ARMA 3 base terrain textures WORSE than the original Operation Flashpoint

[scrim 1]

Because the developers aren't new to making games? Seriously, are you going to point out every single thing you can find that is wrong, no matter how obvious it is? In that case you'll probably be banned for spamming the forums like it's cool within a day. Not to mention the obvious fact that the author of this thread is blind if he really thinks that the Arma 3 terrain he posted is worse than the OPF terrain he compared it too. Useless thread is useless.

[rallyolle 10]

man cold war looks great terrain wise in those screens. ive only played A2 and A3alpha, definetly want improvments in this area.. theres not much point to have a beautiful close picture if it looks like ass in the distance

[kavoriken 1]

Wow, what is your problem dude? Theres even a developer who posted on this thread and basically agreed. I dont think the graphical quality of something that covers 10-30% of your screen most of the time can be considered to fall under your category of "every single thing". This is a discussion forum about the arma 3 alpha and its issues, if you dont like that then dont read this part of the forum to begin with.

[nikiforos 450]

People need to calm down. This is an issue for many and hopefully BIS will do something about it.

[namaan 10]

People need to calm down. This is an issue for many and hopefully BIS will do something about it.

agreed, i would imagine that this will be looked at by the devs before the release of the full game. i know this has been said a couple of times, but it is still an Alpha right?

[caldrin 1]

It's a freaking Alpha, there's no need to give useless "feedback" about things that are obviously going to be improved. It's just as much use as saying "the other island isn't available in the editor, inculde it nau!!!!1!!1 (so I can complain about it not being finished)"

as others have said we dont know it will be improved.. maybe they missed the issue themselves or somthing..

Its best any little things like this get brought up as early as possible.. even if we get a response from them saying " hey yeah we know and this will be sorted at a later stage" better to be safe than sorry :)

[Sealife 22]

seeing these graphics it simply reafirmed to me what BIS honestly said about the Alpha release , it came as no surprise to see just how much TOH is in this game .

I equate it to Arma1 release they simply needed funds to get any sense of continuation and well whilst its obvious this time they havent dropped the new engine because there is a lot that is newer than toh too , its Borderline Arma1 release (obviously more advanced iterations involved)

My summary i expect BIS to pull through and i still remain of the opinion i have invested in an Alpha in order to help contribute to the Beta and eventually the full game .

No complaints whatsoever apart from it needed a "lower Expectations before Raising the Settings " Button :)

[ChiefBoatsRet 10]

Why don't you just report it in the proper place and vote it up instead all the hand wringing in a thread?

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

Why don't you just report it in the proper place and vote it up instead all the hand wringing in a thread?

Why not? He raises a valid point, this is ArmA III // Alpha forums, and I don't see retail ArmA III up for sale anywhere, so we discuss what is current in the Alpha.

[Przemek_kondor 13]

Texture of Chernorus wasn't good neither. There is even ticket on dev-heaven for that but it was never fixed / improved.

[oo para oo 13]

This is one of the effects of not having a 64-bit executable. It doesn't matter if we have 16GB RAM, 32-bit application even with with LAA has a 4GB limit.

Why don't we have a 64 bit version. Is this intended for alpha or final.

[rekrul 7]

Nope, it's gonna be 32-bit since there is too much work to recode everything that's affected by compiling 64-bit instead of 32. Also this: http://www.bistudio.com/english/company/developers-blog/85-breaking-the-32-bit-barrier. Pretty close to 5 years since it was posted.

[TG Marksman X 10]

Scrim: We participate in the Alpha (a REAL alpha, not a DayZ "mod is broken so we'll call it alpha") to give feedback to the devs so that they can improve the game (that we have already paid for).

The distant land textures are horrible, so much so that I'm pretty sure the guys I game with wanted to boot me out of TS for whinging about it all night.

It is far from 'useless feedback', as it is a major problem for a lot of players - and something that the community terrain makers are quite capable of doing, and the fulltime devs are not.

[ziiip 1]

Texture of Chernorus wasn't good neither. There is even ticket on dev-heaven for that but it was never fixed / improved.

It was fixed for Chernarus by the Landtex mod (Nikiforos already linked to it in this thread). It made the island much more beautiful imo and it was created by altering the original textures in Photoshop. The same could be done for ArmA 3 as well.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?84082-LandTex-Texture-replacement-for-Chernarus&highlight=landtex

[-Coulum- 35]

Agreed, textures fro 100 to ~750 metres are horrible and quite honestly they have been since Arma 1 IMO. Now that we have so much detail going into all the other parts of the game (lighting, characters etc.) The flat texture-less terrain sticks out. It needs to be updated. It will also help to make spotting units at range a bit harder as well as making things look pretty. In additions to being texture-less I also feel it seems quite bright at distance compared to the ground right infront of me.

Is there a ticket for this on the alpha hub?

[dragon01 902]

I think that the current texture is just a lo-res placeholder. It takes time to make a proper, super hi-res texture and there's some many features in Alpha that are more urgent than this. I guess they'll get to it eventually.

[-Coulum- 35]

I agree with OP, textures at 100 to ~750 metres are horrible and quite honestly they have been since Arma 1 IMO. Now that we have so much detail going into all the other parts of the game (lighting, characters etc.) The flat texture-less terrain sticks out. It needs to be updated. It will also help to make spotting units at range a bit harder as well as making things look pretty. In additions to being texture-less I also feel it seems quite bright at distance compared to the ground right infront of me.

Is there a ticket for this on the feedback tracker?

[NordKindchen 12]

Guys this is DEFINATELY NO PLACEHOLDER.

Arma 2 had blurry textures at distance too. This is simply BIS style - no offense.

But I am glad that I am not the only one who is concerned by this.

In the ende this can be relatively easy to be fixed.

First of all: The current state has its pros too: The really far distance looks pretty pretty nice - same as the close ups.

So lets look at the positive: If we get the medium range fixed us will await a (completely) beautiful looking game!

So whats my idea to fix this?

Surely BIS wont recreate the textures for over 19km2 and more! Instead - they could add random details into the texture.

Why I am sure this will function?

Now if you take a look at the resolution of the mid distance texture it becomes clear that its NOT THE RESOLUTION THATS TO LOW!!! Not at all!

Its only that they took a blurry picture and put some random overlay texture over it to create (sadly way to weak) details on it.

Now I hate to take this comparisson....but BF3 has NOT much better texture resolutions at that distance!!! But there are better, more crisp and definated details on this textures:

Arma 3

BF3

Now what I want to say with this is: Arma 3 has pretty much the capability to get this kind of neat mid range textures!

And how do we accomplish this task? Well...the random easy way would be to overpaint the islands LOD-texture with a accordingly randomized brush.

Also I would overlay a bit more contrast texture - BUT OTHER THAN IT IS NOW - not the same texture for everything but different textures for different grounds.

If you look at this picture

You can see that theres the same "sand and rocks" texture on top of every colour. Alone switching this into special textures per colours would make a big impact.

But of course the most important think will be "recreating" the intersection between two blurry areas. As I said - the texture has enough resolution to do so. It only has to be done.

(If someone actually tells me how to rework the ladn textures mod wise - I would be glad to do a prototype of certain environments!)

So thats my two cents - greetings!

---------- Post added at 11:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:25 PM ----------

Ps: I think on this picture you can see relatively clear that its indeed not a problem of texture size.

There are far smaller details on the texture than the blurred shadows.

And as I said earlier - at very far distance it looks really neat! Just the mid distance is underwealming.

Edited March 7, 2013 by NordKindchen

[andressergio 1]

I think YES theres a lot of work to do im kinda dissapointed by that HUGHE map with poor details...

[NordKindchen 12]

Pps: Here the advantage we got from the blurred satelite ground textures - the distance view is just...wow - really great

Pic 1

Pic 2

Edited March 7, 2013 by NordKindchen

[TG Marksman X 10]

Pps: Here the advantage we got from the blurred satelite ground textures - the distance view is just...wow - really great

Pic 1

Pic 2

Yep, that looks fantastic. Just need it to look that good for the guys on the ground.

[3instein 10]

I remember seeing this "change" in Arma2 during one of the updates, 1.60? maybe.

I noticed it straight away as it did change for the worse,fair enough this is obviously an alpha but I hope it gets a little love in the full version.

Great work BI enjoying A3 immensely.

Mick.

[hyzoran 17]

I agree, and I agree as well that adding detail textures for distant terrain would greatly imrprove the visual quality with minimal additional memory usage.

[rehtus777 10]

This picture was taken in 2011 almost 2 years ago. Check out the texture on the ground. This is "Altis" texture. I think the dev's are waiting to show us their best stuff on full release.

Again, this is the Alpha. I believe that the Dev's kept the Texture's low on purpose so that they could get a good Universal fps on most systems (Right now, they are running a PR campaign to bring in customers and they want to keep everyone happy). I have a GTX 470 with a Phenom ii 965 - 8 RAM (overclocked) and I can run the video options on High / Ultra (with a distance set around 4500) and still get an average frame rate around 25. Now while in the forest during a battle I might only get 15-20 fps, but when I'm in the open (with the "low textures" as you all call them and a few trees - with everything still on High / ultra / 4500) I get around 35.

I could be wrong and this is as good as it gets with the ground texture. We'll have to wait and see. My opinion is that the overall graphics look stunning....they give frostbite 2 a run for it's money.

Here is a link to the original image - much larger pic with better detail: http://games.cz.imag3box.com/uploads/arma3_e3_exclusive_screenshot_15-game14132-img202122.jpg

Edited March 7, 2013 by rehtus777

[viper[cww] 14]

I noticed that the ground textures at distance are waxy........ but remember it is ALPHA......