EXPANSION OF DEVELOPMENT BASE PERSONNEL THROUGH EDUCATION
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In my opinion, just a note:
- In reference to How to improve the visual aspect of Falcon? Joe 2012
-BAZT (or high-resolution terrain mapping) with the topographic resolution of the old theater.L0 (100m) as a visual reference to all distances when the power of the PCs allow to manage it.
-Using more than 4096 textures when the power of the PCs allow it to manage (post Joe 2011 year testing the possibility).Only with these two elements could be made great improvements that would involve improving two aspects of the terrain: topography and patterns of repetition.
- In reference to the learning curve of a developer (I can only speak of theaters):
-All the information needed to create a theater is available and public. And today more than ever there is more information available than ever before (BMS forums, PMC forums, wiki) by Snakeman
-The necessary tools are available and have tutorials
http://www.pmctactical.org/f4/downloads.php by PMC TFW (
http://www.weapondeliveryplanner.nl/ by Falcas
http://sakgiok.gr/ by Monster
-In the forums there are many topics that give very useful answers and mark standards, links to youtube (Demer blog, Arty blog), and pdf with procedures (e.g. how create a airbase by Cannon), etc.- And the most important, and I take the opportunity to express my gratitude to all of them: in these forums there are many people, gurus, developers, experts …. friends !!! Who will not hesitate to help you in difficult times. That help is free, monetarily speaking, but I have to earn that right; That is to say: I have to work hard; I have to make progress; I have to show commitment; I have to learn, to search, to inquire, to read, to prove, to make mistakes … And then, only then: I will ask for help.
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Also let’s not forget the missing Falcon Editor and Mission commander manuals.
Writing the first will answer and shed enormous light on the theater development.
Community can write it and devs kick in when needed by asking them.sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk
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Also let’s not forget the missing Falcon Editor and Mission commander manuals.
BINGO
and IMHO the reason it wasn’t done yet (for MC at least) is the fact that this wonderful piece of software is still being updated monthly in development
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@Joe:
In my opinion, just a note:
- In reference to How to improve the visual aspect of Falcon? Joe 2012
-BAZT (or high-resolution terrain mapping) with the topographic resolution of the old theater.L0 (100m) as a visual reference to all distances when the power of the PCs allow to manage it.
-Using more than 4096 textures when the power of the PCs allow it to manage (post Joe 2011 year testing the possibility).Only with these two elements could be made great improvements that would involve improving two aspects of the terrain: topography and patterns of repetition.
- In reference to the learning curve of a developer (I can only speak of theaters):
-All the information needed to create a theater is available and public. And today more than ever there is more information available than ever before (BMS forums, PMC forums, wiki) by Snakeman
-The necessary tools are available and have tutorials
http://www.pmctactical.org/f4/downloads.php by PMC TFW (
http://www.weapondeliveryplanner.nl/ by Falcas
http://sakgiok.gr/ by Monster
-In the forums there are many topics that give very useful answers and mark standards, links to youtube (Demer blog, Arty blog), and pdf with procedures (e.g. how create a airbase by Cannon), etc.- And the most important, and I take the opportunity to express my gratitude to all of them: in these forums there are many people, gurus, developers, experts …. friends !!! Who will not hesitate to help you in difficult times. That help is free, monetarily speaking, but I have to earn that right; That is to say: I have to work hard; I have to make progress; I have to show commitment; I have to learn, to search, to inquire, to read, to prove, to make mistakes … And then, only then: I will ask for help.
Thanks for joining in Joe!
So far, what I am reading starting from the link I offered earlier in my posts on this page towards I-Hawk (20:29 timestamp), snake man came up with a method that he holds “close to his heart” to say the least, and on top of that, he remains sceptical towards BMS. Perhaps what I was reading is old, or maybe not up to date.
Tile textures are fine can be used extensively, but if your underlying geometry is just a flat slab or it comprises of edges 1000m long, you wont be fooling the human eye… unless that eye is in orbit!
The 1st goal that needs to be pursued in my opinion is a finer geometrical mesh. So far in my reading, what I am hearing is that an order of magnitude (going from 1000x1000m geometrical tiles to 100x100m geometrical tiles) improvement is out of the question because of memory constraints. I hope I am wrong in this. But eventually someone has to plan a push forward all the way down to 1x1m resolution. The hardware is improving, but this specific portion of the software has been left behind.
What I am talking about is not a matter of modding the existing terrain. Its a code based intervention to bring in a finer geometrical mesh. Again, so far in my reading and if I recall correctly, a user (bald eagle) said that the problem is not with the software its self, but with the tools that generate the terrain (TerrainView, SPTinstall, Pathmaker) that he modified to a version 1.55 and put them up for use. Even though I have downloaded them, I haven’t had a chance to test them yet.
10 years ago, a similar effort was made to incorporate SRTM data into the landscape of the Israel theater, being produced at the time. I haven’t had the time to go into the details of that endeavor, but I will be looking into it. If you have an opinion on everything I am mentioning right here I would be glad to hear it. If you know who I should be talking to, I would appreciate it if you set me off in the right direction.
Again, thanks for participating.
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From my limited knowledge and partial vision of a project as immense and complex as Falcon BMS I think we are talking about a great puzzle where many elements depend on each other. And even more a puzzle where there are pieces that can move without problems, there are pieces that can not move … and there are pieces that when moved affect the rest of pieces and create a cascade effect that converts, in practice, into untouchables .
That interrelation will occur in many sections, but in the case of terrain, with a simplistic vision like mine could say:
- The textures of 1kmx1km are placed in the mesh of theater.L2 / O2
- The L2 / O2 mesh is related to the texture.bin file
- The texture.bin file determines the roads, roads, rivers, water through which troops can move or stop. Texture.bin also determines the type of “plain” terrain on which airports can be placed where an airplane can land (if it will not explode upon touching the ground).
- The paths and areas of texture.bin are taken into account when placing objects (cities, airports, … etc) …
- And the placement of objectives and their relationship between them depends on the smooth operation of the missions or campaigns: campaigns that exceed in their dynamic capacity to the most modern and current simulators.
… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Atreides,
Due to my limited knowledge of English and the use of translators, I lose a lot of information in this particular thread. I apologize.I have not finished understanding,
What is the specific project you are working on? Theater, modding, textures, objects 3d…? -
I have a tool that creates fine manuals as for structure by the program.
It’s called Doctor Explain and it’s considered one of the top in it’s class. I use it for years now at work and managed to release a few manuals.With this tool it can be done that the manual be integrated in the app by using keys that will have to be active and usable in the code. That way it can be done like mouse over a field or button and a balloon can popup with a link or info.
The result can be auto made as html chm or pdf. So it could be online for everyone to use it.
But the thing aint the tool but free time and will to accomplish such project.It’s a vast project. Sure I can start it and I consider it very seriously for long time now but for sure I don’t have the time to keep a standard pace on it nor have all the knowledge as to be a no questions unanswered manual.
I will need help from many guys here in the community and for sure from the dev’s.
Additions and updates will always be, the thing - issue is at least be provided some comments or a few text lines what the newcomer does or is for.
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Hi Atreides,
Since you touched a lot of stuff in your above posts since my last one, I’ll try to answer the main 2 points which I see as a key factors:
1. Geometry/Mesh - You (And by “You” I mean everyone) must understand that there is a quite tight limits to what you can render in terms of resolution.
Let’s go directly to the numbers because eventually everything is about numbers and measurements.Bottom line you have a grid of size X^2 (Let’s consider a complete square always) that represents the heightmap. Currently the size of the grid is very small, we have a point for every 1KM of world size, i.e 1024x1024 for an entire 64-segment theater which turns to 1MB for the number of components. Now, if you take 2 bytes for describing elevation (2 bytes are enough since you have 65,536 values to deal with, enough to describe feet size) you have 2MB of Heightmap data for the entire theater That’s nothing, right? Right.
But now try to go higher res - Let’s see, going down from 1KM per point to 100m, increase the resolution by a factor of 100 right? so ~200MB size of heightmap, that’s still doable right? Now think higher, let’s go to 10m resolution, that’s another 100 factor, that already takes us to 20GB size of heightmap… that’s already not doable, now go down to 1m resolution and you get the idea…If you wonder what I mean by “Not doable” you need to bear in mind that the Heightmap (or parts of it at times) MUST be kept in system memory in order to be able to calculate physics (Ground intersection, LOS etc) because in oppose to some nice scenery app, this is a flight simulator and we need also physics in order to simulate correctly ground intersections and vehicles/objects stationing and movement.
So, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I doubt we will go higher res than the 90m SRTM resolution for the Heightmap. That’s more or less the only sane size for a Heightmap currently (30m SRTM will already require ~2GB of Heightmap size, which is too much, even for system memory to keep and access), at least for now. But think on the bright size - ~90m Resolution means that for every square in the Falcon current terrain you will have ~120 more points, that’s quite a lot for a jet flight sim (Think DCS at some areas still use 250m heightmap Resolution, at least AFAIK)
Now - Consider also the Rendering aspect - Assume that we don’t want today’s Falcon short view range of 30-35NM right? But we want something much further, say 100NM? So think how many tris you need to render a mesh that is ~100NM in size. Let’s do fast math and for the sake of calculation let’s take 200KM and let’s bump the measured resolution up to 100m (That should match ~same as 100NM with 90m Resolution) - Let’s see what we have:
200KM / 100m = 2000, that is the grid size.
Now in order to render the grid you need to render 2000x2000 = 4M quads, every quad is 2 tris --> 8M triangles. Now, I can tell that 8M tris isn’t such a huge size, but OTOH it’s not so practical, for the terrain alone.So if we sum it all up, there are 2 areas here actually that need to be taken care of from Geometry/Mesh perspective:
1. Heightmap size - Sane size that will be sampled in real time for rendering and physics - Say 90m SRTM resolution for now.
2. Rendered terrain grid size - Assuming 100NM view range and same resolution at least as the Heightmap - 8M tris –> Not so practical, requires something sophisticated.Example from the web of some advanced rendering technique (This specifically is procedural terrain but the rendering won’t be different for Heightmap based terrain):
2. Texturing/Filling - IMHO expecting stuff like RL images isn’t so practical, why? Mainly because satellite images are probably not so high res and while they may look good from high altitude, when you go low you’ll see the pixelized look of those textures.
What is the alternative then? More sophisticated and modern stuff like Multi-texturing can be used to create different look of the land from relatively low number of unique textures. Examples of Multi-textured terrain?
Think now that using more detailed textures with better blending, you can create many “looks” of terrain.
And the complementary part of using such “Generic” texturing may be filling the terrain with objects - Eventually a forest is made of green trees/bushes that are placed on brown land right? so you can simulate a forest by painting some green tile on the land with texturing that reminds trees when you fly over it, or you can use a “Generic” brown/gray land texture and put 2D/3D/ trees/bushes on it.
Cheers!
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I Hawk what about our beloved bubbles?
can’t the same procedure be used on what u wrote so that only affected areas are calculated - loaded?ok u have some xxxtris resulting to some 20gb of heightmap…
but you don’t see or need all of them at the same time.
maybe what 20% of a whole theater is used when TE’s are engaged and 50-60% when campaigns kick in? -
So, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I doubt we will go higher res than the 90m SRTM resolution for the Heightmap.
Cheers!
This one line should excite a huge majority of Falconeers on it’s own. A massive step up in terms of terrain resolution which would be extremely welcome. 3-4 weeks will be fine…
Cheers!
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I find myself wondering about the feasibility and benefits of being able to exploit commercially available online satellite imagery and related data (Google Earth, to name the obvious first data source) as a means of being able to generate accurate terrain mapping “on the fly” as it were. While I doubt that Google would permit a flight simulator to hook into Google Earth unfettered and for free, they might allow this if it was made an optional feature requiring a nominal subscription fee.
While G.E. imagery would not automatically give you more targets to strike and avoid, at the very least it could add another layer of realism while flying over terrain
that is not actually populated with targets, troops, items of interest worthy of directly coding into the database, etc.i
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According to what you say anyone who ever went to college, took a development course, read a programming book, or had anyone else ever share their knowledge with them is just a whiny baby because they asked questions with the hopes of getting answers. Suffering is a broad term, which you took out of context.
That is not at all what I stated. Stop trying to put words in my mouth to justify your bogus posts. You were the one that stated, basically accusing me that I believe everyone should suffer like I or others suffered, and that is not the case at all. Also, although you seem to have the talent to quote my post, you don’t have the talent to read them thoroughly without inserting a bunch of bunk into my posts. I took your use of the work suffering in the context that you posted it. We could sit here and play that game, Oh, this word and that word and this statement and that statement are broad terms or broad statements to try to shift the focus at your whim!!
Here’s my tip of the day: If you claim not to have an ego, don’t fill up half your post talking about how much YOU know, and how much YOU did, and how great YOU are for all the things YOU have accomplished, while simultaneously talking down to everyone else and calling them all whiners.
Refer to the above color text!!
C9
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C9 and MorteSil, please knock it off, no point to fight.
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the people are able to help just would like some basic guidance to point them in the right direction–because a lot of people who WERE following all that info out there got shafted when they spent years working on theaters for 4.32 only to find it was wasted effort when 4.33 came out and changed everything around, causing another year of work. A little simple communication could’ve saved a ton of work and allowed the theater developers out there who had already done all the research and taught themselves to put out quality projects in conjunction with the .33 release.
Two points on that one:
1. At some point further development inevitably leads to breaking the old features. it’s the price to pay to progress.
2. There is NO definitive plan in developping BMS, it’s done as it goes on a volontarily basis. As said earlier in this post, ppl work on what they feel like doing, nobody really knows in advance what the final release version will look like. therefore guiding ppl on how to keep things tidy is just impossible with the current organisation.Volontary work makes miracle but has some drawbacks too
New players can’t get simple answers to questions or tips on how to do something better without the first 5 responses saying “RTFM” or “Try harder” I’m not opposed to learning something on your own, or spending the time to figure something out-i actually agree with you that it is very beneficial in understanding a process better to fight through it and learn the ins and outs. But reinventing the wheel 1000 times “just because” is counter-productive.
I challenge you to find such a post here. You will find it, but not after a 30 second search.
RTFM does happen, but most often than not, it’s made with enough reference to point the OP to the right place in the books where to get what he’s looking for.
Which is way more productive than RTFM (matter of fact we have guidance to do exactly that) but still for some readers it is still too much of a RTFM (that’s because some ppl just can’t stand it - they want the food right in the back of their mouth )
Reinventing the wheels goes the other way around too. Why should we rewrite the manuals each time someone asks a question?
It’s as frustrating for the guys who put efforst in writing 1000+ pages of documentations that it is for the OP who is RTFMed
See both side of the coins and maybe things would be better in that aspect… -
cough cough cooooough :lol:
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Hi Atreides,
Since you touched a lot of stuff in your above posts since my last one, I’ll try to answer the main 2 points which I see as a key factors:
1. Geometry/Mesh - You (And by “You” I mean everyone) must understand that there is a quite tight limits to what you can render in terms of resolution.
Let’s go directly to the numbers because eventually everything is about numbers and measurements.Bottom line you have a grid of size X^2 (Let’s consider a complete square always) that represents the heightmap. Currently the size of the grid is very small, we have a point for every 1KM of world size, i.e 1024x1024 for an entire 64-segment theater which turns to 1MB for the number of components. Now, if you take 2 bytes for describing elevation (2 bytes are enough since you have 65,536 values to deal with, enough to describe feet size) you have 2MB of Heightmap data for the entire theater That’s nothing, right? Right.
But now try to go higher res - Let’s see, going down from 1KM per point to 100m, increase the resolution by a factor of 100 right? so ~200MB size of heightmap, that’s still doable right? Now think higher, let’s go to 10m resolution, that’s another 100 factor, that already takes us to 20GB size of heightmap… that’s already not doable, now go down to 1m resolution and you get the idea…If you wonder what I mean by “Not doable” you need to bear in mind that the Heightmap (or parts of it at times) MUST be kept in system memory in order to be able to calculate physics (Ground intersection, LOS etc) because in oppose to some nice scenery app, this is a flight simulator and we need also physics in order to simulate correctly ground intersections and vehicles/objects stationing and movement.
So, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I doubt we will go higher res than the 90m SRTM resolution for the Heightmap. That’s more or less the only sane size for a Heightmap currently (30m SRTM will already require ~2GB of Heightmap size, which is too much, even for system memory to keep and access), at least for now. But think on the bright size - ~90m Resolution means that for every square in the Falcon current terrain you will have ~120 more points, that’s quite a lot for a jet flight sim (Think DCS at some areas still use 250m heightmap Resolution, at least AFAIK)
Now - Consider also the Rendering aspect - Assume that we don’t want today’s Falcon short view range of 30-35NM right? But we want something much further, say 100NM? So think how many tris you need to render a mesh that is ~100NM in size. Let’s do fast math and for the sake of calculation let’s take 200KM and let’s bump the measured resolution up to 100m (That should match ~same as 100NM with 90m Resolution) - Let’s see what we have:
200KM / 100m = 2000, that is the grid size.
Now in order to render the grid you need to render 2000x2000 = 4M quads, every quad is 2 tris --> 8M triangles. Now, I can tell that 8M tris isn’t such a huge size, but OTOH it’s not so practical, for the terrain alone.So if we sum it all up, there are 2 areas here actually that need to be taken care of from Geometry/Mesh perspective:
1. Heightmap size - Sane size that will be sampled in real time for rendering and physics - Say 90m SRTM resolution for now.
2. Rendered terrain grid size - Assuming 100NM view range and same resolution at least as the Heightmap - 8M tris –> Not so practical, requires something sophisticated.Example from the web of some advanced rendering technique (This specifically is procedural terrain but the rendering won’t be different for Heightmap based terrain):
2. Texturing/Filling - IMHO expecting stuff like RL images isn’t so practical, why? Mainly because satellite images are probably not so high res and while they may look good from high altitude, when you go low you’ll see the pixelized look of those textures.
What is the alternative then? More sophisticated and modern stuff like Multi-texturing can be used to create different look of the land from relatively low number of unique textures. Examples of Multi-textured terrain?
Think now that using more detailed textures with better blending, you can create many “looks” of terrain.
And the complementary part of using such “Generic” texturing may be filling the terrain with objects - Eventually a forest is made of green trees/bushes that are placed on brown land right? so you can simulate a forest by painting some green tile on the land with texturing that reminds trees when you fly over it, or you can use a “Generic” brown/gray land texture and put 2D/3D/ trees/bushes on it.
Cheers!
I want to put this out here before answering to the entire post:
I agree with your calculations, even though I would like to see them in detail. Here is a suggested workaround on the memory issue:
Bubble: The bubble limit could be used to reference higher detail geometry within it and cruder geometry outside of it. The main problem I see with this approach, is that it probably requires every terrain to be generated twice. Once in crude geometric resolution for objects and terrain beyond the bubble and once for finer mesh geometry inside the limits of the bubble. But I am not sure if this is even doable. In other words, I am speaking out of my a**.
Even if we could come down to 100 or 90m resolution concerning heightmap - which as you pointed out is represented in per foot accuracy through a 2 bytes record per point - Its an order of magnitude in terms of improvement which is huge.
The other thing I am not sure is the following: Does the flight sim load the entire heightmap or just what exists within the bubble? And to be more precise about that, other than LOD what else does the bubble control? If the bubble allows for reading the heightmap within its radius, then we don’t need to worry about the entire heightmap, but rather the extent of the radius of the bubble and the number of heightmap points within it.
P.S. Joe Lambrada and Arty I have not forgotten or ignored you… I will be back in a couple of hours I think. You will be receiving answers and comments.
P.S.2 I was beaten to the punch concerning the bubble and 90~100m resolutuion! Credit DOES NOT go to me.
Enjoy!
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some motivational tune that screams to move forward, so:
Cheers!!!
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Well yes… many things sound logical…
I believe this bubble thing was discussed years ago also…
Also never ignore or forget something which is just a simple sentence here, for coding can be an uber multi overkill and a super trooper bug creator…
So yes like opinions we can all have one… Let’s see us do it.
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Well yes… many things sound logical…
I believe this bubble thing was discussed years ago also…
Also never ignore or forget something which is just a simple sentence here, for coding can be an uber multi overkill and a super trooper bug creator…
So yes like opinions we can all have one… Let’s see us do it.
Would capturing a memory dump of Falcon while being played, display if the heightmap loaded is a region within or directly surrounding (tangent square) the bubble or if its the entire heightmap? I suspect that the exe would either load the whole of it, or whatever the bubble dictates. If that is the case it would be good to know. The other thing is, what happens to e.g. enemies outside the bubble? They exist over a heightmap whether they are missile launchers or scrambling aircraft. Whats good for the viper is good for the Migs.