Nevada-Fallon Test Range 4.33
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Glad to see you finally around Anthony. I hope, that your temporary break from Falcon life is over and you are to resume some of your development projects here.
As you point above making theater in Falcon is not a trivial matter and requires firm commitment, dedication and quite a lot of available free time. Not always all of those ingredients are in place, when some of the “new” projects announcements are enthusiastically made on this forum, yet let us remember that all should be about having good time and fun. So, after all, all is good in the end ….
Nevada is the theater doable and could involve interesting work at developing two opposing super airbases, where new ways of making complex AI traffic and orchestrating it with properly working AI air traffic control could make really exciting undertaking. I remember from the old days you were talking about it with great interest.
Again, all that aside, most importantly glad to see you around…
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Yes, Nevada seems to have possess an interesting twist on the Falcon theme. I think the two super base concept is a solid idea - I am not sure how functional it would be for a traditional campaign, perhaps a batch of really interesting TE could be created. I also like the idea of a flight school - maybe fly primary trainers like T-38 and then practice gunnery with a/c like the A-10, A-7D, F-111, etc.
RedFlag and gunnery competition was a regular event. Also, the USAF Thunderbirds were based there - be pretty cool to have a demo team put on a show. The nice thing about Nellis was they were regular hosts to all sorts of international aircraft.
I like the idea of using satellite imagery for places like Las Vegas, Lake Mead, Area 51, Tonapah and so forth and maybe blend it with some photoreal transitions. . .
Just need to find some like-minded people willing to put in the time, figure out what models are currently available and see how much DB work would be needed and find a good TE and terrain tile guy, and of course someone needs to generate models for the two superbases.
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Dear Ranger,
nice to see you around once again, first of all, it was time!
Straight to the topic, I’m not skilled in anything, except for making TEs and beta testing. So I don’t precisely know if and when could be useful this for you, but the same if that time will come - and I hope soon - please consider me as a little helping hand.With best regards,
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Jackal - roger that - - still getting my stuff together.
I do have some good news for folks. I was able to run an older computer that I had in the shop and have been successful in locating a lot of old FF3/4/5/6 material that I had thought I had lost or forgotten about. A key to any future project in BMS is trying to retrograde all the finished DXM models back to LOD models. For those who flew FF6 they know there was a lot of variety and eye-candy present. For theater development - the end state I have in mind is one where that material eventually finds its way into various BMS theaters. I think that would be a great contribution.
However, at this point I need to now collect up the best most developed LOD models and see how much work it will take to get those models up to an acceptable appearance for BMS. CCC built dozens and dozens of models and then there were various other contributors over the years and those models were in turned refined and skinned. Long story short I am really happy to have located a lot of raw but usable material and will assess how much it will take to get it ready for inclusion in BMS theaters. There is a down side to some of these models: 1) a lot of work was done in DXEdit which made some facets of model work incredibly easy for a non-3dsMax guy like me. Extracting the fix nodes in DXM models and trying to paste them back into a flawed LOD model may prove easy or hard - I won’t know until I try. 2) I used a lot of Qawa’s afterburner models, rescaled for various a/c - those were only DXM nodes and so I would need to locate a few suitable LOD nodes for afterburners - many of the ones I have seen with the exception of WaveyDaves Tornado, kind of suck big time in terms of overall realism. An accurate rendering of the afterburner is an artistic thing - this is a very visual thing for a model especially if you like formation take-offs - you are going to see the afterburners of a/c in front of you and this is kind of the first thing you see at take-off and it has a memorable impact. 3) I am very concerned with frame rates. So, thinking of higher poly models in the future and some big skins, it remains to be seen if I adding a bunch of models optimized for FF might not make BMS run slow as poop and that won’t be useful helpful at all. 4) most FF models have multiple skin packs and my latest thinking is that it might be smarter to remove extra skin sets and integrate a model with a single skin set. It is entirely possible to just integrate multiple a/c to obtain lots of skin choices but when building TEs or campaigns, the a/c you choose for an airbase will be exactly what you want and air tasking should be more precise in spawning the a/c you want at a given place with the proper skin.
I have a few weeks of quiet working in the background to collect all my models, skins, parent data, pits, etc in to easily usable packages for DB work in BMS.
I am also going to run a few tests and assess a few theaters folks have been kind enough to share with me. I want to see what the current state of those are - how much work is involved and whether or not they present with some low-hanging fruit to finish off quickly or represent projects that require much longer term commitment like ITO2 did (six years). Having been down the long term commitment road, it is fraught with a lot of unknowns totally beyond anyone’s control and a lot really great work and contributions can end up on the floor, as code, interest, real-life, and acceptable products collide.
Essential for any team I form or join up with, it really needs a TE/campaign guru (not a tinker but someone who truly understands how to dig into the campaigns and TEs and make the DB shine in game and simultaneously test fly the stuff first). Next is a terrain tile guy willing to crank out some serious artwork like Polak did for ITO2. Next, I need a really fast/productive low poly model guy like ccc who can do overnight turnaround fixes and then a high-poly model guy like WaveyDave who can produce two or three masterpieces that are the centerpiece of blue/red side, and lastly a cockpit guy who can do some 2d and 3d cockpits that can work within the construct of BMS but dumbed down for more vintage theaters and on par for modern ones. I can cover most of the rest if other folks can’t contribute to stuff like rebuilding terrain, airbase work, music, vids, tacref, FMs, skins, installers etc.
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Very well, Ranger.
Thanks for this update about your plan, and please ask if and when in need.
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Anyone have a working theater in 4.33u1 - nothing fancy just enough to fly test TEs and build from there? Iceburg? Toonces, Ripper? If so, please PM me with what you have and I will see what I can do to get something flying in 4.33u1. Thus far I haven’t seen recent any links. I did dredge the hard-drives and I do have some pretty nice imagery that could be applied. Because there is so little water - this theater demands we come up with some decent and different desert tiles with lots of random tiles, definitely some new stuff to transition with Ted’s older ITO work. I also think that this doesn’t need to have a lot of airbases - rather maybe have two really super nice bases like Nellis and Area51 in a custom build and use stock falcon airbases for he rest. I haven’t checked the map on Nevada but it would be pretty cool if Edwards AFB fit on there somehow, if so I might like to see that included - then one could have some toys to base out of those three airbases. I wonder if CCC has a UFO model, hehehe or maybe some of that experimental stuff. My vision of making this work is phototile Las Vegas valley area and Lake Mead, Tonopah, Area 51 and mountain areas between Nellis and the gunnery ranges - then dumb down the tiles in the perimeter areas where you probably won’t fly a lot. Make campaign/TE to keep within the interesting terrain areas.
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I gave this theater over a year in 4.32 and can tell you from personal experience it is almost impossible to generate this theater with the amount of areas everyone wants photoreal tiled. The map is just too big.
Although with a team of people it might be, at the very least decent theater……
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A total hand-tiled photoreal theater would be a big job for sure - over a million tiles - unless someone has a way to batch process that probably isn’t ever going to happen. However, a very doable way would be to create patches of photoreal tiles then transition to seemless tiles created using photoreal terrain. Area in the corners of the map are low priority. But areas around the 5 major airbases are hi-priority. Get Las Vegas photoreal, do Edwards AFB photoreal, same for Area 51, Tonopah and Indian Springs. Maybe do Lake Mead or not. Laying down the basics is a good step and then doing sections later as separate projects is maybe a more realistic way to approach this.
Call me crazy but I have given a lot of thought to some innovative ideas on how to break up the monotonous repeats of old-school Falcon style terrain. One thought that occurs to me is to have some objects - ie models created that contain alpha channels and that might contain some graphics that would address the problem of something like road networks or dirt roads on uninhabited terrain. It might be possible to create a “trail” with a random look to it that covers several kilometers. Another would be to had some shading or additional feature like appearances - like rocks, shaded areas. So perhaps you have some generic randomize desert tiles - but you overlay it with something, sort of like smoke, dirt, grime on a model, instead you overlay it on terrain tiles - changes the general appearance of the terrain in a certain area and you don’t need to worry about being seemless or anything because it uses an alpha channel and already blends in. This kind of goes with the same line of thinking as using the tree sliders to add a feature to terrain - instead you do it with the terrain itself.
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Not trying to be that guy here Ranger but……
Las Vegas is over 1000 tiles…thats just one area and with the limit of 4096 tiles this is a real problem. Not to mention that the more tiles you add the more performance degrades. My Nevada theater had just over 3000 tiles with 3 photoreal areas as well as numerous transitions in the desert and in it and in its infancy the theater ran at 80+ FPS but by the end stages it was at 30 FPS, it was no where near completion either.
There would need to be massive compromise on the theater creators parts as to what would/could stay and what was not needed. Personally I think focusing on 1 area like Las Vegas is the way to go. Photoreal that whole area then spend the rest of the time working on making the desert and mountains pop. Then take an assessment of the theater (ie. performance and looks) and decide whether to add more or not.
Also for me it was important to make an actual Nellis airbase out of tiles, something you could land on and taxi out of. We were able to accomplish this at Luke and it really added extra immersion as it wasnt just a stock Falcon airbase but it was actually Luke.
I may be in on this theater again but would need to have a meeting via teamspeak to iron out the plans and how to move forward. Also would need at least 4 to 8 people as the theater team to work on the different aspects of this theater. It truly is all just talk until we all get together and start generating results.
Lawndart
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Gentlemen,
just my two cents about this topic: I think it would be the time to create a team to work on this project just as it deserves to.
I want to clarify that this is not an original point of view of mine, but I’m reporting it here because I believe it’s a very good point to start from to make such kind of matters become real.
My apologies in advance in case I bothered anyone with this mine.With best regards,