F.L.A.R.E. Revived
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Point of FLARE is not to be more imersive… but to reduce the tiling effect.
I understand that. But to me immersion is the key factor in a simulation. Getting rid of the repetative effect of tiles is a good cause to work on. The balance between that and a proper amount of detail is a tricky one.
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meh. I dont think higher resolution terrain texture helps immersion that much per se, with the terrain heights the way they are.
Oh I know what would improve immersion… an Occulus Rift VR headset.
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I understand that. But to me immersion is the key factor in a simulation. Getting rid of the repetative effect if tiles is a good cause to work on. The balance between that and a proper amount of detail is a tricky one.
Anyway…. Demo will choose what is good or not for FLARE. We will be free to use it or not.
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Shadow, do I understand you correctly as questioning that such large areas are covered by one type of tile? Or what looks like one type?
In a way, I can see that is a potential issue, but unavoidably perhaps, a result of doing away with the tile borders and repeating effect. It would be great if a way could be found to introduce more variety of terrain and textures, to better reflect real life. But I don’t know enough about the process to comment really.
That’s one reason why I wondered earlier in the post, how this process (or parts of it) and the other advances in tiling made by the Balkans team guys, would be of use to each other in improving both projects.
Cheers, Mark
Yes Mark I do, but dont get me wrong with their attempt to improve falcon but as long as were stuck with a limited tiled map and a very limited hight map resolution its all a compromise.
What the guys did with Israel was/is great, the inclusion of satellite maping and its blend into the surounding tiles was very refreshing. But its still Falcon and we fly above manpads most of the time.
In 98 on a Voodoo5 it looked great, when I came back in the late 2000s with FF/AF it still looked great, high tiles I got used to. I still think it looks great.What i do hate is rivers running up hill and doggy water elevations. But unless some one comes up with wages for a team of skilled devs for 12-24 months were stuck with it.
Unles Tagnight has his wish.Regards and gratidude……Shad
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Anyway…. Demo will choose what is good or not for FLARE. We will be free to use it or not.
I agree, we will.
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I understand that. But to me immersion is the key factor in a simulation. Getting rid of the repetative effect if tiles is a good cause to work on. The balance between that and a proper amount of detail is a tricky one.
There’s going to be some type of repetition, no matter what. That can’t be helped unless you want to go to goggle maps/earth and use a different satellite tile for every area (and we know what constant use of sat tiles look like) or become an expert graphics artist and draw the tile yourself from scratch. They key with FLARE with subtle differences in the layers of the tiles. As well as the look and smoothness of it. We focus a lot of tiles on BMS because there just isn’t an abundance of 3D objects in the 3D world to give the tiles variety. Speaking of 3D, tiles weren’t the only thing worked on. There are a plethora of 3D objects that were modified art wise to match the tiling. Along with some weather DDS file changes as well.
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Gotta agree with Shadow and Snail. Everyone has an opinion and mine is in line with theirs.
And yes, we all are free to use it or not. My choice would be to not use, as it just doesn’t look realistic or immersive to me. I keep seeing it posted that it looks way better in game than in pics??
Ive seen other theater makers post their shots of terrain work and it looks fine in pics. How come FLARE pics that are posted don’t??
RAM22
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The lack of repeating patterns and borders, IMHO outweighs most of the inherent other disadvantages that we have working within the current falcon terrain boundaries. I don’t know about you guys, but down pretty low in certain areas, the existing tiles and textures can look pretty good. But as soon as you go high, the lines and repeats and patterns just destroy any semblance of reality. So for me, the way that FLARE appears to have removed that, is a massive plus. If it comes at the initial expense of less varied terrain and textures, then so be it, as Demo said, this can always be improved.
Finally, what Haukka81 said……seriously??? like this crap satellite stuff here? https://www.benchmarksims.org/forum/showthread.php?12025-New-Texture-Balkans&p=191178&viewfull=1#post191178
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I know its not realistic in the current time line, but is there room for some % of flare intergration in to the current methodolgy.
Or does have to be one or the other ?? Some of those textures have got to have a place some were, at times they fit & look so right.
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Probably the best would be a mix of photorealistic and carefully crafted tiles as “filllers”
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Probably the best would be a mix of photorealistic and carefully crafted tiles as “filllers”
Are you in here too, time I went to bed.
Wiper :nosep:
Sorry back to topic….what he said.
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The lack of repeating patterns and borders, IMHO outweighs most of the inherent other disadvantages that we have working within the current falcon terrain boundaries. I don’t know about you guys, but down pretty low in certain areas, the existing tiles and textures can look pretty good. But as soon as you go high, the lines and repeats and patterns just destroy any semblance of reality. So for me, the way that FLARE appears to have removed that, is a massive plus. If it comes at the initial expense of less varied terrain and textures, then so be it, as Demo said, this can always be improved.
Finally, what Haukka81 said……seriously??? like this crap satellite stuff here? https://www.benchmarksims.org/forum/showthread.php?12025-New-Texture-Balkans&p=191178&viewfull=1#post191178
Yes, it looks pretty but will be blurry/un real looking when you go low (below 5000ft, pov broblems etc…) and cas missions are pain in ass, because there is lots of “false targets”… This is broblem even dcs… it has 3d towns but it still uses 2d city textures too so it looks like crap and makes bombing pain in ass.
Satelite textures are ok for high alt fly but no go for cas or any sort of ground attack. Buildings painted in ground just broke all immersion so easily, even just couple 3d buildings is better than painted city.
I really hope that we get some kind forests…even il2 style would be great. And even simple small towns made of 3d buildings is great improvment if we just get rid of those fake citys. Hell even stock F4 amount of 3dbuildings are ok…
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Perhaps F.L.A.R.E is designed by way of future iterations of BMS that will render some SAT tiles not appropriate.
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Biggest problem, which I think FLARE has vastly overcome, is that when using satellite tiles (especially city ones, coastal, etc) they tent to have shading that in no way corresponds to the shading in the game or time of day. Like a sat photo taken at 4PM with shadows on buildings or, and google maps/earth is a big offender of this, an entire portion of the map will be shaded a different color than a portion right next to it.
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Don’t forget, all the textures we currently use and have are satellite image derived….just all the same small photo. So the same applies about going low. except, that in these new versions, the resolution is 4 times as good( 2048 x 2048 as opposed to 256 x 256 in most cases) so it looks 4 times better. You have to pretty damn low , say under 1000 ft, for it to start to show. Look at this photo over the Spain theater mountains, about 1500ft altitude. looks pretty damn good to me…:
I use photoscenery extensively in FSX and personally don’t like the autogen 3D objects on top. Here is a shot of FSX : Just to show how it can look. The only autogen in that shot is teh tall tres, all the rest of the depth and sense of reality is generated by the actual images, with their shadowing etc. OK, so the shadows are only right once a day…But I will live with that…
Photoscenery is where it’s at for sure. And there is no other engine such a sin DCS being developed for Falcon, so this is the best way we have to improve our scenery. the possibilities are very good and improving ever quicker as various teams learn more and more…
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I think that the best and proper course of action on this project is to finish it first as originally intended. There is is new concept of making terrain, so perhaps let the guys have it finished asap and see what we all can learn from that.
I have to say that following this and other forum discussions I find it little unsettling and discouraging that there is this climate of hightened and perhaps not realistic expectations of what the curent terrain and 3D engine can deliver. In absence of any radical core improvement (and I sincerely hope that this is going to change in the future!) one of the cheap ways of spicing it is use of PR. I am not entirely against it, but it needs to be said that it is not quite the only solution or the Holy Grail here.
FLARE was the move in the opposite direction and it should be given the chance to speak (as originally intended by the author).
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Don’t forget, all the textures we currently use and have are satellite image derived….just all the same small photo. So the same applies about going low. except, that in these new versions, the resolution is 4 times as good( 2048 x 2048 as opposed to 256 x 256 in most cases) so it looks 4 times better. You have to pretty damn low , say under 1000 ft, for it to start to show. Look at this photo over the Spain theater mountains, about 1500ft altitude. looks pretty damn good to me
Stunning. I cannot wait!
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I’ll provide an example short video (I already did most of it DeeJay so it won’t take any time away :)) of things we’re trying to do and things we’re trying to avoid cause I think it will better show what we mean. But I think the conversation is fair. I did say in my very first post that after trying the tiles I said they are not the end-all-be-all. This is still Falcon. When I first went up using these FLARE tiles my first reaction was that it seemed kind of bland. It really looked like DCS or Rise of Flight with the trees missing. I’ve never really paid much attention to no trees until I tried FLARE. But as I got to different areas I liked the tiles more and more, especially at lower altitudes or when there are vehicles or ground units on the tiles (and the river/lakes/etc… inland are the best I’ve seen). I think the FLARE tiles could be improved with more variation in the generic tiles and the mountains. If anyone has done some flights in the mountains in the POH theater, they look amazing. But something to remember with any tiles in Falcon is that there has to be repetition. There’s no way around it, so the idea is to try and minimize the appearance of it.
I think a conversation and sharing ideas/feedback is always good, but there’s no way to please everyone. This all just started because our squad flys primarily in Korea and we saw all these great projects going on in other theaters and thought the old girl needed a face lift too. So we started doing them ourselves until one day I was waiting for a haircut and decided to contact Gio on a long shot to save us a year’s worth of time. Then he explained to us what his goal was and how he did it, and we decided to finish it using his same method and look with a few exceptions (such as making the mountains not look so pyramid-like and fixing rivers going uphill).
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(I already did most of it DeeJay so it won’t take any time away )
LOL!!! No prob mate!
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IMHO this was/is an interesting thing, But they say " With great power, comes great responsibility".
Assuming this was/is a korea project, and from what you said of the organization of files, I assume that there are about 1100 tiles, and 1900 in the texture.bin. So there are at least 800 free slot, what about, instead of geo-sat painting on tiles, adding some more “variations” to all that is still ripetitive? like roads/rivers/coastline…
From the video this is the most punch in the eye thing imho, personally I wouldn’t mind of seeing the 3d obj placed differently from the 2d texture, but it would be nice to have a coastline that doesn’t come out from tetris!
Imho with a very small amount of variation 2-3 you can have a very interesting visual effect, and replace them with monster tool in random mode is a 3 click job.Forgive me if this had/have already been said.
Finally imho some modification of the L2 and bin files is needed to update it to current time (almost empty sets, not used tiles, duplicate textures…)