posted 05-18- 05:25 PM               

Hey presto you just increased the size of SDOE by making it smaller!

Now it that a kick-ass idea or what!
Commence hole-poking.

posted 05-18- 08:26 PM               

So you could just increase the size of each tile, reposition them etc. But you would lower the resolution of the superTexture.

posted 05-19- 02:14 AM               

If it's just a question of increasing the size of the tile, this opens up some real possibilities.

Over land, the texture detail would be noticable, but the sea tiles wouldn't be so bad.

Also, I noticed with the island terrain, the sea tiles were bigger than the land ones...so if you made the sea 'big' tiles, and the land from smaller tiles, you could get a substantial increase in terrain size!

Also, if we are limited to 400 tiles, we still have the extra tiles used for airfields. With Midway, I have made the towns and fields into the islands on a flat ocean base. Maybe that can be used elsewhere ?

posted 05-19- 10:30 AM               

For instance, it takes what, 10 minutes or so to fly all the way across the map now. Suppose the only thing you did was decrease the size of the "man-made" objects and effects. Say you made the planes, runways, towns, etc HALF the size they are now. Texture size is no problem. If all you do is carefully "shrink" an object, the texture will still be mapped to it exactly as it was before.

Now all you have to do is make everything go HALF the speed it went before, and instead of 10 minutes to fly across the map, it takes 20. You'd have to rework the DOFs for the speed and climb instruments, and rework the FMs so the planes would fly, climb, and stall at the new "scale" speeds, but the terrain itself wouldn't necessarily need to be changed at all. An added benefit would be that our (so-called) "mountains" would become instantly twice as high

I would think you could shrink everything by a factor of even 5 to 10 and still have it work--although it would be a huge project to shrink all the planes...

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--jedi--

posted 05-19- 12:29 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Bryan Russell:
The problem with terrain size is not the physical size but the number of tiles.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there also a problem with the collision detection system? I seem to remember a post about this some time ago, that the time to do the object<->ground interaction checks went up with size^2 and thus 40x40 was pretty much as high as you could go before the performance died.

Of course at that point I developed a complete algo for fixing this... :-)

Anyway I think the real solution here is to do what every other game does - load them in a 40x40 chunk at a time. And it we had a universal coordinate reference system we could sitch them all together...