ArmA, view distance and the curvature of Earth

[maddogx 13]

I think (in future games) where the view distance goes even more up, the curvature of the earth should be implemented to make drawing objects in distance easier.

(needles to say you won't see them anymore then)

Occlusion culling via earth curvature. Not a bad idea. :D

[myshaak 0]

Sigh. Another "Make ALL the realistic things!" feature request thread. If BI had infinite resources, time and manpower, why not... but sadly, that's not the case. I can imagine this could make sense in some large scale naval battles, other than that it just seems like unnecessary eyecandy vast majority of players wouldn't even notice.

Occlusion culling via earth curvature. Not a bad idea. :D

Indeed :D

[sqb-sma 66]

Sigh. Another "Make ALL the realistic things!" feature request thread. If BI had infinite resources, time and manpower, why not... but sadly, that's not the case. I can imagine this could make sense in some large scale naval battles, other than that it just seems like unnecessary eyecandy vast majority of players wouldn't even notice.

Indeed :D

1) That's one seriously huge draw distance! It's be a while before technology can render that sort of thing (at any reasonable detail, realtime etc etc).

2) In that case draw distance would be constantly modified during changes in altitude, that would be a challenge to make.

[dmarkwick 261]

Ironically ArmA does not simulate much at all. Most of it is "Press TAB to win".

And yet, despite all your snipes & comments, the thing you'd like to see is curvature of the earth..... ?

ArmA is an infantry-based game, footsoldiers. As soon as you start adding tanks, helicopters, you get to the limit of it's intended scale. jets, I would say stretch the intended scale too far. Curvature of the earth... is so minor a detail for so much engine work that it's simply not worth the effort. It would introduce a whole swathe of new problems for the engine to overcome.

[max power 21]

Oh, it's not just the earth's curvature. He wants the same thing everyone wants: "All the things!"

[Kamov 1]

Oh, it's not just the earth's curvature. He wants the same thing everyone wants: "All the things!"

Did you even read OP?

[-GR-Operative 10]

I mean if they added this to ArmA 3 that would be great but if they dont they dont. It would make it more realistic and a lot cooler but if they have to give this up for a better graphic or a better multiplayer/singleplayer aspect then leave this out.

The same failed reasoning: the people doing the multi/singleplayers aspect of the game are not the same people doing the terrain/geometric aspect of the game.

[Ekko 1]

I want all the things including random lava eruptions and actual women soldiers! How frickin crazy is that huh?!

I for one believe that the curvature of earth is just a lot of a extra work and a critical performance factor. I said believe so correct me if I am wrong about the performance part.

I for one do however think that there is something off with view distance in previous arma games. I never liked those fake mountains in the distance and the fact that you can't have a high view distance even when playing on a high spec computer. But hey, maybe directX 11 will sort this out somehow?

[PuFu 4600]

\I for one believe that the curvature of earth is just a lot of a extra work and a critical performance factor. I said believe so correct me if I am wrong about the performance part.

You are right about the extra (unneeded work), you are wrong about performance here.

I for one do however think that there is something off with view distance in previous arma games. I never liked those fake mountains in the distance and the fact that you can't have a high view distance even when playing on a high spec computer. But hey, maybe directX 11 will sort this out somehow?

Doubt that. especially knowing a2 engine. I might be wrong, but there is little content going through your buffer memory, and a lot of hdd stream. That said, we'll have to wait and see.

[no use for a name 0]

Why even make the series go beyond visual range? That's what flight simulators are for lol! Not much fun just sitting back firing missiles and not seeing things go booom; I want to be the guy calling in the arty, not the guy loading the cannon

[iceman77 18]

In AII, you can have a huge mountain which should be more or less visible from across the map, yet you won't see a bit of it until you move within 10km of it, at which point it fades into view. There must be a better way of handling this, like a extremely lo-poly landscape mesh, used for rendering silhouettes of distinctive geographic features from afar. This would really add to "sense of scale" of the game.

^ This. There has to be a way to render an entire island landscape(s) visible. This would be soooooo awesome to see in A3.

[Minoza 11]

You can actually always see the background but yeah, geometry tends to disappear over distance, even if it's a huge ass mountain. In BF3 they solved this by using tessellation on terrain.

[PuFu 4600]

You can actually always see the background but yeah, geometry tends to disappear over distance, even if it's a huge ass mountain. In BF3 they solved this by using tessellation on terrain.

tesselation has NOTHING to do with the above and the way it is handled by BF3...

[metalcraze 290]

BF3 uses 2D skybox with stuff painted over since its small maps don't provide for a large view distance and you can clearly see their edges from above.

What does tessellation have to do with anything

Edited November 3, 2012 by metalcraze

[Kamov 1]

More importantly who cares. By your logic your signature has nothing to do with the topic at hand thus should be removed since all it does is distract people.

[Minoza 11]

tesselation has NOTHING to do with the above and the way it is handled by BF3...

Old news, quote:

It has been revealed through the twitter account of Johan Andersson that Battlefield 3 will use terrain tessellation.

But you have to be right about everything, cause you're Pufu.

One more quote:

Terrain Displacement Mapping.

The terrain in Battlefield 3 is built with high-res destructible heightfields that we stream when moving across the terrain which enables us to have very high terrain detail across large levels. On DX11 we are able to fully show the detail we have in the heightfields by using DX11 tessellation and displacement mapping. This creates very detailed & accurate silhouettes of the terrain in a distance and drastically reduces pops in terrain detail while flying over it.

Nice silhouette in distance, low performance cost (compared to rendering a distant detailed mountain in Arma 2). Wasn't that what we just talked about and what Arma 2 lacks?

BF3 uses 2D skybox with stuff painted over since its small maps don't provide for a large view distance and you can clearly see their edges from above.

What does tessellation have to do with anything

Well done! You managed to completely miss my point. Read above. Btw. what has skybox to do with terrain geometry anyway? Not all the maps are small, small compared to Chernarus, yes, but small, no...

Edited November 3, 2012 by Minoza

[Droikka 1]

Old news, quote:

But you have to be right about everything, cause you're Pufu.

One more quote:

Nice silhouette in distance, low performance cost (compared to rendering a distant detailed mountain in Arma 2). Wasn't that what we just talked about and what Arma 2 lacks?

Well done! You managed to completely miss my point. Read above. Btw. what has skybox to do with terrain geometry anyway? Not all the maps are small, small compared to Chernarus, yes, but small, no...

You shouldn't keep responding to these two trolls, PuFu and metalcraze. Why they are not banned is a mystery to everyone of us.

[PuFu 4600]

Old news, quote:

But you have to be right about everything, cause you're Pufu.

One more quote:

Nice silhouette in distance, low performance cost (compared to rendering a distant detailed mountain in Arma 2). Wasn't that what we just talked about and what Arma 2 lacks?

I didn't say BF3 doesn't use tesselation. I did say that tesselation has nothing to do with available draw distance.

And afaik, one can play BF3 on lower DX level with exactly the same draw distance. care to explain that?

If you have used tessellation with displacement mapping (or vector mapping for that matter), you would know that you need extra geometry to produce geometry via a texture map

You shouldn't keep responding to these two trolls, PuFu and metalcraze. Why they are not banned is a mystery to everyone of us.

LOL

Edited November 3, 2012 by PuFu

[Kamov 1]

Pufu is abit of a dick, I've lurked for awhile and pretty much stuck in a superiority complex. No offence to Pufu. But you all know nothing at all about Frostbyte since its closed source, just like ArmA.

[Minoza 11]

You shouldn't keep responding to these two trolls, PuFu and metalcraze. Why they are not banned is a mystery to everyone of us.

Indeed.

I didn't say BF3 doesn't use tesselation. I did say that tesselation has nothing to do with available draw distance.

And afaik, one can play BF3 on lower DX level with exactly the same draw distance. care to explain that?

If you have used tessellation with displacement mapping (or vector mapping for that matter), you would know that you need extra geometry to produce geometry via a texture map

LOL

Don't go smart on me... You have no jack about what I do, what have I been working on nor it is your concern. This is second time you tried to insinuate something on me, dude, I honestly don't give a fck what you think you know about technology, probably less than you think you do anyways. Regarding your claim, yes, view distance is the same, but game for sure doesn't look the same, does it? Same applies to terrain.

Pufu is abit of a dick, I've lurked for awhile and pretty much stuck in a superiority complex. No offence to Pufu. But you all know nothing at all about Frostbyte since its closed source, just like ArmA.

That is not entirely correct. You can easily obtain lots of info about technology used in today games, movies etc... You just need to know where to look and who to ask.

Edited November 3, 2012 by Minoza

[Kamov 1]

Indeed.

Don't go smart on me... You have no jack about what I do, what have I been working on nor it is your concern. This is second time you tried to insinuate something on me, dude, I don't honestly give a fck what you know about technology, probably less than you think you do. Regarding your claim, yes, view distance is the same, but game for sure doesn't look the same, does it? Same applies to terrain.

That is not entirely correct. You can easily obtain lots of info about technology used in today games, movies etc... You just need to know where to look and who to ask.

It is correct, unless they have some engine spec sheet somewhere.

[Minoza 11]

It is correct, unless they have some engine spec sheet somewhere.

You don't need detailed engine spec sheet to understand how lighting and GI works for example in upcoming Far Cry 3:

http://engineroom.ubi.com/wp-content/bigfiles/farcry3_drtv_lowres.pdf

Same applies to Battlefield 3, Crysis 3, etc... you name it...

Edited November 3, 2012 by Minoza

[Kamov 1]

You don't need detailed engine spec sheet to understand how lighting and GI works for example in upcoming Far Cry 3, this PDF should be enough, it even contains code samples:

http://engineroom.ubi.com/wp-content/bigfiles/farcry3_drtv_lowres.pdf

Same applies to Battlefield 3, Crysis 3, etc... you name it...

Far Cry 3 isn't Frostbyte. Cryengine 3 has a freely available devkit, thus most of it is open to the developers/modders. Unlike ArmA or Frostbyte.

[Minoza 11]

Far Cry 3 isn't Frostbyte. Cryengine 3 has a freely available devkit, thus most of it is open to the developers/modders. Unlike ArmA or Frostbyte.

Mate... my point was, information is there. I didn't made things up, it is on the internet, available to everyone! You may not know all the details, but you can pretty much get the basic idea of how something works, even in BF3, right? I'm just not bothered with spending my day linking stuff which you can easily obtain with a bit of google.

Edited November 3, 2012 by Minoza

[[frl]myke 14]

You shouldn't keep responding to these two trolls, PuFu and metalcraze. Why they are not banned is a mystery to everyone of us.

It is pretty simple: look at what they contributed to the community, upon this you might get a idea about how much they actually do know about the RV engine, it's possibilities but also it's limits. Regarding that, what stands on your side? It's not mistery, it's simple logic.

Pufu is abit of a dick, I've lurked for awhile and pretty much stuck in a superiority complex. No offence to Pufu. But you all know nothing at all about Frostbyte since its closed source, just like ArmA.

Your "no offence" doesn't help it, calling someone a "dick" is plain simple insulting.

@all

Calm down, focus on the topic (which doesn't have anything to do with Cryengine nor Frostbyte) and watch your language. No more warnings, next time infractions are handed out.

This goes for everyone, no exceptions.