[WIP] Ground texture mod

[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.