RockinHarry
Posts: 2963
Joined: 1/18/2001
From: Germany
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Mad Russian
It just came to me that while you may have a hard time seeing a texture difference, although you can set that at any shade you like you should have no problem seeing where the dense and light woods are with this graphic representation.
To get the underlying terrain features you simple hit the "insert" key.
Good Hunting.
MR
Nice feature  , but my aim was to see a better visual representation of "density" and "depth" for the forest terrain types. Just compare with CMx1.
I understand that the CMx1 LOS and collison tracing is solely based on the terrain tiles and contours (though inaccurate), while PCO traces LOS and collision quite accurately by the terrain mesh and single objects bounding boxes.
The base idea is to improve visual appearance of dense forest in PCO, by means of its editors in a resource friendly way.
That would be handpainting of the megatexture, in particular darkening the interior ground textures. Painting fuzzy blob shadows on the ground texture, to avoid having more trees cast ray traced shadows than necessary. Using simplified billboard objects (no cast shadows) for the interior. Using darkened trees (billboard and full complexity types) for the interior. Using goups of trees of this type (darkened, no shadow cast) for parts of the map, that are secondary for game play.
Personally I would be satisfied if the visuals look ok at ground level, while from birds eye view I get confused if I look on "dense forest" terrain, that actually looks more like "scattered trees" and can hardly distinguished from the true "light forest" areas or open terrain with single tree objects. That´s the case with the Glinki map and as said, I understand that you can´t place another 10000 trees to achieve a credible outlook.
Anyway, maybe there would be consideration for PC4 to add a LOD level, different for ground view and birds eye view. As we know, CMx1 uses a system, where tree billboards are changed to top down view billboards. Il2 Sturmovik also uses a very good looking model to present dense forest masses, when looked at from high above.
I´d imagine a high LOD view at ground level cam and a simplified LOD when raising the player cam to a certain altitude and angle. That could be either a single 2D (layer) texture covering forested areas (on top of the ground texture at a distance, maybe 10 to 30m), or single 3D forest block objects (like in SSI´s Panzer commander).
Question: While dynamic objects (soldier figures and vehicles) cast live shadows, do they also "receive" shadows from objects casting them?
So far, I do not know of a 3D wargame system, that have game units "benefit" from shadows as part of extra "camoflage". I´d wish for PC4 (or any 3D wargame) to have something like that implemented, at least in a somewhat abstracted manner.
In example an AT gun placed in open terrain would receive less "concealment", as a gun placed in open terrain AND in the shadow of something, a nearby house or while beeing in a terrain fold in dawn/dusk lighting conditions. One can create an extra shadow map layer that is used to calculate, if a game unit benefits from extra "concealment" while beeing in a shadowed area. A visual presentation could be to lower texture gamma (maybe -30-40%) for units in that shadow map areas. That sort of abstraction wouldn´t require to live calculate any point to point ray tracing routines, as the underlying shadow map determines "concealment benefits", as well as visually darkening of unit textures that melt with the terrain shadows. Maybe PCO has something implemented like that yet, but I can´t determine by viewing at the various SS´s. 
< Message edited by RockinHarry -- 10/8/2010 11:17:23 AM >
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RE: Forest terrain - - 
So they aren't concealed.
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