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Originally Posted by Heliocon
As for the weathering where it says physical and visual, is physical = mechanical? As in if you fly it and take bullets then donw repair something might malfunction? Maybe a more used aircraft engine overheats more easily or it responds slower?
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Yeah, I think it does mean mechanical wear. It was mentioned many times when a dynamic campaign was still planned that you would get a new plane and it would wear out over time. No idea if that still applies to the static campaigns.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Heliocon
As for CPU 3d space is easier - because there are little/no obstacles and over than the ground and other planes they wont get stuck. Managing pathfinding for 56k units, and they cant "overlap" is immensly complicated, so I dont know why you repeated what I alrerady said then dismissed it without addressing the specific points of why it is complicated
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Why is it less work because of an extra dimension? All pathfinding in a RTS can be defined as a areas a unit can move in and areas it can't. These areas could be represented as a white sheet of paper with black areas. At a slightly more sophisticated level units can be made to start avoiding no-go areas before they bump into them, and recognise other units as no go areas but it is still only a few lines of code and some basic calculations. Of course, if you have thousands of units then this will still add up.
By contrast, pathfinding for an aircraft needs to be more sophisticated. The basics are keeping a safe distance from the ground, but more accuracy and hence more calculations are required to do this, because unlike an RTS unit which can bump into the obstacle and then move on, a plane will turn into a fireball on contact with the ground.
Simple flight from point A-B is easy enough, you just need the altitude and speed, but that is still more complex than moving an RTS unit across open ground, because an RTS unit doesn't need to calculate the altitude and moves at a fixed speed.
After that, you need to be able calculate an accurate path for takeoff and landing.
Once you add combat things get much more complicated for the Flight sim. While a RTS unit only has two basic parameters added, which are the range that it will sight (and move to attack, if the units AI is set to) and the range where it can use its attack, the aircraft requires many calculations on how to position itself relative to the enemy and more to be able to lead the enemy and shoot accurately. More so if you want the AI to be able to predict the needed aiming point against a manoeuvring target. Separate calculations are required for different styles of attack, for example dive-bombing or strafing.
Of course, you can simplify some stages, IE in Il2 AI landings are simplified to a fly to this point, and then be guided in on rails down to the runway system, and AI bomber pilots do not "know" the whereabouts of other aircraft, which leads to collisions, but I believe the intention is to improve on this aspect in CoD. One of the methods mentioned was AI bubbles, where aircraft outside a certain range use simplified AI and pathfinding.
End of story, the AI and path finding in a simulation of the level of CoD requires at least several hundred times as many computing resources per unit as an RTS.