Terrain Improvement (dev branch)

[St. Jimmy 272]

amazing. want. performance difference much?

No performance difference back when I tested and looks bloody freaking crazy holy moly batman amazing. It just needed bush and tree shadows added in the texture and maybe keeping some sandy parts more sandy to respect the original, though I prefer more green.

[nikiforos 450]

I agree , NordKindchens' solution was amazing and the difference from vanilla textures day and night. Unfortunately BIS always chose to work with things that don't matter the most.

[DancZer 65]

I agree too. Those images are amazing. Wonder why BI didn't do that. Do they like the aquarell?

How much work does it need for a professional? 8-16 hour or more? We will have this blurry mess till Arma 4? :O

Edit: They outsource the Taona assets. They should do it with this mid range texture too. I bet the guy would be happy if the put it in the vanilla even if he do it for free.

[Greenfist 1863]

How much work does it need for a professional? 8-16 hour or more? .

I think might take a bit longer than that to redo over 500 texture tiles. ;)

[nikiforos 450]

They pay people from the community to create buildings and assets for Tanoa. Why not pay people to create mid range textures like NordKindchens?

It's really hard to think how BI thinks about some certain aspects of their games. Really , might be the beer in Czech Republic or something :)

[Sterlingarcherz101 15]

The difference in the terrain that it has.really looks awesome , makes arma 3 vanilla look ofp esc. Honestly I'd be willing to sacrifice some fps for it. Ans yet people here saying it is barely noticeable?

Whats the deal with this. I'm guessing its only for single player usage. or dedicated servers. should be standard. gonna download it when I home.

Cheers for the pics reminder.

---------- Post added at 13:02 ---------- Previous post was at 12:58 ----------

a lot of posts. Not going to go through. But has any dev given a solid reason why this is still as is.

Breaks AI, messes with something important. has to be some reason it's a pretty big improvement to just ignore.

[Defunkt 431]

Putting aside for a moment that they're really unlikely to hand-paint a higher resolution satmap for two already released terrains, NK's proof-of-concept multiplies the satmap texture size by (on average) 20-times. If this were applied to the whole of Altis the satmap textures would bloat from a trim 200MB to a whopping 4GB, if the game is streaming this stuff for a player in an aircraft that's going to absolutely kill performance.

I also can't see them creating new whole island 'logic maps' for the released terrains, nor do I think there's any real need. Opteryx pointed out that the issue didn't really exist in A1 because each surface type had its own 'mid-detail' texture. A much simpler improvement would be for them to revise the terrain shader to re-introduce this capability. I still doubt this would be retro-actively applied for released terrains.

---------- Post added at 01:34 ---------- Previous post was at 01:31 ----------

I would add that, I have posited an alternative improvement which, while not a complete fix, could yield a really significant improvement for next to zero effort; http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?192262-A-readily-attainable-improvement-to-middle-distance-terrain

---------- Post added at 01:43 ---------- Previous post was at 01:34 ----------

Or maybe they're cooking up some enhanced terrain rendering for Tanoa (fingers crossed).

[DancZer 65]

I think might take a bit longer than that to redo over 500 texture tiles. ;)

Ok, but if 99.58% of the community think it's ugly since 2013-03-14(2 years 4 month) it doesn't worth it?

I mean 500 tiles it's ain't that much (((500*10min)/60min)/(6 hour per day) ~ 14 day).

[gammadust 12]

NordKitchen's method changes satellite texs not mid-range. I think bohemia's reluctance is more related with the huge file size increase then performance or workman hours. If i recall correctly:

1. the performance impact was negligible

2. the tex size increase was from 1024x1024 to 4096x4096 corresponding to ~16x increase in file size, unrealistic, if we halve this effort we won't get such a crisp results as in above examples

3. producing such a satmap by hand is not necessary, one might as well automate the process, do a final manual pass in the seams and bake the result into the satmap

His second suggestion is much more interesting, opening up and improving the way actual mid-range textures are used via the "logic map" (ie. multiple tex depending on underlying terrain). Fine examples of the improvement shown with BadBenson's experiments. I did some suggestions on it too (engine/

).

I certainly hope Bohemia is addressing the issue one way of the many available.

[bad benson 1733]

1. the performance impact was negligible

i wonder though. did he only increase the res of single tiles and left the others alone in his tests? that would not be representive of how it would be with each tile having 4 times the res.

i'd rather like to see terrain shaders being updaed overall to support a wet look for when in rains and maybe even some fake cloud shadows or something (i saw a great example of that for unity some years ago).

i feel like arma already suffers from too much data being handled so i don't know about just upping stuff as a workaround for something htat should be handled more in a procedural way.

[Sterlingarcherz101 15]

Think I'd be a bit disappointed if the new expansion island was another step sideways .

From the video released at e3. at the airport it looks same as now .Hopefully they can pull it out of the bag.

I know the AI crew have their work cut out.

[nikiforos 450]

Think I'd be a bit disappointed if the new expansion island was another step sideways .

From the video released at e3. at the airport it looks same as now .Hopefully they can pull it out of the bag.

I know the AI crew have their work cut out.

Well just to save you from tears , have no expectations at all... This will not be fixed, ever!!!! If it does it will be welcomed as a wonderful suprise but then again it will never happen.

[gammadust 12]

i wonder though. did he only increase the res of single tiles and left the others alone in his tests?

I remember he provided a version where he merely repeated the modified tile he had worked on through the remaining tile "slots". I quickly tested it and it felt ok, i think there was certain delay when loading the map (M key). In any case, i agree, i would prefer some other solution, his second suggestion looks much more promising.

[Defunkt 431]

He upscaled 7 (out of 64) Stratis tiles, the rest are their original size. The effective file size increase is greater than 16x because the additional noise makes them less compressible.

[das attorney 858]

IIRC there was a massive issue which halted work on it where the game reverts the terrain if you zoom in/through a scope/pause the game/goto map or something like that.

I can't remember the specifics but if you look through his post history, you'll find it. Maybe it's just too much for the engine (in it's current state/iteration) to handle.

[jumpinghubert 49]

Why not implement bad bensons good  500kb-solution NOW instead of discuss & claim theoretically perfect solutions till next boulder period? Only a question.

 

I can´t play without it anymore so I have to pick servers like EUTW because they allows this great addon.

[twisted 128]

with the coming new tropical terrain i hope an issue with spawning over or near rocks can be looked at/ solved. ie - of being trapped inside those rocks. slightly maddening really when a random spawn script has no way of detecting rocks (afaik) and once spawned inside them all you can do is restart the mission or be trapped inside the rock for the whole time.

 

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=2563

[roberthammer 582]

Making improvements to the mid-range terrain textures has been a hot topic for a long time.

We have investigated various solutions and looked at the problem it with our programmers and environment team.

Our conclusion is that it's unfortunately not realistic to expect big improvements for Arma 3.

Existing community solutions can work great under certain circumstances, but in our opinion based on tests, make things worse in others.

We thank you for thinking with us and for proposing some pretty advanced workarounds!

The basic and short explanation from Arma 3's engine's point of view is that we're limited by our terrain shader and hard limits of the amount of textures we can store in materials.

The overhaul required is too complex at this stage. If we do find a way forward, we'll re-open this decision, but it's not likely during Arma 3's life time.

http://dev.arma3.com/post/sitrep-00126

[St. Jimmy 272]

Just showing the NK texture mod in work. We haven't forget this ;)

 

[alanford 27]

Just showing the NK texture mod in work. We haven't forget this ;)

 

 

what are those amazing high def mid range textures on the left in the video, and how do i get them?

[St. Jimmy 272]

what are those amazing high def mid range textures on the left in the video, and how do i get them?

In this very topic https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/141095-terrain-improvement-dev-branch/?p=2418205

[tremanarch 6]

never forget 

[mr.g-c 6]

ALl the pics in first post are gone sadly... it looked so good what the topic starter made

[GBee2 68]

In the sitrep (http://dev.arma3.com/post/sitrep-00126) they talked of limits in the number of textures they could store, I wonder if that was a memory limitation or something else?

[omL 24]

On 2016-4-2 at 1:56 PM, St. Jimmy said:

Just showing the NK texture mod in work. We haven't forget this ;)

 

 

How do I get my hands on this? It seems like the file is no longer on file dropper.