some of graphic tricks from the current FPS game engines (Unreal, Doom Crytek) that a lot more could be done in terms of graphics, what I suspect is that are certain patent issues to get around.

It seems to me that you would only need to place the high count polygon (damage modeled) trees near airports and landing strips....maybe just place them at the end of runways.

I don't think that every tree needs to be modeled in such detail, but it would be nice if you could place these "tree obstacles" in limited strategic places...

Maybe mission builders could place the "high-poly" trees around ground objects that need to be strafed in the course of a mission.

Other ground obstacles that you commonly find near airports like telephone poles could be placed in limited areas too...

The placement of the 'high resolution' polygons are not determined by where they are 'positioned' in the map but rather how close they are to the 'virtual camera'. Although this cane be done too by the game developer meaning it can program the higher density polygons to be loaded near the bases but in general LOD (level of detail) loading is determined by view and camera distance. So this means if you are looking 'externally or 'from inside the cockpit' this distance to the trees determines HOW and WHEN the high resolution polygons are loaded. The issue is still the same because even with LOD too much detailed trees would still increase the overall polygon load specially with damage modeling on them.

Surely 2D polygon cutout trees as modeled and rendered can be made to orient to the camera hereby making it appear 3D, it is the number of them thats still an issue in a fli-sim. This 'polyface orientation based on camera view' technique is already being used int eh game though in the cloud generation.

FPS games tho cheats, they dont exactly show all the trees or all the polygons since there is a lot of CLIPPING and CULLING (back-face) happening there based on occlusion. This means objects that are obscured even temporarily by the camera are immediately removed or buffered so in these fps games they always look like there is more in the scene than actually is being 'rendered' in real-time. This is harder to do with fli-sim where your view extends 'forever' at at least as far as the camera near and far clipping planes are set to.

If it was possible indeed to use the technique I described higher in the post, technique which involves only a computation based on relative heigth, it would be the cherry on the cake to make one (or two, varying the cut heigth) damaged tree model (= cut normal tree...would you believe that?) for each tree type and

- either to replace entirely every tree impacted in the crash by its closest damaged counter part...
- or to make it simple remove the impacted trees and then no need to make a damaged tree!

Both would be visually quite good...Now what impact would it have on the FPS, compared to a normal crash with associated crater for example?

This being said I hope the craters will be a lot better and more complex than in IL2...whether they are from bomb or crashes...the Il2 ones are ugly and nowhere near realistic, even for a texture! I have never understood why? Immersion killer again...

JVM

I dont think you understand the enormity and complexity of tree interaction and the resulting increase in polygon load. Surely there would be programmed to have localized adaptive subdivision when it comes to collision detection based on proximity of a plane to the ground and trees but those would still require enormous resources (CPU,GPU and polygon load). Most GPU today are not made for handling enormous polygon loads but rather are optimized for enormous TEXTURE handling instead as well as shader processing and some geometry calculations. They aren't geared for handling 'interactive' 4 million polygon scenes at all (although they might be able to load that in memory but not interactively) while the CAD workstation cards are (which renders everything accurately and NOT cheat like the game cards which do not render everything), although things are changing.

Computation based on the height will work since they trees and such are placed on 'height field' generated terain as it is already but even with a simple 4 triangle tree that would require more resources and more polygons to pull off IF you want interactivity with the plane instead of a simple collision detection that we have now. I am asuming that the collision detection (plane vs ground or trees collision detection) in the game isnt even collision detection per se but rather based on the coordinates of the plane's axis. IF the computed vector (for the plane) falls beyond the 'ZERO ground axis' the plane is designated as crashed. But this is a guess. Having to apply this to trees is a waste of time. This is why we crash on the large 'invisible trees' (which are 'height displaced geometry' (pancaked) mapped with alpha channels to look like forrests) but pass through the ones that look and feel solid (those with swaying detailed leaves).

As for better craters well, Oleg can always implement bump mapping and procedural displacement (even animated) but didnt chose to do so in Il-2. My guess would be due to the video cards' capability limitations when Il-2 was released.

I may not have explained myself clearly: in the system I was thinking about, the collision detection is between a segment (representing he tree trunk at the tree geographical position) whose length and altitude is known and the parts of the A/C model used in the collision detection. I agree with you in that no additional part of the tree and notably not the triangles giving it volume (assuming the trees would be real individual 3D objects) would be involved, because there is no need, trees being what they are. For a building it would be more complicated, but there are less of them fortunately!

As for the craters I also agree with you, the graphical processors of the time were not up to the task of depicting them realistically...but why so horrible textures? The Il2 craters do not resemble at all to bomb craters (have you ever seen earth projections going in zigzag like that?) They do no look like craters at all...It is a tad bizarre as there never was any shortage of real crater pictures around...