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

[BG-09]

Originally Posted by X32Wright

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

[|ZUTI|]

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.

[X32Wright]

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!

[Codex]

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.

[proton45]

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...

[X32Wright]

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.

[JVM]

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