3D Cities for Falcon…
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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…]
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Just throwing this out there - city lights would look pretty odd in a city that was under attack. Generally, a mandatory blackout happens in cities when air raid sirens are blaring. Adding lights without a script to turn them off during an air raid would detract from simulating realism of a war in Korea, and I just wanted to make sure this concept has been noted alongside the goals of this project. Great work, btw - I’d be very impressed to see this become a reality!!
**also, if this is something you’d do, remember that cities power comes on and off in grids or sections, just like the sections of buildings that make up your city models. If they were to switch, they should not do so all at once, but section by section the way it happens IRL. -
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Or……a better bounding box could be looked into……[Pumpy runs and hides…]
Not my department, talk to Stef…
/Me runs after Pumpy and hides along…
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Stef 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…)
I have seen destroyable autogen buildings and trees at “BIRDS of STEEL”(2012 Gaijin Entertainment/PS3 and XBOX360) which became “WarThunder” later.
They corappse and melt into ground after they were hit by a bomb or an aircraft.Combining existing destroyable buildings(which you can RECON on 2D UI and should affect campaign situation) and auto gen small buildings would be good I think.
As current weapons like SDB becoming precise so that they can attack enemy without coraterall damage, auto gen buildings are not only for eyecandy but should also increase realism I believe. -
auto gen buildings are not only for eyecandy but should also increase realism I believe.
I think that these days the problem is that eyecandy and realism get mixed in many areas… if we look around what people are working on, we can find many working on creating “eyecandy” tom populate cities and ABs. I guess it’s the way how new engines evolved so people see DCS Nevada and X-Plane stuff and they want to do the same here, This is a natural evolution process I guess
Since day 1 that I started to work on Falcon, there was this debate about realism and eye candy. I started development of Falcon as a Particle system dev in RV team, and I ended up in BMS with 4.33 as a pure realism and avionics bitch. And now I’m back to eye candy, in a way
What is more important? I don’t know to tell and I don’t even believe anymore that there is really a difference, eye candy is realism and realism is eye candy, in a way. When your Airbase is full of objects, then it naturally gives you a more realistic feeling when you take off and land, even though it’s mainly eye candy, because eventually it’s all about the feeling of the simulation.
I’m sure that a city full of buildings, roads, power poles and power lines will give the virtual pilot a more realistic feeling, even if not everything will be as “destroyable” as every single “real” object.
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From my POV there are 2 words that describe what are you referring as “realism” in a simulator: “functionality” & “eye-candy”. Each one is different in its area.
“Functionality” is avionics, FM, systems & weapons behaviors, so bottom line a proper (code-wise) modeling of all those small details that the player interacts and (most possible) has control over them.
“Eye-candy” are all the graphical details on the virtual world the player is “in”, but (most probably) the user has no control over them. Than might be from static ground vehicles and crew models in an airfield, up to power lines and cities.
IMHO, in order for a product simulator (in our area of interest) to be mentioned as “realistic” product, it HAS to sum up to the maximum extend both these 2 words. You cannot have a full cockpit switches working 95% and crappy terrain / engine graphics, nor an Pr3par terrain level with FreeFalcon cockpits…
I’ve flown the F-16V sim recently. External world = beautiful. Internal cockpit functionality = extremely limited (as it is a “demonstrator” remember? ). FM = SUCKS. Its pilot instructor believed I am a Viper driver too since referring that “this is not a Viper”… So, can it be described as realistic?: NO.
I’ve been flown an old Block 50, FLIR’s and all in there, in real HUD optics, everything working in the pit, just great. FM seemed ok too. External world remind me Falcon 3. Can it be described as realistic?: NO
We are in 2017, computers & systems are here to help gain the best possible in each aspect. There is a need (not referring to bms strictly) to continue pushing forward evolution to each area of science in a product in order to describe it as realistic simulator and gain the crown.
Again, my POV.