Where is the ground personnel?

[Sepp]

Originally Posted by Bloblast

Haven't seen any so far. Did I miss something?

No drivers no mechanics no gunners.

They are so frenzied about Cliffs of Dover last developments they failed to repair to their stations and missed appearing the first video altogether.

I’m sure in the following weeks they will resume their posts…

[The Kraken]

Originally Posted by ChrisDNT

2 : we are in 2011, standard personal computers in 2011 can stand a few more polys for basic people and animal sprites (after all, these sprites have to be realistic from some hundreds of meters far away, not be realistic like in a FPS game).

That wouldn't work for me. Either do it right or not at all. I always hate it when the quality isn't consistent throughout, and the ground detail shown so far is too good to include some Il2-style low polycount models.

On the other hand polygon crunching isn't such a big deal anymore these days and the performance impact probably not the biggest problem anyway (compare the number of trees and houses we have which have similar complexity). Maybe impact on memory and CPU (if those objects are supposed to be non-static) could be an issue, but most probably it's simply the development resources again which are lacking, which is by far the most limiting factor these days, especially for such rather small projects like CoD.

There were shots of ground personnel models some months ago and it would be great to have at least vehicles and AAA manned. Civilians I can personally live without but I realize not everyone has the same priorities.

[winny]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

......and yours is? No i wont say it.

Go on? What is mine?

You and your constant moaning... It's easy to be negative.

[ChrisDNT]

"I always hate it when the quality isn't consistent throughout..."

Like for instance the ultra-sharp houses floating over low-quality ground textures ?

"On the other hand polygon crunching isn't such a big deal anymore..."

Yes, today, you can design a very nice cow, with few polys, BUT with a very high texture baked back from a very detailed model (with softwares like Zbrush, Mudbox, Mari or 3dCoat). I still wonder why these softs have not been used for the ground textures ?

[fireflyerz]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

......and yours is? No i wont say it.

LOl... good shot Tree .

[winny]

Originally Posted by fireflyerz

LOl... good shot Tree .

Wow, you're easily pleased.

[zauii]

Originally Posted by ChrisDNT

"...this is just a fun gimmick.. it dosnt add to the gameplay or anything..."


This is of course totally wrong, the immersion feeling, the feeling of "being there" comes when what is described in the game is described in the most possible realistic way (of course, in relation with the technological capacity of the current pc's).
That means "visible people", "accurate clouds" etc...

Don't be fooled, people saying "this is just a fun gimmick" (when someone is asking for a realistic feature) are the very same people who are just interested to fly with the "GPS" to the center of the map for another useless points counting furball. Of course, for these people, the "furballers", an empty map with just a big single uncolored polygon with also an empty sky (1) would be quite enough for their "gameplay".


(1) clouds are annoying for gameplay.

Fail.. , and might I add facepalm?




Folks in the streets still doesn't add anything to the gameplay itself.. for crying out loud.. are you gonna go up against what the developers themselves are saying? I never mentioned anything about clouds, how on earth
can you compare clouds to people in a flight sim? The clouds obviously play a big role and they're there. All the basic stuff in the sim that is necessary is already there, stop being such a baby and imply that people
that don't whine about the smallest little details are inexperience folks who doesn't give a sh*t about anything ?

Things will be cut and things will be left out due to various reasons such as deadlines, quality reasons and/or simply because they didnt add anything to the gameplay.
Maybe its time you realize how game development works, and that Oleg can't please everybody.

mmkay?
mkay.

[The Kraken]

Originally Posted by ChrisDNT

"I always hate it when the quality isn't consistent throughout..."

Like for instance the ultra-sharp houses floating over low-quality ground textures ?

No, although that's also an issue (one that will fortunately go away with higher texture and AF settings, as shown in previous screens). I was more thinking of going from the Gladiator cockpit to the P-47 in Il2. Or watching some of the legacy 3D models in DCS along with some of the latest ones with 150.000+ polygons.

"On the other hand polygon crunching isn't such a big deal anymore..."

Yes, today, you can design a very nice cow, with few polys, BUT with a very high texture baked back from a very detailed model (with softwares like Zbrush, Mudbox, Mari or 3dCoat). I still wonder why these softs have not been used for the ground textures ?

Baked-in shadows don't work well with dynamic lighting conditions, which is why Oleg probably sticks with bump mapping for the terrain (rarely shown so far unfortunately). And the models we've seen from planes over ground objects to seagulls already has a very conservative polygon count and are using various tricks to make them look more complex (just check how many of the vehicle surface features are done with bump mapping).

But that's not really my point - what I'm saying is, polygon count is not really the problem (for rendering ground personnel or traffic), so using "sprites" is not the solution. Such objects will not eat a current GPU:

[TheGrunch]

What the Kraken says, basically. As long as these personnel have no real AI to speak of, it shouldn't be tooooo-tooo taxing, but as far as I'm concerned it'd be a nice extra and nothing more as a release feature. This game is about flying historical air combat missions, not RAF Fighter Station Simulator 1940.

[Bloblast]

Originally Posted by TheGrunch

What the Kraken says, basically. As long as these personnel have no real AI to speak of, it shouldn't be tooooo-tooo taxing, but as far as I'm concerned it'd be a nice extra and nothing more as a release feature. This game is about flying historical air combat missions, not RAF Fighter Station Simulator 1940.

It's not a show stopper but in IL-2 back in 2001 we had ground gunners and drivers, if convoi was attacked they jumped out. Must be said that those figures were low polygon.