WIP - Guam Theatre
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Why are you handling trees anyway? The Falcon engine already renders billboards-like (They aren’t pure billboards) trees and does it pretty fast. I don’t think you can get things faster but making that as part of a 3D model.
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opacity map ttee approach (default one) is demanding. I dont like it too much. I can see its qood for most simmers, but there should be an option to use own 3D geometry for this “particle”.
I have nice 3-tris and 6-tris trees without opacity textures. I would be happy to swap default ones in my install/theater….(current option is trees OFF for me) -
opacity map ttee approach (default one) is demanding. I dont like it too much. I can see its qood for most simmers, but there should be an option to use own 3D geometry for this “particle”.
I have nice 3-tris and 6-tris trees without opacity textures. I would be happy to swap default ones in my install/theater….(current option is trees OFF for me)That bad??
I don’t know how can you render a tree without transparency (I assume that’s what you mean by opacity map), as without it you will see the billboard background and the entire illusion goes bye bye…
Such billboarding effect with transparency work nice for most sims, even the trees in DCS are pure billboards (i.e worse than the BMS trees, especially visible on close trees from ~2-3K feet looking down and you can see the “paper shape” pretty good)
And BTW the default BMS textures are pretty low res, for sure there is a place for improvement. I’d make the 16 trees sheet on a 4096 texture, then you get some nice 1024^2 resolution per tree. For GPUs today you will almost not see the difference in performance for 1 texture fetch…
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Why are you handling trees anyway? The Falcon engine already renders billboards-like (They aren’t pure billboards) trees and does it pretty fast. I don’t think you can get things faster but making that as part of a 3D model.
Hi I-Hawk,
The reason for “Handling Trees” in GUAM is simple. The Falcon Engine will not…ATM…render the trees at the correct elevation to the projected terrain.
I will give the reason why in Pics: First here is the “TERRAIN” of GUAM (Feature\3D Model) rendered over the current L2 wireframe.As you can see the only elevated L2 wireframe is only that, that is needed, for the PHD\PT Data (ATM, hoping BMS gets Z working for that DATA) on the Airbase. The rest of the L2 Wireframe is FLAT.
See, I told you the Falcon World was flat!!!LOL
Lets look at it another way:
We could just assign Areas on the 15 or so Green tiles and project the trees via BMS and yes I agree the textures used for the trees could use a bit of TED magic.But, why should we, other than Poly Count, when we can get them at the correct elevation to the (Feature\3D Model)???
Most of the Falcon trees would be rendered below the (Feature\3D Model) elevations anyway.BUT…heh,heh,heh…demer may have found a way to bring back the DEM2Terrain L2 in GUAM and utilize it, if so then we will just use the BMS trees:
See City Engine allows us to produce\render Terrain layers in differing depths of Resolution. Kind of like L0,1,2,3,4. The “Trick,Hack,Cheat, No Scruples” approach is to find the Base Resolution for an elevation layer in CE that most closely matches Falcons L2……;)
Then we can MERGE the more detailed Layers to it…BAWAHAAAAHAAA…Hardy…Har…Har…Pirates we BE!!!We don’t know what we don’t know, BUT we can find out what we don’t know,
demer -
Cool trick Dave. Now will this trick/hack allow us to have high altitude lakes filled with water?
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Yes. And for sure something I want to work on for years now:
Dams which maybe will include and a bonus script animation with water flowing from the dam with pressure…
How does that sound?Στάλθηκε από το MI 5 μου χρησιμοποιώντας Tapatalk
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Cool trick Dave. Now will this trick/hack allow us to have high altitude lakes filled with water?
Yes. And for sure something I want to work on for years now:
Dams which maybe will include and a bonus script animation with water flowing from the dam with pressure…
How does that sound?Στάλθηκε από το MI 5 μου χρησιμοποιώντας Tapatalk
Sure will, with waterfalls and raging rivers to boot……chuckle, Chuckles…!!!
Seriously though, it does allow for the illusion\render of Negative Elevations in the Terrain as exampled in the ROTA movie of the latte stone quarry east of the runway (Still haven’t found that Rogue Poly…LOL…maybe a GFX glitch).
The “Hole” is in the Terrain MODEL and cannot go below the level of the L2 Wireframe beneath it (BMS does not support negative elevations). You could raise the Terrain Model abit or lower the L2 Wireframe a bit to allow for them, the latter is used in Guam.
A pic is worth 1K words:As far as the Dams, ( I’m thinking a BIT outta’ the box here :madgrin: I hope that doesn’t surprise anyone :rofl:), you could take over a bridge model in the DB and use it as your Dam feature on your objective. It would have value for managers\AI i.e. to produce attack missions in BMS and easily placed correctly in CE (CE allows us to use “Static Models” as .obj matched to the terrain) that would translate correctly to Falcon……
Cheers,
demer -
Great info Dave/Arty. I was thinking with a trick like this, we could have hydroelectric dams as eye candy/immersion as well as objectives for AI. In this way we could really replicate a South Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Italy) for a 64 European Theatre but with less city/town/village objectives than what we have currently have with Tom’s Theatre. Would make a great ‘Cold War’ Theatre, hint, hint Dave.
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Well a dam can be broken in x pieces and once bombed just affect the corresponding part only and replace it with damaged and destroyed one. Once a part is destroyed you can add the script and have water flowing from that part and raise the level of water in the area after the dam and lower the water area before the dam.
Στάλθηκε από το MI 5 μου χρησιμοποιώντας Tapatalk
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It has been a Falcon Minute or 2, but back to the Geo-Located Trees for GUAM as I promised…Did I Promise Anything???..LOL!
A Lo-Poly Tree,remember I stated I would like to have it <100 Polys and still render in game nicely:So I got that,not too bad, better than what was done for MW EONS ago…with their mighty engine…LOL!!!
Dropped it into CE and:Convert to .obj for 3DS:
Convert to LOD for Falcon:
Then shove it into my DB for in game, and I mean SHOVE, it CTD the first attempt. But she’s all fixed up and fine now….:D!!!
OTW:From the Pit:
So that is done (Proved) and more to come……:mrgreen:
BTW the CTD was on the Terrain mesh,not the Trees…fixed.Have fun,
demer -
Nothing to say, Pics should explain it all:
Cheers,
demer -
Looks cool!
Στάλθηκε από το MI 5 μου χρησιμοποιώντας Tapatalk
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Coming to a Theater near you sooner or later than we think
Tedious, tiresome, boring work!!!
BUT once done the immersion level jumps up!!!Enjoy,
demer -
Eager and willing.
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Well Hell its been a minute…So just an update. I lost my SSHD last September and recovered it, well most, this January. So A LOT of Falcon development is gone…Sigh
In between times I was still “Playing OUTSIDE the Sandbox” with Guam Theater. i.e. The NEW Google Earth and my friend there etc……can’t help myself…LOL!!!
Here is a render from 3DS MAX as to where it went:Enjoy the pic.
Regards,
demer -
Thanks for the Thanks Gent’s……
But we are moving ever forward in these last few days…http://www.boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/downloads.php Get it, learn it and use it….Free and Kinda simple …Chuckles…LOL!!! I am going to demo some pix here and NO I am not going to explain how I got here from there. But I will state that the new techniques for building this took a lot of research into the various Falcon code’s I have…not for the feint hearted…LOL what a mess. As well I have found a way using .dds to sharpen a lot of imagery without “Lossy” Again I don’t have the time anymore to explain…sigh!
Suffice it to say that this is all based on Triangles…Wireframe AND Imagery…with low impact on FPS…kinda 1993 Atari but better LOL!!!So the first pic demonstrates the natural terrain of Rota and no I had not applied a Smooth Modifier yet…LOL! Still REALLY close to the terrain profile in DEM!
Second Pic shows the way demer WAS going in getting definition on the Airbase’s at a HUGE Poly cost…sigh.
Third pic show’s the Ultimate compromise for Falcon IMHO…outside of the “Cut In” the ENTIRE runway is one polygon…:DEnjoy the preview and yes we will have a DL’d soon…
demer -
Link in first post not working anymore https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9EBo1PFk5NUSXJ1T0lkNTRDdlE/view?usp=sharing
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Link in first post not working anymore https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9EBo1PFk5NUSXJ1T0lkNTRDdlE/view?usp=sharing
Long Ago and far behind……something new is coming…
demer
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So here we go AGAIN Gent’s……LOL
New CODE, New DB, New DB structure…What’s an “Outta’ the Box” Dev. going to do…Well this:https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Dn49EQlwZ-CXUn6dfpgG9jQmnODmfVFr
Notes on the VID.
1. Everything we see, from the Fence to the Sewer Treatment plant, is DRAWN from the Polys on the Rota feature “Land Mass”.
2. WTF does that mean demer???..…One Object\One Model = One DRAW Call…;)
3. New technique for the terrain…I posted B4 about using simple planes in 3DS to achieve an Elevation profile that closely matches the DEM Data available…with a LOT less Polys spent…F’n Triangles…LOL!!!
Ummm…Let me explain that one for you…I-H…so if we take a 30 degree DEM and we want the resolution to be somewhere near L1 or even L0 we end up with 1 to 2 million Tri’s…with this way we end up with 6K Tris and the same ~ resolution for the Elevations…go do the math…I did…LOL!!!Enjoy the Vid,
TIRED demer