Friday 2011-01-21 Dev. update and Discussion

[AdMan]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

Satellite imagery is a major failure in a WW2 combat flight sim for a couple of reasons.

1. There are no satellite images from the WW2 period. Any photos from space are just plain wrong in details.

2. Satellite image ground textures only look good from a distance. If you are taking off or landing, or involved in low level work of any kind the obvious pitfalls of this approach are all too obvious.

that's why you do a combination of both, you can take a satellite image, edit those images to remove things that dont pertain to the period. You can then use it as a template to lay out your 3d objects, trees etc. You could even just use it as a template pulling general layouts and textures from it then scrap the image itself or keep parts in certain areas. This is basically what was done for the towns/city, they had maps/satellite and were arranging streets and houses on top of the image. It doesn't look like they used the same technique as much for rivers, trees, and land plots.

also I think using individual trees has major limitations and is a performance hog.