Civilians?

[zapatista]

Originally Posted by artjunky

I also think humans would help put things into better scale. When flying over cities, at times, the buildings seem somewhat out of scale and to have people near them, it might make it more natural.

agreed ! the good news is:

1) oleg seems to have listened/been-aware of the large amount of "feedback" about the problem with incorrect proportional sizes in the il2 series (buildings / vehicles / humans / pilots / objects). i think some were "out" by around 30% iirc. for BoB the rules are much stricter, and all indications are that proportions/sizes will now be correct (i have seen screenshots of foo'bar the german modeler using human figures next to the buildings he created for BoB, but cant see them on his website anymore)

2) most of us really should only fly 95% of the time in il2/BoB with the correct FoV setting for our individual monitor sizes, so it is set to the exact field of view the monitor occupies. that way you would get the correct/realistic "sensation of speed" when flying at low altitude over the scenery. with many people flying in a more zoomed view (to compensate for the severe "distant object" visibility problem in il2), this completely distorts the sense of distance to objects, and our aircraft speed in flight. by all indications this will be resolved for BoB

Originally Posted by artjunky

It would also be interesting to be able to build columns of refugees leaving battle areas.

the more i think about this, i cant really figure why modeling groups of "individuals" moving together would be such a problem (to keep it simple, lets say an infantry group of soldiers on a road). surely modern game engines for fps/driving/flying sims dont constantly draw/display each individual object no matter how close/far it is to the player/viewer.
for ex for the group of 50 soldiers marching i would have expected a game engine to use
- in close up, display/draw/calculate each individual soldiers skeletal movements
- at medium distance: have the soldiers together displayed as a single object for which only one position/movement is calculated (similar to what is done for an aircraft)
- at far distances, use the old "dot" method

iirc in the old 486 cpu days, one gfx card (powerVR) had as its great strength that it only used gpu power to draw/display what the player could physically realistically see from the position he was in on the "game map", it wouldnt waste gpu power on drawing objects and scenery "over the horizon" or out of view. most other cards at the time (3dfx voodoo etc) would actually draw the whole game world iirc, yet the player was only in one part of the map. and that is over 10 yrs ago.

surely in 2010 most modern gfx cards do something similar to that powerVR card now, so having 30 or 50 soldiers marching on a road should not be a waste of cpu/gpu when you are flying an aircraft miles away. the game engine should imho only keep track of the overall game plan and mathematical position of variables inside the game world, and objects would be grouped into a single variable once out of view.

as one poster mentioned in another recent thread here, one core of the cpu could deal with the campaign engine, another core draws the game world we see etc...


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