Quote:
Originally Posted by Ekar
Hi Philip.
I've been dabbling with the terrain a bit but I haven't been super focused on it. I'm more familiar with the different textures being used for the terrain now as I've been flying over England to get a better understanding of things, but it has made me aware that there is more work to be done than just the four main landscape tiles, which was my original goal. I guess that's the problem when you start to update textures, the old ones tend to stick out more. Going through the original textures, another thing which strikes me is the fact that, especially the ones relating to towns and built up areas, there is just an incredible amount of work there. Whoever made these must have spent hours upon hours moving around little boxes all over these tiles. I am simultaneously impressed and also a little bemused, because the result is not really very nice. Just thinking about it makes me feel a little sad actually.  All that work...
My predominant feeling now is maybe to wait a bit, see how CloD matures before jumping in too far. You never know what's going to happen- I just caught the new update, which looks fairly significant in a number of important areas. The whole thing could be changed around tomorrow, there's no telling. Maybe the landscape guy is putting final touches on things, or maybe the whole terrain is just a placeholder and is about to be totally stripped out. It doesn't make sense to me, looking at these textures- that Oleg could be confident in saying that his system could stand up to photorealism. You just can't get there with these textures. Either his vision and timeframe for the completion of CloD was much broader than what was provided on release (seems fairly likely- there's enough evidence that they're still working hard), or he was stretching the truth in order to make a sale. If it's the former, then their obviously working on the terrain in order to lift things to a higher standard. If it's the latter, then that doesn't exactly inspire me to pick up the ball and run with others in the community, to finish others work.
I think we'll see some good updates over the next 6 months or so. Someone brought up in Luthiers latest thread the fact that reflections had been turned off for planes in the official patch. With reflections turned on in that video posted, the plane looks really fantastic, metalic, realistic. Right now the planes look very dull. I'm a patient guy so I have no beef with the devs in terms of progress. They obviously need time to get things to a level where everyone's happy. They seem to me like they are being rushed. What's with the horrible new/old map border for eg?
Haha, sorry, long post. |
that map border was just a placement taken from the old game when they patched the ingame map to work better.
reflections. dont think they were turned off, but more toned down through the mma files. i didnt like the effect, it looked nice and shiny, but they were not so nice and shiny back in the day 1940. granted though because of the presence over enhanced effects it can appear to look better because its more interactive & dynamic in its environment but for me its wrong not realistic. when we see bare or polished metal then we should see these effects and through the series and modernised materials we should see this more.
regards photorealism. we dont get to that level with textures. its shaders that do the job of reality. the texture is just a scale presentation of an object in a non dynamic state. At the core context of Photorealism is the dynamic aspect, One example of further development was the furthered use of a shader that mimmicks distance and atmosphere and the combined colouring chaanges it can make as i had discussed here in this thread, and as luthier told us in the last update.
its all about the shaders with this sim and the context of photorealism.
you have touched upon the 4 tiles factor too Ekar. I had previously commented that if we had 1 or 2 more tiles in that mix to make 6 interacting tiles then we might be able to get further with what seems wrong as youve stated. i agree with that.
if i had free reign to mod an englaish scenery the scale as is. i would have a 9 map grid system, but at 1024x1024 size. This would allow regional variations upon the patch quiltwork effect. 3 main field types and for each type a transitional tile. If i get the chance to for e.g. fully re create the current scenery of england i will attempt this. but within the current format i just dont see the outcome of the work being actually worth it. i.i. no better than what we have at present. no point modding what 1C have done already, in many respects 1C nailed it given the current possibilites even though you may dislike it or be very opinionated of it.