Friday 2010-03-26 Screenshots and Discussion Thread
 

Today I hadn't time to compile the next working version(still in compilation from yesterday on my PC) that to show something definitely new. Anyway here is some screenshots that maybe interesting for you all. Remind you - its a WIP.

Thanks for the update Oleg!

The lights and shadows are fantastic! Trees looking very good!

Happy Easter, everyone!

Skarphol

nice tree detail

3D engine/In Game/NO new grass/Trees are NOT final/DX 10/Please don´t whine:)
I´m very curious about next week update with the latest build.i like those DX 10 screenshots BTW even if not finished.

Sure, something for this purpose.

+1

Nice shadowing on the trees. Even the bark detail is a nice effect. Those cottages look real enough that if they were in the U.S. I could smell the apple pies sitting on the window sill.

My interest in the Blenheim just increased. Very unique looking pit.

Thanks Oleg. Appreciate the update.

Have a good weekend all.

Very nice lighting and terrain relief modelling. With the grass, final trees and AA it will look really nice. Thank you.

It looks great

Very nice!

Again, it's especially the things behind the screenshots, that are most interesting. Looks great, even though it's WIP! VERY promising!

There are so much detail on the trees that I´m starting to think that they gonna have its own DM, burning leaves and broken branches and trunks.
Great work Oleg and team.

This is really great pictures.... Great work... But I'm going mad if I starting to think what kind of the hardware will the future users need to run this stuff. OMG!!!! Oleg can you please just say what kind of workstations your team uses for testing?

kudos for the great lighting...

You can see on a specific landdetail level in il2 the trees waving in the wind ;)

a nice never before seen feature

Can feel my hayfever kicking in already :( :D

Il2: Birds of Prey has trees waving in the wind too.

Still the trees here are better detailed and more realistic looking, and with the proper grass (like we have seen in some of the earlier screenshots) this will look absolutely amazing.

I dont want SOW anymore!!!!! Cause I have to buy a complete new rig for this ... damn :-P

Wow, looks great...I'm impressed!

As a comparison about the trees, second post, second image on this page :

http://www.checksix-forums.com/showt...157741&page=22

Most important thing for the trees is that they look real at the distances at which a pilot flying in an aircraft usually see them.

The implantation of the trees, each group to each other, is also very important for the general feeling of "being there".


P.S. I presume the colors palette for the British landscape is still WIP too ?

Great
 

The sim is comming on a treat,great work guys,Il2 has to be the best game EVER in my opinion,cant wait for the release,can you give us a clue Oleg?:grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin:

Thanks for the update!!
Excellent pics!!!

Give us october now plix. Looking great oleg, any estimate of when we'll see more videos?

That's interesting, but I am looking forward to seeing the new ground textures and model from the plane cockpit, as those one are not very promising

S!

Nice shots, once again.

The graphical level seems similar to ArmA (Armed Assault) from 2006 or so (imagine there being grass rendered as it should). That game engine was tweaked to be seen from grass level, not from the air.

Think about how crappy things always look in flight sims as soon as you lose some altitude. A lot of this detail will not be visible for the most part when we fly in SoW - but for once(!) the ground detail will be retained or even get better as we fly lower. If your computer can handle it ;)

If anything will make me buy a new graphics card, this will be it.

Will There Be Civilians?
 

Hi Oleg,

From an immersion standpoint I am very curious about the farmers, villagers etc. that live in these dwellings. Will SOW introduce civilians, if so how, and how will the game address the danger of their being hurt in air raids?

My gosh... very excellent

Thanks for update Oleg! Will there be chance to fly dornier on release day?

As some fans have already written, the game looks really promising!
Oleg, thank you to tell us more about the design surface (graphics on the ground) :
Is BOB DX11 compatible ?
Will there be animations like bike or car on the roads ?
Stronger, will there be mobile pedestrian visible from the cockpit ?
More stronger, will it be possible to watch mobile pedestrian looking in the direction of our warbird _ I mean will there be interaction beetween mobile ground objects like neutral pedestrians and our warcraft ? (who knows :)

Anyway, Thanks for your update Oleg

The WiP trees are of very high quality, and the level of detail is amazing.

But what are they? Some sort of tropical tree that doesn't look right close up, and makes the landscape look foreign from a distance (to my English eyes it looks like it might be Australia).

I know this is WiP, which makes this the right time and place to say that trees of that quality will have to be good representations of English types. Otherwise the whole landscape will look wrong.
Most people would not recognise more than one or two species, but everyone will notice if the general look of them from afar is wrong.

I hope this area isn't overlooked because it is deemed less relevant in a flight sim...a little effort with getting the right look, and correct species of tress will make all the difference to the overall look of the game.

They are excellent tress though; excellent WiP trees that is :-) and I am very impressed by them. The development updates are certainly something to look forward to these days!

Thanks for the update Oleg. Love the trees.:grin:

I agree, it would be nice at this early stage if you tried to get them to look like oak, ash and beech.

Still looks like IL2 to me .....

This is some good stuff here.
I have imagined for years that I am flying low over a realistic and believable countryside in a simulator.

Clearly we're flying two completely different games :rolleyes: Does Il-2 have dynamic shadows? No. Individual leaves on trees? No. This is all WIP. Il-2 is not. ;)

That only shows that Il-2 was very good.

troll :(

Thoughts about the images, particularly the first and the last.

In the first, the building on the left has a roof that to me is too steep, you might get a rare one that steep but they would be very rare in England I think.

In the last image there is a road visible out of the window, does that road have white lines on it? I'm pretty sure that lines on country roads used to be rare, and became more common as I've grown older, and the technology to make them has improved. I think in the old days of WW2 there would have been very few lines on country roads, possibly almost none. Maybe on a second look they are wear and tear markings, that would be very good.

The windows on the buildings look flat, painted on (which they obviously really are, but still), it would be better if they looked as if they were fittings that had been fitted into the walls of the buildings, as real windows are.

About this level of graphic detail, do you think SOW will be so CPU linked like Il2 or it will benefit of a pair of VGA ( SLI or crossfire?)
Does we need nvidia, or ATI will do the job too? ( we cannot have perfect mode in Il2 with ATI if I remember)
Can you comment about it , Oleg?
Because upgrade will be a necessity for all of us I think.

are so manny and VERY details in the trees :eek:! i love that! but, i think we need 3 cpu i7 whit 2crossfire gtx295, all in crossfire (the 3 CPU) to run that

+1!

I think Win 7 64 bit will be mandatory since it´s release the memory cap, (and RAM will be REALLY important here)
I read in the internet that future versions of the newest VGA will have 3Gb of GDDR5 ( the dual core versions), but will only be useful in 64 bit OS

Doofus. :(
Now anyone that posts an opinion contrary to yours is a troll .....

Beautiful work Oleg and Team- looks to me like you've got the lighting spot on. And the trees- amazing! Can't wait to see it all come together! My computer is begging for mercy already- it knows I'll have to crank up the eyecandy.

Trees list.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y12...02/trees02.jpg

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y12...02/trees01.jpg

Oak
Beech
Horse Chestnut
Chestnut
Pine
Spruce
Ash
Sycamore
Hawthorn
Poplar
Larch
Elm - also by roads in town
Willow - by water
Weeping willow - by water
Lime
Rowan
Yew
London Plane - in towns

Holly bushes.
Hazel.

Any oriental or foreign trees will work well in parks and gardens.



Others help please...I am not an expert.

We need at least 5 or 6 types of tree as the absolute minimum.

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZRKVXG3DV-I/0.jpg

http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/TheLarch.gif

The Lerche:

http://discaircraft.greyfalcon.us/picturesaa/lerche.jpg

Nice work Oleg. The trees look very similar to the common Ash, even the leaves in the closeup pic are very similar to the Ash. The tree works for me as long as its dispersed with other varieties of English trees. Stone walls and Hedgerows will also go along way in getting the feel of the English countryside.

ATI will run IL2 1946 just fine in perfect mode my HD 3870 has no problem. You just can't use water 3,4 only 2, looks just as good as NV 3,4.

Flyingbullseye

Tools/Viewer, right there slapped across the image...

I like the leaves up close. I think the movie makers are going to go bananas with this sim. If it sells well I hope we get to see many movies on all fronts.

Oleg said recently they've licensed 'Speedtree' and will be using versions of those trees, modified to suit SOW.

Here are the default trees Speedtree offers -

http://www.speedtree.com/trees/

Should be alright.

Les.

For those thinking that the colour palette is off, here's a comparison I just threw together, looks pretty close to the British summer to me:

Can you explain how it will be 'alright'?
Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but I can not see more than a couple of native British trees in that listing! Most trees are American and would look totally out of place!!!
:-(

There isn't even an English oak!!

This means lots of development time is needed for them if they haven't already been modelled. I hope Oleg isn't trusting that there will be enough default trees in that program to suit SoW:BoB, because it looks as though there aren't.

those trees are very similar to an English Oak, quite a bit smaller than a full-grown oak but with some reshaping of the leaves the textures would be spot on

http://www.cirrusimage.com/Trees/english_oak_1.jpg
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...9&d=1269610317
http://www.mcnees.org/mainpages/misc...aves3_remc.jpg
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...0&d=1269610324

No, Protos, I think he was referring to you specifically. Your body of work speaks for itself. Were it anyone else, he may have suggested a visit to the optometrist. Unfortunately there is no cure for inflammation of the ego, at least no external one, so a doctor won't help here.

At least they actually look like trees. This is definite progress. I should think Oleg's crew will take the observations of Englishmen into account, when landscaping England.

So true in your case ..... you have always been a wannabe.

I don't want to be too negative, because they are WiP's. But I disagree - it is not enough to change the leaves. The oak is instantly recognizable by the shape of the tree, and way the branches spread. They are typical for this tree. It is a very difficult thing to model if the modeller knows nothing about English trees.
I can tell an oak in a field from almost any distance (as most English people can). The same goes for a few other trees (Elm, Beech, Willow, Horse Chestnut). And I'm not an expert, nor particularly interested in trees.

You see what you want to see...

Oleg,

thx for posting the update !

the tree detail looks very good, even individual leaves and great tree truck detail in close up view :) houses look good to !

will after-market modelers be able to edit ships/houses to increase detail level to match the il2-BoB aircraft ? i know you recently mentioned some objects like ships at this time were not modeled in as much detail as the aircraft (as we could see from the screenshots) because this is an aircraft sim after all (fair enough)

some BoB users however will be willing to spend the time to increase the details on those to match the aircraft (like foobar did with trains), will this be "open" in the game and possible to do for us ?

Understood.
Well, all this years and I never bought a ATI card because I thought they cannot do perfect mode...
I hate to admit but I´m a moron.
So, I will start to look for one of those Radeon 5970 babies.
The drivers are stable too?

well I don't think this:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...8&d=1269610310

is too far off from this:
http://www.localriding.com/image-fil...h-oak-tree.jpg

wouldn't be too hard to do a little reshaping to give it more of a classical Oak shape.

These trees actually strike me as Oak trees if you were to prune them and keep them in an Orchard.

Good pics, thanks.

Nice pics- very interesting amount of detail in the ground objects for a flight sim. I makes me wonder what this new engine will be capable of in future.
I notice in the picture of the gunner position the broken glass in turret- is this a randomly generated break pattern or a pre-rendered texture?
I can't wait to see this damage modelling in action- i've become very used to the one in IL2 through years of being shot down .

The reason the trees don't look like Oak trees, as they are probably Ash trees, also native to England. Although it could pass for an Oak if your too far away to notice the shape of the leaves. I'm sure there will be more than one type of tree modeled so there is no point throwing a noose over a limb yet. ;)

"And I followed the blighter down to nearly ground level , so there I was chasing the hun all round kent when suddenly from across my port wing I noticed that some of the trees we were flying past - wernt even Oak , they were some fake american import , well i tell you , I broke off the attack , landed my spitty and whent strait down and complained to the council , damn cheeky beggers"

"throwing a noose over a limb" ... uh???

Just my thought, but you told in a much funnier way than I would have!!

Some people here amaze me.

Skarphol

It's a WWII Combat Flight Sim not a WWII Tree Sim

I love your work Oleg! Many thanks from me.....

Continuing our interesting discussion regarding the deciduous vegetation of NW Europe......... I assume that you will have a 'summer' vegetation scheme, considering when the Battle of Britain took place.....

Currently IL-2 has a basic Summer landscape scheme, and for some maps, a Winter scheme......

My question is, have you allowed for more variations of season in the Storm of War game engine? (Allowing for later development) So for example, could there be a difference between early-Spring, and mid-Summer, and late-Autumn......? There could even be differences in the fields reflecting agricultural activity over the year....whether there are the tracks of the harvesters, or haystacks, or crops ready to be sown, or just stubble, etc etc etc....

Another question (and this relates to my ignorance of English vegetation)....from the screenshots, it seems that there is a 'standard' tree height........is there scope for allowing variations in height due to exposure? (trees near a windswept coast tend to be short and bent by the wind), and other location factors. (Trees in a valley might be taller and lusher because of greater access to water, and less exposure, for example).

Hasn't Oleg or Ilya (don't recall) already told us that he's using 3rd party software for the trees?

Nice trees indeed!

By the way, anyone knows how these trees will "behave" in planes flying through them and what will happen to pilots in chutes falling on them?
To be honest I don't think that KIA should always be the result of a pilot falling with his chute on a tree (like it always happens in IL-2).

Can Oleg confirm that a pilot falling on trees won't get an instant KIA?

Looking forward to the Elder Scrolls V addon for SoW.
Got a Deadra problem??? No worries! We'll Stuka the bastards...

Nobody takes you serious in here or ever will again... You asked for it, you got it.

Too bad you have sullied the good name of the 13th Hsqn. I think everybody in here will think of you when they see it mentioned, which is really too bad for the good people that flew honourably in the squadron.

Yes.

I'ts an aviation sim, no need no model realistically anything except the aircrafts.

Please, no landscape at all (good for fps) :rolleyes::grin:

There are more European trees, including an English Oak, in the 4.2 version of Speedtree - their home page lists version 5 by default.

To see them click the 4.2 box top left on http://www.speedtree.com/trees/

Unfortunately, I don't think their English Oak is one of their best!

If Oleg's reading, I'd like to put in a request for some of their Granny Smith apple trees - should be just coming into their best around September :)

-----

OK. Nix the apple trees! Before I get pulled up for incorrect research - apparently they're not native English and they come into season later than September. Got to watch your back when posting on these forums ;)

If only SpeedTree did a nice Cox's Orange Pippin or Laxton's fortune

Damn this game and damn Wikipedia!!! :mad:

I agree that the pics of the 'typical english village' are far from perfect i.e roof angles too sharp etc, but is this amount of detail really relevant, to me the most important detail is what it all looks like from the air, and if the buildings/trees at airfields are in much higher detail then that would be a considerable bonus because obviously you will be seeing a whole lot more of these.

The ground environment still need enhance, the impression of artificial work still comes to me immediately, again. It is so impressive that I begin to believe it may well be done in this way intentionally, considering the purpose of optimizing, and we do not spent most of our time on the ground in this game. The engine itself looks like using a cartoon rendering technology while the groundscape open out to me. But the cockpit samples are really fine. I don't know why the staff/or the engine can not carry this FINE into the groundscape.
The first three screenshots look like some place in the fairy-tale, an artificial landscape. It has been said before, looks like a real aeroplane flying over a LEGO city, a Disney theme park. It's hard to tell what's wrong, because they are nice as some people said, in a sense. But the feeling of something wrong does exist, it is not the correct atomsphere fit for the war, it's not a battlefiled, it's a place for afternoon tea...

Ah, Tree UK - surely the perfect person to put us right on these matters! ... or is your name just an empty boast ;)

Hesitated to say this before as I'm sure those shots are thrown together WIP demos but, for me what was most off was the positioning of the trees and houses. Looked like a random scatter. Needs to be more integrated around roads, fields, etc. (See real photo a few pages back.). Hedgerows will help when they are put in.

Again, maybe a bit OTT to criticize, :oops: . Suspect they are already aware of this.

Im beginning to suspect this is the reason WOPs overly dark and grungy look is popular with some.
It seems many people can't get their head around the fact that "battlefields" and "afternoon tea" take place in the same time space continuum.

The impression of "wrong" arises because you look in close up at chunks of generic created landscapes. This can hardly be avoided - after all it's a flight sim.

The problem with trees and other vegetation is, simply said, that they are very hard to be done right in 3D. It's an insane amount of work to do a good looking tree (from afar, but even more so from up close) in 3D, and it becomes very quickly polygon hell. Unacceptable polygon numbers for a game that has to render things in real time. Hence the popularity of optimized libraries like Speedtree or other tree generators. There are lots around for just that purpose. I am quite frankly rather impressed by those trees - they look really convincing for a tree that is obviously heavily simplified in polygon complexity. It should be no problem to put other species onto the map. The question is just how many Oleg is willing to buy for diversity purposes. (and maybe they are already there, you just don't see them on the selected screenshots).

PS: I forgot to mention that Oleg and team have without doubt to modify the trees after purchase. I am fairly certain they are not usable as they are "out of the box". They just deliver a good template. So it still stays work.

The long hot summer of 1940. England on the ground was for many people a place for afternoon tea. The battle was going on up above. Many RAF pilots commented on this contrast after parachuting out of the battle. Until the Germans switched priorites and began the blitz the Battle of Britain was in the air not on the ground and unless you lived close to an aerodrome you were not directly affected.

RedToo.

Hi all. According to the "Royal Horticultural Society Gardeners Encyclopedia of Plants & Flowers" the most common trees in England are;

The Common Oak - Quercus Robur
The Ash - Fraxinus Excelsior
& The Beech - Fagus Sylvatica

All large trees growing well over 20 metre plus.

Alas, I am not a master of all things Arboreal.....but that's what they say. I thought the Sycamore would be there too. I am from the North East of England though, we really need some posh git from the Home Counties to set the record straight :). You should see some of the trees in County Durham, they look like skyscrapers relative to this 'Bonsai' affair lol.

I agree that it is very important to get this right however, as it has to look like England. These are of course all WIP people, so give them a break. :)

I would say the Royal Horticultural Society would be the definitive source on these matters, without doubt.....So check them out! :)

There would be a lot more Elm trees then than there are now - since almost wiped out by Dutch Elm disease.

Before "dutch elm disease", the Elm was a lot more common, and may have been the most common.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_elm_disease

@ AndyJWest: :)

I agree 100%, the house positioning seems random with no gardens/greenhouses/sheds/fences or hedges to speak of, and a garden is the pride and joy of every Englishman.

When you look at the diversity of opinions and discussions and information that just a few pictures every friday can ignite on this forum, one can start to wonder what strange bunch of people that are lurking around here..

What other gaming forum would bring forth the "dutch elm disease"?
Now it's just for me to find a way to slip that piece of information into a discussion in real life...

Skarphol

lol, its all in the detail buddy :grin::grin:

Well don't forget the Poplar/Aspen either, an ancient native tree :)

http://www.british-trees.com/treegui...0000003851.htm

Mixture of Poplar Oak and hedgerow on country lane in Kent. I know this wont be modelled but it gives an idea to those wondering what it looks like :)

Alot of the country roads 60 years ago were like this due to lack of traffic.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...CN3504copy.jpg

the same type of people who will spend hundreds, if not thousands, in computer hardware and peripherals just for the sake of flying little virtual aircraft in front of their computers.

yeah, flight sims have always been a weirdo magnet imo

that's why I draw the line at strapping infrared beams on my head.

Let's not forget the plane tree :-)

http://www.strangecosmos.com/images/content/160441.JPG


The plane tree has nature's finest 'cameo'...in my opinion:

http://www.cambridge2000.com/gallery...s/P3125281.jpg

This photo really makes me want to take my TR-3 back to it's country of origin and drive it down that road.

How lovely.

And hopefully a pub nearby for some fine English bitter, that I miss so much.

Quickly followed by an English speed trap, £60 fine and 3 points on your license!!

Who says I'd be speeding?

I give my 50 year old Triumph a lot of respect for her age.

Unless of course some pesky little MG decides to get frisky with me, then I let the Weber carbs do the talking.

:mrgreen:

Not a moron, just didn't know. Nothing against that. I don't know how stable the new cats are as I'm still using 9.3 and have no need to install any newer one. Heard its a mixed bag so far. I'd wait until we get closer to the release date and save yourself some money unless you are without a decent usable card at the moment.

Flyingbullseye

I think ATI 5970 will be the best choice for upgrade at the time of the SOW release , because of It´s crossfire configuration.
Fermi is too power hungry and very loud too, and in SLI we will need a in house power plant to juice it.
I´m already planning my next upgrade , but waiting until the last moment to do it...

God, if we waited for them to fill-in and position all that detail, for the whole map and in every town...we could be waiting forever for this sim to be done... ;0

This is kind of a small observation, but I like how the ground objects are placed in the map "on a plane", and not tilted, at angle, on the hill side (looking very awkward and wrong)...

Didn't he say in the interview that all of the ground objects are done for this arena and the next one too.....I pretty sure he did.

And I say again ..It's not a WWII Tree Sim

Like Richie pointed out, ease on the ground requirements it's a flight sim.

It is a game set in Britain. There will be little point in releasing a Med' sequel if all countries look the same. It should obviously look like England.
It doesn't yet.
And it is a good idea to let Oleg know that; just in case he can't see it. Or should we wait with that until after release?