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mr.g-c

VBS2 1.22 ADF, NZDF and SDF Screenshots

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Different terrains you see in these screenshots. Some available to the public (general VBS2 customers) and some available only for military customers.

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Yes, please how is this Islans called? This looks so superb....

The whole stuff looks totally different than our poor Sahrani, it looks from the scale like the real world, like Photos.....

I want it, i want it now!!!! tounge2.gif

Jesus, how big are some of those Islands?

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http://virtualbattlespace.vbs2.com/images/stories/ukjan09/1680x1050_VBS2_113.jpg

Should be East Timor, not available to the 'poor' general customers though the buildings are.

The one bigstone linked is a new Afghanistan map, also not available to the general customers.

As for the size of them, no idea as we never will see them. The As Samawah map that comes with VBS2 should be approx. twice that big than Sahrani is (though most of it is just desert.)

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Man Wolle that sucks!!! That Afghanistan map is by far the best Afghan map around. I'm a general customer(chunk of change to be one) I wish they would provide us that map or more maps. smile_o.gif

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Its sad to see really that the community here has released addons with visually far greater quality than these screenshots present. What is BIA wasting money on? crazy_o.gif

http://virtualbattlespace.vbs2.com/images....077.jpg

Normal maps were deemed useless it seems for the vehicle and the soldier which looks at best like a good OFP addon sad_o.gif

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The goal is to have training and not observing beauty of graphic.

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Spot on mchide, otherwise they would just buy farcry engine and bunnyhop around smile_o.gif

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Yeah, when I got VBS2 I (at first) was a bit disappointed by the lack of normal/AS maps. But when you look at it from a purely practical point of view, these optional extras are simply taking away CPU and GPU cycles which could be used elsewhere for greater training efficacy.

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Quote[/b] ]Its sad to see really that the community here has released addons with visually far greater quality than these screenshots present. What is BIA wasting money on? crazy_o.gif

Bear in mind part of the allure of "Commercial off-the shelf" technology is that you can run it on a personal computer instead of a more expensive mainframe or custom-built computer. Now, the cheaper the computer that can run the program, the more cost you are saving.

Put yourselves in the shoes of someone who has to buy the hundreds or thousands of computers to run this stuff on.

Heck, the ideal situation for that guy would be for the program to run on all of the crappy computers you already have that only need to run word and powerpoint.

Lower hardware requirements = lower cost to end customers, with same price margin for the software producer.

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well why is it then that wehicle, weapon and uniform likeness has to be maintaned? Y not just make a cardboard box with big gun (tank) cardboard box with small gun (car) and box with no gun (truck)? Well its because of immersion. But the thing is immersion is increased the more real something looks so the simulation becomes technically more real and suspension of disbelief is further employed.

And about computers: the army is a bunch of boys commanded by abit older boys but still boys :P They will buy good enough computers to run normal maps with their budget.

Im guessing that this is a way BIA has decided to cut costs with lower production times.

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well why is it then that wehicle, weapon and uniform likeness has to be maintaned? Y not just make a cardboard box with big gun (tank) cardboard box with small gun (car) and box with no gun (truck)? Well its because of immersion. But the thing is immersion is increased the more real something looks so the simulation becomes technically more real and suspension of disbelief is further employed.

And about computers: the army is a bunch of boys commanded by abit older boys but still boys :P They will buy good enough computers to run normal maps with their budget.

Im guessing that this is a way BIA has decided to cut costs with lower production times.

Having vehicle likenesses is important in helping soldiers trained on the system to differentiate between different BLUFOR and OPFOR vehicles, and how to operate in and around these vehicles, assuming there is a facility for reasonable interaction between player geometry, vehicle geometry and environmental geometry (which I believe VBS2 has, particularly with PhysX support).

Whether or not they have realistic specular properties and surface textures doesn't benefit the training applications of the models at all, it's merely an immersion factor. Just because they could have been added, doesn't mean it was necessary to add them. Like you said; production costs and times determine whether adding these features is worthwhile given their limited benefit to the function of the software and the core requirements of the customer. The user cost of buying a training suite full of computers that are capable of running a demanding program, is also important to consider when thinking about the customer's requirements.

The UK stuff (well, the stuff produced outside of BIA at least) was produced to a strict deadline in order to to satisfy the British MoD's requirements; and from what I've been told, it was tough to meet this deadline. I reckon producing normal and spec maps for each item probably would have either reduced the amount of material delivered to the customer, or decreased the final quality of other visual aspects of the material, below the addonmakers' full capabilities, even more than sticking to a deadline did.

I know that producing nohq and sdmi textures doesn't take a great deal of time on the basis of an individual addon; but when you're contracted to produce many dozens of vehicles, each with several different variants (which makes for hundreds of individual items), the time taken to create these shaders adds up significantly, and is a big handicap in reaching the deadline.

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You are right of course. I just merely mentioned that the extra mile was not pushed sadly and that the visual quality of the units on that page is poor. Weather its so intentionaly is another point completely smile_o.gif

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Man Wolle that sucks!!!  That Afghanistan map is by far the best Afghan map around.  I'm a general customer(chunk of change to be one) I wish they would provide us that map or more maps.  smile_o.gif

That would be a possibility if the 'General' customers were a priority, the amount that we contribute per copy compared to the contracts that the Military Customers have with BIA, makes the 'General' Customers very low on the priority scale.

So content that may be developed for us in the future will start from a Contracted Customer who will allow a group of objects and/or a map to be released to the 'General' Customers.

I would imagine that the only way for a specific 'General' Customers Terrain Dataset or Addon to be developed would be for individual contracting of BIA, and that is very expensive.

I personally am extremley satisfied with BIA and its support that they offer, they dont have to keep updating us all the time, but they do, and I would imagine that we are all very grateful. I would, with no hesitation, recommend VBS2 to any person that is looking to spend $1500.

I heard on the grape vine that there might be 1 or 2 new maps in slow development for 'General' Customers, but nothing too soon.

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You are right of course. I just merely mentioned that the extra mile was not pushed sadly and that the visual quality of the units on that page is poor. Weather its so intentionaly is another point completely smile_o.gif

You've got to rember as well VBS2 isn't like ArmA anymore. its engine has been signifcantly modified and is far more CPU hungry than ArmA. And the recent addition of various features means less CPU cycles available for graphics.

I have a pretty good PC and ArmA actually runs better than VBS does even without all the RVMATs.

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Buts thats sort of backward development, with this in mind the new more feature loaded games and addons would then be made less and less visually appealing.

Your Lynx is a prime example. It is an addon with superior list of features that take more computer resources to run then your run of the mill addon. Did you descide to sacrifice visual quality on it? no, it looks absolutely great. I understand that with the free public Lynx the motivation is different but in anycase progress should be a forward thing. The VBS2 engine should clearly be more optimised to handle both new features AND superior visual quality, and not sacrifice one for the other in order to avoid developing optimization.

Sort of like if in the coming year they add new features say some uber new animation system. Will they start bringing down color texture resolutions? Will all the new units come with 256x256 texture sheets? Y not? the color is still there, you can recognise the camo too and it would run waaaay faster compared with 1024 smile_o.gif not to mention 1/3 of the time to make :P Or the helmets will start being cube-shaped (geo-lod is still cubic helmet so it wouldnt change anything)

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You are right of course. I just merely mentioned that the extra mile was not pushed sadly and that the visual quality of the units on that page is poor. Weather its so intentionaly is another point completely smile_o.gif

The thing is, they're not poor. Even without comparing them to "the competition" (which they vastly exceed the quality of), there's nothing wrong with the VBS2 models. They look like their real-world counterparts to a very high degree of accuracy.

The only people who would say that they "look poor" are people who are judging them harshly in a graphics-snob fashion. The lack of specular maps is pretty much a non-issue. Instead of wasting time on texture map details that don't matter, they've spent time making thermal textures for the thermal system. Now, as far as I'm concerned, there is an obvious difference in necessity between "visual enhancement" things like specular maps, and "training enhancement" things like thermal maps. I can see why BIA has chosen the route they've chosen, and I can't quite understand why anyone would peg them for their units looking "poor" when they quite clearly do not look poor, and beyond that, are easily superior to the models that their competition puts out.

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You are right of course. I just merely mentioned that the extra mile was not pushed sadly and that the visual quality of the units on that page is poor. Weather its so intentionaly is another point completely smile_o.gif

The thing is, they're not poor. Even without comparing them to "the competition" (which they vastly exceed the quality of), there's nothing wrong with the VBS2 models. They look like their real-world counterparts to a very high degree of accuracy.

The only people who would say that they "look poor" are people who are judging them harshly in a graphics-snob fashion. The lack of specular maps is pretty much a non-issue. Instead of wasting time on texture map details that don't matter, they've spent time making thermal textures for the thermal system. Now, as far as I'm concerned, there is an obvious difference in necessity between "visual enhancement" things like specular maps, and "training enhancement" things like thermal maps. I can see why BIA has chosen the route they've chosen, and I can't quite understand why anyone would peg them for their units looking "poor" when they quite clearly do not look poor, and beyond that, are easily superior to the models that their competition puts out.

Im not trying to push my "graphic-snob" fashion on you just expressing my opinion. For the money they get for these models you can make all the texture maps in the world on deadline including the "dog-poop" map and the "alien laser track ultraviolet map". SO if anything comes to mind is the optimization issues.

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For the money they get for these models you can make all the texture maps in the world on deadline

Really? Where can I find a price list which defines how much BIA gets per model? It would be great to know your sources.

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Im not trying to push my "graphic-snob" fashion on you just expressing my opinion. For the money they get for these models you can make all the texture maps in the world on deadline including the "dog-poop" map and the "alien laser track ultraviolet map". SO if anything comes to mind is the optimization issues.

Ok, whatever. I guess you know better than BIA. Perhaps you should consult for them and let them know that they're not doing their jobs as you deem they should be done?

icon_rolleyes.gif

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For the money they get for these models you can make all the texture maps in the world on deadline

Really? Where can I find a price list which defines how much BIA gets per model? It would be great to know your sources.

Its an educated guess if you like  smile_o.gif. I have worked in a company which made software for police and firebrigade simulations for 1 and a half years. Models we made were not cheap but im absolutely certain that BIA charges way more.

But this is going of track  crazy_o.gif I feel like im being inquizited by all you VBS subcontractors and owners  huh.gif This COMMERCIAL product strikes ME as visually unappealing full stop. I THINK they could have made it much better, full stop. Im sorry if I hit a nerve, I ment no disrespect.  smile_o.gif

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This COMMERCIAL product strikes ME as visually unappealing full stop. I THINK they could have made it much better, full stop. Im sorry if I hit a nerve, I ment no disrespect.  smile_o.gif

I feel the same, and it's part of the reason I wouldn't buy VBS2 for personal use, at that price.

I consider VBS2 in the use of an individual to be a game, where in use by an organisation it is a tool. Since most of its features are aimed at training organisations; these features are little more than play things unless you're using them for their intended purpose, which is impossible with just an individual licence. I believe much of its potential is wasted on individual license holders, so it's daft for them to spend money on it if they're not getting the most out of it.

For a game it falls short of my requirements, which are largely based on appearance and entertainment value; and would do even if it cost the same as ArmA. However, if I was a member of an organisation hoping to use VBS2 as it is intended; to train other people in my organisation, these requirements would be drastically different, and VBS2 is by far the best piece of software at doing what it's intended to do.

A lot of people in this community don't seem to understand the point of VBS2 and apply gaming standard to it, including some of its non-military owners. As a result they either undervalue it as a tool or stupidly overvalue as a 'simulator', which is something it is not.

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Well, people seem to be forgetting that the reason this product is a sucess and why its used is because of the "realism".

Realism would be enhanced by including spec and normal maps etc ...... putting aside the argument for the moment that the PC dont have the power to do everything in VBS2.

Be careful how you throw that back at me/us ... because I can defend by saying "if the look/realism is not really that important, then why did BI use HQ sat maps in those landscape pictures I see ... ?"

Yeh yeh, sure, whatever. Terrain recognition blah blah blah

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