Sprite-Surface VS. (Detail-)Textured-Surface

[ManDay 0]

As posted in the german forum - see here - I repost it here to gain the attention of you guys at BIS, because I dont think you browse the german forum there.

Quote[/b] ]I have got a suggestion/question with regards to the grafic: Standing somewhere in the Nature, looking arround, you will notice three different radii:

1. The closest radius, where the ground is covered with gras-sprites

2. The mid-ranged radius, where anisotroph-filtering proceeds and detail-textures are still "detailled"

3. The far radius, where textures begin to appear in a blurred, pulpy fashion

At least from the first to the second radius there arises a certain looseness in transition.

Looking through the NV at night, the sprites appear very dark while the ground is more gray.

At day, the sprites theirselfs look pretty contrasted in a dark-green and from one inch to the other the sprites dissapear and the mudgreen, blurry surface pops up. This looks kind of ugly in my eyes.

One solution - an idea respectivly - would be to turn the texture of the surface into a darker/more contrasted green as well. At least the transition of color would have been improved that way.

Furthermore, you may make the sprites losse opacity with increasing distance from the point of view. Which would lead into a further smooth change from sprite covered area to non-covered areas.

Acutally, I didnt invent this technique myself. It's a common exercise which is in use for years now with many major games. I am just astounded it hasnt been introduced to ArmA.

A third Idea, which yet required a even deeper change in the engine, would advance the textures, which AF is not applied to, as well:

Because it would be hardly possible to apply AF to absolutly each and every pixel on the screen, you may contemplate to overlay the areas where either AF nor Detailtextures are in use with some sort of NOISE-Filter. This will cause the textures to appear more scraggly and less like some sort of uniform mud.

These are three Ideas I got so far, to solve the issue with texture. Explicitly Part 1 & 2 I would like to see realized!

May I dare to solitcit your dear opinions, criticism and remarks regarding what I have just presented? It would be awesome!

ManDay

[l mandrake 9]

OT Hint: change the word 'demand' to 'request' or 'would like' and you will get a better response from native English speakers

[ManDay 0]

Oh, my bad. Is it that obivious I am not a native speaker? At last: Why dont you state your mind on that issue?

E: Luckily, the boys at BIS arent likely native speakers, either

[ManDay 0]

Wow. I really didnt exspect that much feedback from you...

[maddogx 13]

Wow. I really didnt exspect that much feedback from you...

A topic like this won't really attract the public, because it deals with a very technical aspect of the game. You're lucky it hasn't been totally spammed.

My opinion: I think the fade in/out effect for grass at medium to long ranges is an excellent idea that shouldn't really be all that hard to implement (at least from what I know about 3D graphics). It shouldn't impact performance too much either. Maybe BIS will try it out.

As for the blurred "muddy" textures at long range, I think that's a necessity to keep the performance stable.

[ManDay 0]

Yes. You hit the point, dog.

What do you to do suggest with "such kind of topics", huh?! I mean: I am really annoyed because the people at BIS do really not seem to listen to what the community says.

If such "kind of topic" is not supposed to be found at the offcial forum where I want the developers to read it, where else then?!

I found a dozen of those little things that could have been fixed within 5 Minutes: Bugs which are still present in the current version although they have been in the Bugtracker since Version 1.0!

Where do I have to post all this so I will be heard?

[Scrub 0]

Don't assume to much here. Those '5 min. jobs' may be entrenched and dependant upon many other things. And while I know you are frustrated, it's pretty damn unfair to say BIS doesn't listen to us..

[ManDay 0]

I did not code ArmA but I got a little understandig of what is going on technicalwise. And there are many things which can easily fixed with a little of time (assuming the engine has orginally been written in at least a minimal logical and sober way)

To give you an example:

With Version 1.0 I posted a bug in the Tracker:

You cannot call up the gear menu when standing on certain entities (towers, houses, roofs etc.)

has it been fixed? No! Im pretty sure this could have been done very easily. And even if not - there are other bugs which are very simple as far as I can tell.

Sorry, I am a bit out of temper

[psycosmos 0]

I did not code ArmA but I got a little understandig of what is going on technicalwise. And there are many things which can easily fixed with a little of time (assuming the engine has orginally been written in at least a minimal logical and sober way)

To give you an example:

With Version 1.0 I posted a bug in the Tracker:

You cannot call up the gear menu when standing on certain entities (towers, houses, roofs etc.)

has it been fixed? No! Im pretty sure this could have been done very easily. And even if not - there are other bugs which are very simple as far as I can tell.

Sorry, I am a bit out of temper

Well, it's probably also a question of priority. As long there are really gamebreaking bugs, problems with stability and more serious problems with graphics they probably don't look at "smaller" and only annoying bugs too much.

Regarding your Topic, uh, what can I say.

It's true that the transition between the three radii is far from perfect and could be improved a lot. Regarding the Noise Filter Dwarden also made an interesting Post.

However I'm afraid that the issue probably isn't very high on the "to do" list for new patches. A good thing to do when they have the spare time, but not as long there are other, more important things wrong with the game.

That's just what I think and not necessarily what BIS does, but I'm also pretty sure they will at least read this thread.

[max power 21]

Firstly, there aren't any sprites in the arma world. There are textured poligons- some billboard, most set in all 3 axes.

Seconly, if you think that BIS don't listen to the community, you are on drugs. Just because they don't respond to every hair-brained request doesn't mean they have their hands clapped over their ears while they hum to themselves. I'm actually glad that they don't respond to even the suggestions that they do take under advisement. They get a high volume of people who think they know best already. Imagine if the community got some positive reinforcement for that behaviour. There would be a frenzy of threads with friendly advise from laymen, followed by a backlash when BIS cannot respond directly to every feature request on the forum.

Okay, the grass is already an alpha blended texture. Blending it again and then having a controller to procedurally create alpha textures on the fly that permits the engine to fade objects in and out would most certainly have a negative effect on performance. This sort of bell-and-whistle sounds like the kind of feature that you would expect to see only in the higher detail levels anyways. Another problem I can forsee is that you would obviously be blending the bushes and grass in from a distance further from the camera. If you're blending them in from distances that they would normally appear and inward, obviously that would give that player quite an advantage as he scopes through half invisible grass and bushes. So, if you're drawing objects further again from the camera, you're going to encounter a further performance hit.

Your third idea has been discussed in context with the noise filter that they have adopted for that first person rpg... what's-its-face... oblivion. You can actually make the game appear to have a grain yourself by adjusting your driver settings. You may wish to find that thread. I, personally, found that the results just re-justified the existence of proper mipmapping, but tastes vary.

[-CS-SOBR-1st-I-R- 0]

Wow. I really didnt exspect that much feedback from you...

A topic like this won't really attract the public, because it deals with a very technical aspect of the game.

Thats right... I didnt understand shit.

@Manday - you might want to make some screenshots and post them so people who dont understand the technical stuff can judge from the visual result.

[Planck 1]

Might this be the 'bug' you were referring to Manday?

5153 - Fixed: Gear action did not sometimes work in buildings (high over surface).

As you can see it is marked as fixed in .5153.

More listed fixes here:

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA:_Version_History

Planck

[Dwarden 1124]

ManDay You mean something like i posted in this topic earlier ? :

http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....distant

[TankCommander 3]

Yeah just reading this I would also disagree on the alpha blending as that could potentially be a nasty performance hit. The grain might be a good idea but by the looks of it from Dwarden, the grain encompasses not only the ground but other objects too which might look a little sloppy. But other than that, could you maybe post some photoshopped examples of what you mean exactly by changing colours etc to help blend the middle ground? That would be really helpful just to see how big a difference it would make.

[Shadow NX 1]

Thats one of the things i really hate about ArmA, this abrupt change in detail on the ground around the player, for me it looks like i have 2-3 rings around me and especially on desert island part that looks rather crappy, if bis would find a way to soften that effect a lot then i would be pretty happy.

[Dwarden 1124]

Yeah just reading this I would also disagree on the alpha blending as that could potentially be a nasty performance hit. The grain might be a good idea but by the looks of it from Dwarden, the grain encompasses not only the ground but other objects too which might look a little sloppy. But other than that, could you maybe post some photoshopped examples of what you mean exactly by changing colours etc to help blend the middle ground? That would be really helpful just to see how big a difference it would make.

you checked the Oblivion screens from my post ? they shown way how 2 do it w/o need to be aplied over objects ..

what i used (the mipmap trick to reach merged result) was just cheap and problematic trick

still the outcome was better than actual vanila low quality mid-distant texture ...

ofcourse as part of engine, ability to enable/disable e.g. on server and easily modable by custom filters (la Oblivion)

it would turn into usable feature

[ManDay 0]

[TankCommander 3]

Quote[/b] ]you checked the Oblivion screens from my post ? they shown way how 2 do it w/o need to be aplied over objects ..

Ah yeah I see now. It would have to be implemented directly into the engine and not via video drivers etc. And yeah if that can be done for Arma I'd use it

And with the grass blending, perhaps it's just the NVG that wacks out the contrast of grass and ground as normally during the day it's not so much a problem. And as most of the time you're close to the ground, it's harder to notice...at least for me. But without losing tons of FPS, I can't think of a way how they can make the transition smoother. Unless it was possible to map the colour of the distant procedural textures to the foreground grass so that any colour contrast would go away. So instead of just dark green grass, there would be shades of dark green and yellow.

[Maddmatt 1]

...Unless it was possible to map the colour of the distant procedural textures to the foreground grass so that any colour contrast would go away. So instead of just dark green grass, there would be shades of dark green and yellow.

Same thing I thought before. In some places in North Sahrani the colour difference between the ground and the grass is too obvious. Another solution would be to have a couple more types of grass from some areas.

I don't think BIS would want to do this so late though, so I don't have much hope in it happening.

Would be cool though.

[ManDay 0]

So what? Will any of the developers loose a word regarding this issue? Would be great!

[Fu-ion 0]

@ Shadow_NX

I had those 3 rings too, you can remove them by turning off Anisotropic Sample Optimisation ( for Nvidia, not sure what ATI calls it )

[max power 21]

So what? Will any of the developers loose a word regarding this issue? Would be great!

What issue would that be? There are lots of issues in this topic.

[ManDay 0]

onoez issue lolz

I think mainly the change between sprites and non-sprites (as to be read in the title ) is the issue.

[MamiyaOtaru 1]

The thing I don't like about North Sahrani is the obvious line where the grass sprites end.  It isn't so bad in the south; the grass is almost the same color as the ground texture underneath so it isn't so jarring when it ends.

In the north however, the colors don't match somehow and it looks really stark.  It seems like this at least would be a slightly easier fix, involving adjusting the color of a few textures.

Compare:

http://img391.imageshack.us/img391/7888/armanorthgrasspf5.th.jpg

In the south it's hard to tell where the grass ends

http://img391.imageshack.us/img391/6021/armasouthgrassuu7.th.jpg

In the north it's painfully obvious.