posted 02-06- 04:22 AM               

What do I need to do? I do have them in that folder in a separate /textures dir.

posted 02-07- 09:41 AM               

How feasable do you think terrain editing will be in the future? What are the road blocks? I'm talking about creating a fresh new terrain the same size as the existing terrains.

Any insight would be appreciated.

------------------
-Sv =FC=

WWI in SDOE!

posted 02-07- 05:03 PM               

The main problems as I see it are:

1. Making the actual terrain. DEM files are fine but it is difficult to get high resolution. The ones I used were about 1km resolution which don't show up details, and infact for a pacific terrain some islands would be lost altogether. If you can get hold of high resolution DEM files then the thing I wrote/am writting will handle it OK. Without hires DEMs it would need someone to manually create the terrain details in MAX or AC3D, a tile at a time.

2. Placing the file references, i.e. towns airfields etc etc is a bit tedious in OPS. This isn't too hard to fix, but still needs to be done. Every things scaled for a 40foot or so long aircraft, not a 28 mi terrain.

4. Editing the whole supertexture could be an issue as well. it would be on my machine/paint package anyway

5. For optimisation purposes, something that lets you pick and place supertextures.

6. for OPS anyway you would need a fairly decent machine 3D card and memory to handle it. Mine only has a S3 Virge for windowed D3D and 64M ram so even though it loaded it it was so slowww. Theres heaps of things to make OPS go faster but at the moment...

7. Making a bigger terrain doesn't really change much of the above, except of course more textures etc put more pressure on the machine. its more that becuase of the sheer size it just needs more work. Also my little experiments showed that the size of the terrain has a large hit on FPS, from what MH has said there is alot of room for improvement in this area though.

posted 02-07- 08:29 PM               

I think editing the terrain by hand is not the worst part, the big question is how do you get the tiles to line up at the edges and how do you work with the tiled texture... that I don't understand.

I am thinking about making even a rather simple terrain - much flatter than SDOE with no fancy cliffs and stuff. Maybe some trenches, barbed wire, and blowed up stuff around

So why do I always here that you have crappy cards, low memory and stuff Bryan? Is this really the case? If so, we can fix this Or are you like those kings who liked to dress in rags and mingle with the peasents?

posted 02-07- 09:05 PM               

The DEM2SM proggie lines up the edges automatically. If you are after a flat terrain with lots of mud etc then perhaps a 1/2 / 1/4 scale version of the DEM of france might do the trick.

The tiles are seperate LODs so you could edit them individually in MAX etc, by exporting them from OPS. If you only edit within the boundarys of the edges i.e. don't change the line of the edge, then you could keep the seams err... seamless as you detail each tile over time.

The tiled texture is supposed to work like this. Make a huge bitmap of your entire terrain, and then dice it with Dicer. As far as assigining superTextures to tiles, the DEM2SM thing doesn't have this yet but it should be a simple matter to have it automatically assign the supertextureID's to match a diced texture.

Bryan

posted 02-08- 06:03 AM               

Seriously though... is there any hardware that would help make you more efficient? I think we could set you up... out of my own greed for OPS stuff mind you Video card? Memory? Processors? What do you need man?

The work you do with OPS is so kick-ass. There would be no contest and few new planes without it. In fact, I would still be busy doing stupid stuff like working and spending time with the family - yuk!

I am probably not the only one who sees any investment in OPS as a good thing for us. Maybe if we set you up with some kick ass stuff it will guilt you into working even harder on OPS

posted 02-08- 07:58 AM               

I just created a 7168x7168 texture in Photoshop. It was 147 Megs large and get this, just to paint the white background black took about 20 seconds! Thats huge!

posted 02-08- 08:32 AM               

It seems to me that besides how tedius it is the hardest part is lining up the painting with the features on the map itself.