Cliffs of Dover Technical FAQ

[luthier]

Originally Posted by Heliocon

For the trees, (is speed tree being used?) why not just create a hitbox around their center and generate it when a plane gets close to/within a certain range of a tree.

That's exactly what we tried at first, but there are too many trees and too many planes. We also use a rather unorthodox scheme for tree coordinates, which allows us to generate more trees in a frame than perhaps ever in the history of speedtree, but that also makes collisions difficult to track.

Even with a single plane, anything we try leads to significant freezes when flying over terrain, much worse than anything you currently see, and if you have say two large squadrons taking off one in England and one in France, forget it, the constant generation of collisions against multiple fast-moving objects kills everything.

This could possibly be cured by dumping everything onto a separate core used for nothing but tree collisions, but that would instantly increase our system requirements to 4+ core systems.