Grass

[Second 0]

How about having the grass like in joint ops? It worked no matter how far out you were looking and it concealed soldiers quite well.

Loved how it was in Joint Ops...

How it worked?

I havent' played the game but i've understood that character goes more and more transparent during time they remain stationary.

[hoot 0]

[...]This is why we really need full realtime raytracing.

And not only on graphical level, but the whole game should operate from the drawn map, including the audio processing layer.

Realtime raytracing can also do sound occlusion, AI visual sensory would be affected by a WYSIWYG-like recognition.

I think raytracing, or better raypicking is already implemented in all BIS games. I don't know any other well performing method to 'select' an object in an 3d environment. You shoot a ray from the two dimensional mouse position into the 3d space, then you would perform a little collision test by traversing through the scene graph, or to a specific part of an object (engineblock of a car or whatever sub-object you like), to get what you've hit. When you are moving your mouse cursor in OFP/ArmA over an object, intel of it will be shown to you - i guess that's an good example.

Sound occlusion can work the same way. But here you would probably take a cone to make an sound collision object, like a vectored sound coming from a human's mouth. With such a cone, a small object would not implicitly block the whole sound, or dampen it, if you are standing behind it. For using just a ray, there would be only the chance to say: full sound on, or damped sound on, i think. Anyhow, collision geometry is expensive: Rate of realism versus performance.

Intresting topic...sry for hijacking the grass thread.

[Steakslim 1]

[...]This is why we really need full realtime raytracing.

And not only on graphical level, but the whole game should operate from the drawn map, including the audio processing layer.

Realtime raytracing can also do sound occlusion, AI visual sensory would be affected by a WYSIWYG-like recognition.

I think raytracing, or better raypicking is already implemented in all BIS games. I don't know any other well performing method to 'select' an object in an 3d environment. You shoot a ray from the two dimensional mouse position into the 3d space, then you would perform a little collision test by traversing through the scene graph, or to a specific part of an object (engineblock of a car or whatever sub-object you like), to get what you've hit. When you are moving your mouse cursor in OFP/ArmA over an object, intel of it will be shown to you - i guess that's an good example.

Sound occlusion can work the same way. But here you would probably take a cone to make an sound collision object, like a vectored sound coming from a human's mouth. With such a cone, a small object would not implicitly block the whole sound, or dampen it, if you are standing behind it. For using just a ray, there would be only the chance to say: full sound on, or damped sound on, i think. Anyhow, collision geometry is expensive: Rate of realism versus performance.

Intresting topic...sry for hijacking the grass thread.

I thought current generation of pcs were unable to perform full realtime raytracing? Infact that was what Intel was pimping as the next big thing for their future processors and supposed gpu's their producing to compete with ATI and Nvidia.

[Pyronick 21]

[...]This is why we really need full realtime raytracing.

And not only on graphical level, but the whole game should operate from the drawn map, including the audio processing layer.

Realtime raytracing can also do sound occlusion, AI visual sensory would be affected by a WYSIWYG-like recognition.

I think raytracing, or better raypicking is already implemented in all BIS games. I don't know any other well performing method to 'select' an object in an 3d environment. You shoot a ray from the two dimensional mouse position into the 3d space, then you would perform a little collision test by traversing through the scene graph, or to a specific part of an object (engineblock of a car or whatever sub-object you like), to get what you've hit. When you are moving your mouse cursor in OFP/ArmA over an object, intel of it will be shown to you - i guess that's an good example.

Sound occlusion can work the same way. But here you would probably take a cone to make an sound collision object, like a vectored sound coming from a human's mouth. With such a cone, a small object would not implicitly block the whole sound, or dampen it, if you are standing behind it. For using just a ray, there would be only the chance to say: full sound on, or damped sound on, i think. Anyhow, collision geometry is expensive: Rate of realism versus performance.

Intresting topic...sry for hijacking the grass thread.

I thought current generation of pcs were unable to perform full realtime raytracing? Infact that was what Intel was pimping as the next big thing for their future processors and supposed gpu's their producing to compete with ATI and Nvidia.

Some hitscan games have realtime raytracing, but that's only one ray which isn't related to graphics.

Most other games have precomputer raytracing, or raycasting in the form of parallax occlusion maps.

A game with full realtime raytracing has yet to be developed, there are Quake 3 Arena techdemo's but those need überexpensive Intel Skulltrails to stay above 20 FPS.

The new Larrabee seems to be dedicated for realtime raytracing using full OpenRT/IntelRT and OpenCL-spec, it actually has to emulate rasterized rendering to give you an example how dedicated it is.

Due to it's versatility and OpenCL support is can actually do audio processing with realtime raytracing and offload gameplay physics aswell.

[hoot 0]

Raytracing and Raypicking is nearly the same (the idea behind it), but raytracing is used to perform lighting operations on a scene, and raypicking to interact with objects in a 3d space:

http://www.mvps.org/directx/articles/rayproj.htm

Edit: Here is a better one (codebase), based on MS' XNA-Framework: http://xna-uk.net/blogs....ng.aspx

So one can say, that raycasting/raypicking is a common but old technique, already used since many years in realtime 3D CG environments.

[Itch 10]

Hello, its my first post in this forum:D

Well after watching the Track IR vid and other Ingame videos to ArmA2, it noticed that the distance of displayed grasses is very small..after 20meters theres only texture, some bushes thats all. Good exaple for this is the sniper scene in the Track IR vid where the guy is sniper and explains its better to rotate the head instead of the whole boddy. It looks extremely odd.

So I was wondering if its only like this on old PCs, or if the game needs high end PCs to be played. Will there be a way to increase the distance for vegetationto be displayed.

IMO its a waste to have grass that reacts when ur laying on it if on distances over 20meters everybody can see you as some peasant lying on Google earth grass texture

Also the effects like for rocket impacts look awful. I hope they will change them. I do not expect Crysis like eye candy, but at least something that looks like an explosions and not only a 2d 16x16 pixel effect

[jakerod 254]

Will there be a way to increase the distance for vegetationto be displayed.

Pretty sure it was mentioned that you can adjust it yourself or that it is higher now. Someone from BI confirmed it when they released the FARMA pics.

[sabre4809 0]

IMO its a waste to have grass that reacts when ur laying on it if on distances over 20meters everybody can see you as some peasant lying on Google earth grass texture

Thats not how it works. When the grass stops being 'drawn' it becomes that 'flat' ground, but that is at the hight of what the grass would be, so your still 'hidden'. Heres a link with pics to explain, Thanks to dslyecxi,

http://dslyecxi.com/armattp.html#environment scroll down to Grass.

[Rocco 0]

In multiplayer mode, the grass will be disabled anyway on most of the server, which is a shame, because it takes away tactical possibilites.

[bravo 6 0]

Grass should only exist if it also affects AI sight considerably as it does for humans.

I like the small green grass in arma2 because it seems it does not cut human visibility.

About the taller grass (wheat) i have a more negative opinion. Hope I'm wrong about this.