Tree branches contact - Drag or damage in Battle of Britain?
 

Hello all!
In Il2 series, I remember any contact with the forest trees and their branches was leading to crash.
I have seen Vietnam war documentary, where, the rotor of the Bell helicopters in low level jungle flight, cut entirely tree top branches thick as 15 centimeters - that is confirmed by pilots. So similar is tree contact with the aircrafts.
I have read memories of Ulrich Rudell, who said, that his Ju-87, diving with heavy bomb load in the dark conditions, have cut entirely with the both wings - left ant right wing, two tree tops 10 centimeter thick, and the tree tops remain hanging below the wings of the aircraft. As You see, there was no instant crash. Ulrich Rudell land his aircraft at his airfield successfuly.

The same famous pilot, Ulrich Rudell, afther short take off from one castle yard, some kind of lawn flying with Fi-156 collided with giant oak, and the poor Fi-156 remained on the top of the tree intact. Grownd crew successfuly helped to Ulrich Rudell to come down from the tree.

What do you thing?
I belive, scalable damage for the aircraft must be modeled in case of tree contact.

And one more thing - trail of broken trees if You fall in to the forest....and why not forest fire.

Oleg, please do something...

regards to all pilots!

BG-09

I'm sure that not every contact with a tree ends fatal. But what you propose would mean that each tree needs a kind of damage model. And the question is if that effect is worth all the programming effort and if it is worth the cpu rescources. I think there are far more important things but than again I'm not a lumberjack :D

Tbag, I mean damage model for the aircraft, but not for the trees. : )
I repeat: We do not need any damage model for the trees.

regards!

BG-09

To have that kind of contact modelling the tree would need DM too.
I'd be happy to actually *see* the forest when I'm flying @ 10-30m altitude; right now I can see individual trees (if they're lonely in the middle of the terrain) but the forrest is depicted as horizontal textures, even with forest=3 in conf.ini; the horizontal textures obviously have no width/depth, so when you also fly horizontal and very close to the ground... BOOM!

I do not think you would need a damage model for a tree: I believe it would just be necessary to know the height of the tree, the height of the A/C and you just have to cut your tree in say three parts:
- height of A/C in the upper part of the tree = big noise, everything OK (believe me I experienced that first hand with a PA-25!); if two trees or more, the flight stops right there, not necessarily with a boom...
- height of A/C in middle part of tree (this would be actually a very small part, and maybe not even existing) = big hole equivalent to 20 mm explosion, consequences on handling, still flyable with skill...if two trees or more, boom
- height of A/C in lower part of tree: boom

Add in the picture coefficients to take in account the nature of trees (pine not equal to oak for that matter!) and you could be done...

Even a simple separation in two zones on the tree, without the complexities as described above would add a lot to immersion!

JV

That i think,would have to be the best solution that anybody could really come up with.

+1

Realy good proposition JVM - sounds very reasonable. easy and relistic decision of the problem. You know, that colision with the part of other aircraft in Il2 series, leads to desintagration of your aircraft or both aircrafts - similar effect must appear be in the case of colision with tree branch.

JVM, say something more about your experience with PA-25 please!

Regards!

BG-09

It might look simple on paper but in the 3d world thats another issue. If this is implemented even with LOD (level of detail) geometry, this would lead to an increase in the geometry load since every breakway section would need to have a separate geometry (plus the LOD geometry) plus bounding boxes (for collision detection). Even with adaptive subdivision this multiplied by thousands of trees would be a nightmare. IF its possible at all it would restrict online play to maybe just 6-8 people nothing more due to the amount of data that needs to be exchanged as well as the amount of data that needs to be processed.

Even if they use flat geometry and simple geometry (triangles) ovelapped with Alpha-channelled textures this would still lead to more geometry and more texture maps to load during gameplay. This would be impossible. Using shaders (Cg or rendermonkey) might help but still it would be too much for online play.

You need to Broaden Your Horizon fellas ... get it ... Broaden Your Horiz....ah forget it. :razz:

Have a look at this: http://www.gamedev.net/community/for....asp?jn=263350

This is terrain generation procedural style. It is CPU intensive but way less expensive on storage space i.e. RAM, but with multi core CPU's pretty much main stream now who cares. So with the saving in RAM bounding boxes could be cached to aid in collision detection between tree and planes.

Thanx a lot Codex for the link! Extreeeemly good graphics...

I belive it is not dificult to model tree colision. New CPU's are coming...