The Sky is Falling!
Just had a pretty interesting meeting. We've been aware for some time, since we introduced it actually, that the weather changed for the game rocked for the ground game and pretty much blew for plane guys. Lots of issues but the main issue is the loss of horizon when at altitude. We're gonna try some new stuff, largely changing colors but Killer thinks it will work pretty well as he's been playing with it for a couple weeks.Speaking of planes, well and all vehicles, DOC made a good prod note this weekend covering the changes he's been up to on the vehicles. You should go have a look if that's your thing. I was most pleased about the new planes coming along so nicely. The VC pits may be a challenge as ANIMAL hasn't done a lot of planes but if things look to be coming together for 1.27 we may need to bump up the priority of a couple plane features to have a combo patch. I'd like to shoot for radar but that largely depends on how the rewrite of the pending ToE system gets done and how soon it gets into beta from dev. Hope Oli is stocked up on his espresso. He's gonna need it.
So hopefully we'll have some better fly boy sky for 1.26. If the color isn;t enough, I'm prepared to get the whole thing torn out again. Weather is a cool idea but we just can;t get where we need to with the limits of our first graphics engine. Unity II to the rescue on that front I hope.
Labels: wwiiol
6 Comments:
Gotta retain that essential descriptive distinction between tactical weather and different-weather-in-different-map-zones.
Some of us think the latter will be pretty significant for the naval and strat-bombing games, and especially the ground game if occasionally one random zone has bad enough weather that it's non-flyable by visual-flight-rules aircraft.
Pretty much the heart of the matter J.
* we need to be able to do weather in zones
* we need to be able to have a cloud deck
Doing a game that really exists in 3d terrain has some unique issues like these where there just aren't really any traditional systems we can rely on to use. We've looked at a couple weather solutions but they just aren't designed to simulate weather either on the scale of our map size of they aren't discrete enough to be used for an FPS.
Is there anyway to split the weather so that each Octet (or what ever you call the large terrain cells the map is split into) has it's own weather?
e.g. numbers indicate severity of the weather.
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1
0 1 2 1 0 0 1 1
0 1 2 1 1 0 1 2
0 1 2 2 2 1 1 1
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
etc.
Therefore as the server knows what Octet you are in it kows what weather effect to display to you.
You also have the ability to 'move' the weather on the map.
The issue is how you blend the weather effect between the edge of one Octet to another.
Just an idea.
That's a pretty big issue, though. :)
You can tune *down* the weather, rather than rip it out. Make fewer days socked in, but let it happen sometimes. Just one really big socked in day. For the love of infanry!
The problem, though, is that even on the clearest possible combination of settings, the vertical sky wall fog plane and the horizontal ground fog plane blend together. The pilots have no horizon once the ground isn't being drawn.
It seems to me like the big change in the game was the addition of a ground-hiding fog layer once you got over a certain height... presumably to save FPS and mask any wierdness caused by either non-rendered models, non-rendered terrain tiles, or ultra-low LODs.
Would it be possible to remove this ground-fog layer, and instead just have a couple more "terrain mipmaps" of successively lower and lower detail, so that at the lowest possible level you've got "ground" with octets of 16km on a side? IE: basically just a single triangle pair from horizon to horizon. That way, the people in flight will always see at least a minimal ground...
Biggest problem there I think would be that the ground TEXTURES themselves wouldn't tile neatly... you'd see an abrupt shift as the ground pattern changed. :(
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