3D Cities for Falcon…
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Does this still have the problem that tanks can drive through the buildings?
can you fly through them?
if you fly between them, will you still collide?
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crazy stuff.
I`m not pretty sure about all that stuff because nobody knows what the new 4.33 engine will do. Autogen trees and Houses?
In this case whe should relax and wait- Ist the same Problem I have with my Norway and Korea Theaters…
However- great to see that.
Cheers
Tom -
@Tom:
crazy stuff.
I`m not pretty sure about all that stuff because nobody knows what the new 4.33 engine will do. Autogen trees and Houses?
In this case whe should relax and wait- Ist the same Problem I have with my Norway and Korea Theaters…
However- great to see that.
Cheers
Tomwell Auto gen houses is the thing. I don’t know if they are going to be in the 4.33 or any following version. I just know that those engines are mostly for one off and they are heavy.
The rings a bell post was done when said trying to fit 12 buildings textures and damaged at the same time in one texture file.
Sure they can be optimized but the combination of forests and buildings and while the war engine is there active will need a way serious pc for sure and very very very serious optimization to bring it to a level to be usable in Falcon.
On the other hand I hope the procedural rules files will be open and not hardcoded so we could tweak them and create variations and etc. Why does something in my guts tells me it’s going to be python? No tip, just know from city engine that CGA rules are good but when the going get’s tough python comes in.
Maybe a combination… who knows… we will certainly have to wait the miracle those guys can provide.Anyway let me try and do some procedural windows on those models to see how they look at night.
@Blu3wolf nope u will not be able to fly inside them. Tanks will not be able to follow roads and travel between the buildings if the order to scatter is given as this is a general Falcon way that it works. And you will not be able to destroy only one building from those. Maybe a setting as when a B-52 gives hell will result at a destroyed model.
For a solution to this there will be separated buildings inside the city and probably the ones are already there. Those u will be able to destroy with an F-16 payload.The thing for the destroyed city model is that those not destroyed buildings walls are like paper thick so when you destroy them will be like broken glass. But with CGA Rules ucan recreate the whole model and set the walls to be thick as real then u can brake down the model using like 30 - 50 bombs on them.
Really how many bombs does a B-52 unload in a pass?
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Just a small comment: Wouldn’t it be nice enough to have some city feel independent of how we can destroy singular houses. I flew a couple of years testing campaigns for FF and I rarely recall having an object of destroying a dedicated house or city / civil object ever.
It was airbases, mobile units, some factories (often invisible anyway ) and the alike. -
Hi crazyTom,
Just a small comment: Wouldn’t it be nice enough to have some city feel independent of how we can destroy singular houses. I flew a couple of years testing campaigns for FF and I rarely recall having an object of destroying a dedicated house or city / civil object ever.
It was airbases, mobile units, some factories (often invisible anyway ) and the alike.that is history, think about what to come in F4 future.
Cheers
Biker -
Yesterday maybe be history, but (falcon’s) tomorrow is a mystery.
Focus instead on today, it is a gift (a.k.a. the present)
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Looking good, keep up the good work. One day we will have graphics that are up to 2005 standards at least. As far as buildings go.
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Hi crazyTom,
that is history, think about what to come in F4 future.
Cheers
BikerWell Biker, I think I am not up-to-date anymore. Known issue… To be frank, I also forgot a lot of the hard learned Falcon basics. Yet the rest stayed, just like stuff you learn as a child, engraved in/on my hardplate.
Cheers
:drink:
Tom -
what is not that obvious on those last crapy images is that the city model follows the terrain height.
Not so well on the pictures cause I hadn’t it scale properly (buildings are bigger and the area they cover is bigger) also the height map used was the real one and not Falcon’s… but still blends quite well.In EMF where I scaled it better and it looks even better.
But thing is I have to write from zero the CGA Rule as it has a lot of unwanted details.
Biggest problem are the windowed walls, where they blend with floors polygons… So Either I have to find out how not to draw the floor polys or do it from scratch. Those together give 800.000 vertices and it’s a killer to remove them by hand in the 3DS.
The windows come out separately all as one object so it’s way easy to make them light up at night… Not all…
Another thing is to master an automatic variation on the CGA rule for roofs and windows. That way even if the buildings are identical the whole city feel will be like they are all unique.
It will be rather hard to scale the model and align it with the tiled roads. So maybe I will have to do the roads also or change the tiles underneath so it will show correctly those streets and Green areas. Thankfully the roads rules available are quite good.
About street Light poles are easy to put them there the tricky part will be the lighted polygon witch must be aligned on the terrain - road to give the actual city night lighting. Those Poles must have LODS and mostly be for the light effect rather than the actual 3d model.
Flash… I believe with the switches we can imitate the traffic lights and display an auto switching pattern of red green yellow? :lol: if I - we will reach that point of detail… doh I don’t believe what I’m writing… it will be wow…
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Lots have changed since the last post? Has BMS 4.33 affected these plans?
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well not actually.
The project is frozen until the first release of IKAROS where I put all my free time for falcon development right now.
Once this is done my main focus will go to FBB which will be for IKAROS and maybe a guideline or some generic blocks emerge for KOREA. -
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Just 2/5 of a city in falcon untextured (testing materials and ptypes) and no terrain leveling yet as it is based from where I left it on 2014:
Rest 3/5 will follow just for the fun of it…
Now sorry for not showing up the FPS I had pretty screenshot on and it didn’t show them I was at minimum 17fps on res:5440x1200 on my 580GTX with 3GB vram.
The polygons where the two parts are shown at the same time are close to 1.000.000 just the city not the surrounding ones.They are in real measurement and the roads are real from OSM. Nice found are the lighted terrain tiles underneath the buildings. Having a generic one will give a nice lighted roads effect for the night. Of course windows will be lighted for the night to have a nice city by night but my tests without textures dind’t work as I wanted them. There are there some that should but they didn’t. Those ptypes are still confusing…
Mostly I wanted to check how much LodEditor can handle.
Oh the above where done in three days and the other parts are ready just needs refine and export from 3ds max.
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Future for “real” cities is autogen and autogen only
See, this kind of stuff should be implemented to draw a huge number of simple 3D models with great efficiency:
Also another crazy example here (Even older and with GTX-460!):
Eventually, Autogen structures are mainly simple models with how many? 8, 12, 16, 32, 64 vertices? so this is nothing for a modern card, using the correct method for batching and instancing with minimum number of draw calls may generate a huge amount of such simple models in 1 scene.
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well for this the issue ain’t just the vertices. but the rules and layers to apply and create such models. The placement of them.
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well for this the issue ain’t just the vertices. but the rules and layers to apply and create such models. The placement of them.
Rules to create and place can be same as we have for trees currently, just more advanced… Think like this:
- We define say 10 groups of structures
- In each group you define structures with similar purpose - e.g 1st group small houses, 2nd group skycrapers, 3rd group office structures, 4th group small industry structures etc).
- In some dedicated/expended tool you define circles/other-polygons with some properties to define group/type etc
- In the engine then you define for the CPU to read that data at sim loading and generate some data structure that eventually will be processed in the rendering phase, select the required 3D models, and sent them efficiently to the GPU to render.
Think that currently every object in Falcon requires at least 1 draw call, besides of course the generic stuff like Particles and trees/grass which are all rendered with a single draw call. By rendering Autogen stuff you can pack many objects in a single vertex buffer and draw them all at once, that would be the most efficient thing that can be done, even without talking about future dreams like DX11.
Of course that is a nice list up there but it’s much harder to perform (and integrate!) than to write, but that is an idea of how to draw many objects at once in graphic engines.
See an EXTREME example of what I mean from Xplane 11 sceneray:
This is of course a fantasy to get to this level, but I’d suffice for something even close :mrgreen:
I understand BTW that they are using some crazy data from the web that contain all objects you have in cities, buildings/roads/traffic-lights and on and on…
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Hi guys,
Rules to create and place can be same as we have for trees currently, just more advanced… Think like this:
- We define say 10 groups of structures
- In each group you define structures with similar purpose - e.g 1st group small houses, 2nd group skycrapers, 3rd group office structures, 4th group small industry structures etc).
- In some dedicated/expended tool you define circles/other-polygons with some properties to define group/type etc
- In the engine then you define for the CPU to read that data at sim loading and generate some data structure that eventually will be processed in the rendering phase, select the required 3D models, and sent them efficiently to the GPU to render.
Think that currently every object in Falcon requires at least 1 draw call, besides of course the generic stuff like Particles and trees/grass which are all rendered with a single draw call. By rendering Autogen stuff you can pack many objects in a single vertex buffer and draw them all at once, that would be the most efficient thing that can be done, even without talking about future dreams like DX11.
Of course that is a nice list up there but it’s much harder to perform (and integrate!) than to write, but that is an idea of how to draw many objects at once in graphic engines.
See an EXTREME example of what I mean from Xplane 11 sceneray:
This is of course a fantasy to get to this level, but I’d suffice for something even close :mrgreen:
I understand BTW that they are using some crazy data from the web that contain all objects you have in cities, buildings/roads/traffic-lights and on and on…
I don’t want F4 to be just another nice looking “pacifistic” flight sim (what is the benefit of such 3D cities, besides eye candy?).
In a real world conflict almost every building on the ground can have a strategical meaning for the war progress (even if it is “only” Collateral Damage).They way I want to go is pretty much the opposite of this.
I want to have targets if military priority inside a civilian objective, challenging they player (and AI) to be more cautious on tgt selection and weapon release.Cheers
Biker -
well having a city in there affecting the weapon trajectory or sensors wouldn’t be more realistic?
My target also is not eye candy. I target a no textures solution. But having the real layout as close as possible.
About the targets inside the civilian objective. By doing them 3d it’s easy to exclude buildings from the mass one object xxxx buildings in one model and plant them separately and assign them as targets.Now it’s another thing to go find a building in just 30 buildings in one area instead of spotting the building which looks way familiar to others in a stack of thousands. Example the pilot must read the maps more closely (even real maps OSM) and designate key points or visual points like cross sections parks etc.
In a night environment with better lighting like light on the streets - lighted windows and general urban lights (points spread over the city as point lights as we do in taxiways) etc things might get even more confusing.
Trees can be planted also in areas designated in the city with current autogen engine.
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Hi guys,
I don’t want F4 to be just another nice looking “pacifistic” flight sim (what is the benefit of such 3D cities, besides eye candy?).
In a real world conflict almost every building on the ground can have a strategical meaning for the war progress (even if it is “only” Collateral Damage).They way I want to go is pretty much the opposite of this.
I want to have targets if military priority inside a civilian objective, challenging they player (and AI) to be more cautious on tgt selection and weapon release.Cheers
BikerStef what would be the difference from what we have these days? The cities these days are full with houses, just they are painted over the tile texture instead of pop-up like real 3D objects, is that not right?
Also, Autogen doesn’t mean necessarily no bounding boxes, BTW, I think a solution can be found for what you are looking for. e.g a group of small buildings packed close together in a street may have a simple rectangular bounding box to represent damage, and we can set fires where weapon hits.
But practically, if we want real looking cities, Autogen is the only possible solution. Even leave GFX alone (Say we can handle rendering), I don’t think it’s practical for the CPU to manage so many real objects (You know better than me, loops are running over those lists many times every frame…)
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, BTW, I think a solution can be found for what you are looking for. e.g a group of small buildings packed close together in a street may have a simple rectangular bounding box to represent damage, and we can set fires where weapon hits.
Or……a better bounding box could be looked into……[Pumpy runs and hides…]