Moving clouds and shadows from ROF
 

anyone else seen this?...Oleg will SOW have this in first release or later?

http://www.777studios.net/ROF_Videos/Clouds_Shadows.wmv

very cool :)

Alrready in IL2 and in SOW friday shots.

IL2? dont think so...and how can you see moving clouds in a screen shot?

Oleg is God.. isn't he ?? :grin:

Look closer. He said in "friday shots" S is plural and means more than one. A video is nothing else than more than one picture displayed with a time delay in between. In fact the very first animated pictures have been simple pictures and photos indeed.

In other words: you can very well see something moving if you compare 2 or more images with each other.

A funnier sidenote would be: if you speed in your car and get caught - do you get a video or a picture? If it's a picture how can it prove that you were moving? :P
Answer: it doesn't even have to. A picture can still show a status, feature etc. while someone just adds additional information using words, numbers or other expressions.

Another example would be an icon. It's usually static but it still is the gateway to a function. If you click the IL-2 icon twice for example it will start up the game. So how can a static image show this dynamic process you might ask? Again the answer is: it doesn't have to as long as that is common sense or explained somewhere. (FAQ, manual etc.)

Hope that helped :P


On a sidenote: what would be even more amazing than moving clouds would be transforming weather! In other words clouds not only moving but growing, colliding, combining and generally transforming into different weather situations. Might be storms, hail or vanishing until we have clear sky! But that is probably another topic ;)

Ok, now you have a closer look, to tell if something is moving in 2 or more screen shots you would have to know how and when the shots were taken and the time lapsed between. If you dont know the details, you dont know how the shots relate to each other, they could be taken on seperate days, the mission could have been restarted in between shots, we just dont know.
get it?

Anyway :)...i agree moving weather and storm fronts would be just great, im sure Oleg had talked about this, im just not sure if its still going to be in SOW in the first relase.

LOL, the very idea that you can see moving clouds in the screenshots is ridiculous. Oleg never posts the same shot from the same angle unless he's trying to show different lighting patterns or something similar so go figure.

However, although Il-2 lacks moving clouds (unsurpisingly for a 10year old game!) the old SoW version developed from Il-2 had moving clouds that changed shape and size which is far beyond what the RoF team have done here; and this SoW version was made years ago. RoF has a lot of catching up to do :D

S!

Well, at least RoF will have moving clouds that brings a ton of immersion to the game. SoW sure has too but now also in a WW1 sim :D Oh joy what a treat we are up to!!!

Yeah good point. Whenever I get a newer PC, RoF will be my fourth installation after SoW, BoB2 and Il-2 ;) :-P It does look like a very beautiful game.

This ROF video is very nice indeed and a good step toward better immersion. some aspects of the cloud shapes are not bad either (but we see only cumuli here).

There is however something entirely missing and wich will have to be the next step: the cloud shapes (especially cumuli like those) evolves relatively fast, along a growth/maturation/death pattern very obvious in accelerated time...this is due to the other missing factor that cumuli clouds appearance is ground related; a cumulus will appear more or less in the same place (as its birth is due to local temperature contrasts), will grow, change shape, and decrease a bit and disappear, all that being transported by the wind.
Higher order phenomena can occur where the instability is such that the cumuli are growing very much and glue themselves together to form first a bigger cumulus or even a cumulonimbus...In the latter case, all smaller cumuli close to the CB tend to disappear.
I agree this is a nice first step, but much is left to do to obtain something life-like...It would still need quite a lot of CPU power, and probably too much for today, but the way is paved!

JVM

It's very unlikely that this is the case. First of all you could can very well tell if it's the same formation usually by composition and mostly a series of Shots was released. Basically done within 5 or 10 Minutes.

And as phillip.ed also mentions: these details have been announced AND shown already. "Get it?" :P
I don't know why you're so against that fact.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GtsN...eature=related

This was the old SoW Alpha but as you can see all the things mentioned have been in there already! Now, I partially agreed and maybe they cut the extreme weather simulation (that's why I mentioned it'd be another topic) like sudden hail that forces you aboce cloud level or something but I am V E R Y sure that the athmospheric simulation will still be about m u c h more than just simple moving, but otherwise static, clouds.

@JVM
yeah, well, that's pretty much what SoW:BoB will probably bring. I'm just not sure to what degree. Since I agree, it could be very CPU consuming if done extreme. For example if clouds could be affected by planes propwash etc.
But in total what you describe is what they were aiming for. So I'm sure it will be there to some degree. :grin:

I had forgot about that video, :) i hope it makes it into the first release(we havnt heard anything about the weather for a long time).

Looking at the vid again, the landscape looks very good and the colours are spot on :)

S!

Even the clouds are generic and do not change shape etc. in that RoF video it is the IMMERSION that matters. Imagine flying your sputtering stringbag there scanning the sky for other planes and the clouds glide below or around you casting the shadows..the tactical element they bring and so forth. Even small details add to the big picture improving the experience :D

Those clouds have 2 important aspects:

1) Cloud shadows give more immersion. Without them it feels really weird.
2) Moving clouds are very important for bombers (whose are coming too). Cloud can obscure the target and then float away. With static clouds you can't have this random element in your bomb run.

http://i440.photobucket.com/albums/q...1/19930903.gif








http://i440.photobucket.com/albums/q...81/Clouds1.jpg







http://i440.photobucket.com/albums/q...81/Clouds2.jpg