Why's that? Why couldn't they designate any forest large enough to hide a plane that flies through it as a single box and designate it create a damage type that would bend the airframe and cause the plane to spin and crash?

Similarly, they could use a single large collision box for a large forest and give it a (extremely high) statistical chance of causing certain kinds of catastrophic failure. So skimming into it quickly might act like touching the tops of the trees (minimal damage) being remaining in there for a second or more would result in catastrophic failure.

Trees or stands not large enough to be relevant for flying through them could be ignored.

I've never seen the quote saying each tree would require its own collision box, but it doesn't seem to pass the sniff test.


EDIT: that's what I get for only reading the first page. Klemm's link above goes to a post he made making basically the same suggestion I just made.

There are A LOT of individual trees on the COD map.

That is one of the features that people have said is wrong or overdone, so just arranging collision detection for areas of forest will leave a phenomenal amount of trees still with a problem and won't be very realistic.

As I understand the issue the OP was raising wasn't primarily one of realism but the functional problem of multiplayer PvP with some players diving to the deck and skirting through forests to be invisible as a way of disengaging.

The fact that the phenomenon you're talking about and the phenomenon the OP is talking about both involves trees doesn't mean they're the same issue. I'm not trying to discredit your concern completely, but I do think it's less significant in a PvP server when there seems to be a problem with hiding in forests to avoid losing fights.

It may rankle your aesthetic preferences, but non-collisions with lone trees is not exactly going to break the multiplayer PvP experience.

Yes - I was talking pretty much from my own perspective as a predominantly offline player with a focus on realism where possible.

No offence intended.

This cannot really be that hard. The server already enforce CEM settings.
The server should also enforce Cloud settings as far a I'm concerned.

As for the argument that there is to many trees in the sim, I have a very simple solution ( once the server tree settings and client settings are in sync.)

1. Only add a collision box for 1 out of every 10 trees ( hell even 1 out of every 50 ) will do. So if you risk going down and fly below the tree tops , you are bound to run into 1 of the trees with real collision.
2. Also I have to say that collision detection really isn't that expensive an operation, the bigger problem is the internal game structure (scene graph) to easily find only the objects you want and NEED to test for collision, but here again there is many tricks to optimize the search for 'local' objects.

Forests without collision is a 100% no go for me. Single trees i rather see with collision too, but as mentioned, thats something to argue about. One of the reason CLOD is collecting dust atm. I hope it wont collect forever.