is there a way to extand the grass draw distance?

[topeira 10]

ISSUE 1 - grass draw distance:

ARMA2 looks fantastic as long as the grass is drawn. beyond it it looks like 2001 OFP, not to mention that soldiers are easier to spot at 200 meters than at 20. it affects gameplay and that's the worse thing about it.

i know about the option to make the grass go farther (ground detail, i think it's called) and i already have it at Very high , which renders grass up to 100 meters away. it's nice. however i was wondering if there is a way to EXTAND the grass's distance to over 100. it will cost in FPS, i know, but if it isnt official than no one can come to BIS with complaints they can't max the game out.

i can run the game fine on my rig and would like the ability to extand the grass farther.

the only games that have this miracle done where u can barely see grass disappearing is FC2 and crysis though the latter doesnt stream it's world.

possible? a mod? tweaking a *.cfg file? anything?

ISSUE 2 - pop ups -

i really hope BIS will integrate a fade in effect for the trees and models that come into the draw distance. unlike many games - the draw distance doesnt cuz the entire world but only trees , houses and other models like these, BUT when they DO come into view they POP in. what happened to the smooth transition of alpha fade in? i hope BIS will implement such a thing cuz it's so distracting seeing trees pop in when i step forward, than i step back and they pop out. step in - a factory appears out of nowhere. step back - puff - the factory disappears...

[longers 10]

yup

it's a huge problem for me, everything looks amazing up close but the stuff in the distance looks truly terrible. like you say it effects gameplay in a huge way, surely this can be fixed in someway ?

it makes sniping stupid, you lie in the grass thinking you are hidden but someone a few hundred metres away can't see the grass and thus in reality you are completly exposed.

it's beyond retarded and amazing that something this huge can be overlooked by the devs.

[Jimmy the Saint 10]

as I have read somewhere else, the developers are making another "grass-system" which does sink you a little bit in the terrain as if you go prone. But I don't know anything about a drawing distance and clipping.

[longers 10]

yeah it's gonna be like arma 1 where you sink into the terrain, looks absolutely retarded and doesn't really disguise the player either.

weak

[Adramelech 10]

yeah this is a serious issue :eek: i noticed pretty quickly

[dayglow 2]

Joint Operations probably did it best for concealment at a distance.

[EDcase 87]

Yeah, Joint Ops was really great for the grass effect but they were using hypervoxels which is a totally different system unfortunately.

Hopefuly there will be some improvement in future...

[frederf 0]

ArmA1 didn't sink you into the terrain. They just had a very simple grass layer that was about 12 inches above the hard terrain. It looked like people were sunk into the ground though.

Also JointOps simply made the character at distance semi transparent. Nothing to do with voxels.

[topeira 10]

yup - the mast idea is exactly what i meant. only perhaps sharper and more like grass and not dots, but that's the idea i had. quoting myself from earlier this thread:

in arma2 if they had a masking system that goes over far away characters and that masking system create a Zebra type mask over the legs of characters in the distance it might give the impression of being behind grass. maybe thats how jointops did it (dont know. never played it). this solution doesnt help the visuals though might help gameplay.

Edited July 3, 2009 by topeira

[Jimmy the Saint 10]

I think operation flashpoint already had such a simulation of grass which sank the player into the terrain. At least sniping worked pretty well from a distance of about 1,5 to 2 km. Anyway, a good sniper has at least a second teammate and doesn't stay at one point all the time, he's always on the move looking for good spots. :p

---------- Post added at 11:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:12 PM ----------

@ Jimmy the Saint - so where have u read that info? i found it hard to believe a new system will be implemented into an existing game so i doubt it will affect arma2, which is all i care about...

You can find some informations here:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=75821&highlight=grass

Not sure thought, since they seem to be rumours only in that thread.

[topeira 10]

I think operation flashpoint already had such a simulation of grass which sank the player into the terrain. At least sniping worked pretty well from a distance of about 1,5 to 2 km. Anyway, a good sniper has at least a second teammate and doesn't stay at one point all the time, he's always on the move looking for good spots. :p

---------- Post added at 11:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:12 PM ----------

You can find some informations here:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=75821&highlight=grass

Not sure thought, since they seem to be rumours only in that thread.

it's a great thread. thanks.

however isn't a part of the subject that much.

i hope a mod can give a few variations of grass draw distance. i think my GPU can handle a few more meters of grass... will help the immersion a lot.

[frederf 0]

The solution I always though was cute was to place a selectively invisible-making mask box around the object at a far distance.

Remember the old ArmA1 bug where you could see through the hangar walls when looking through the AV-8B's cockpit glass? Imagine the same thing except the hangar wall is the enemy man at 700m and the cockpit glass is an invisible box around the enemy man. Now imagine that the cockpit glass was painted in such a way that it only had that invisible effect on the lower half.

The left pane is normal. In the center section shows in red what parts of the model would be made invisible when viewed through the mask. The right pane shows the final result. The mask in the example would be for some rather tall grass and up close it looks weird.

Imagine an enemy at 500m where you can make out 5-20% of him through the invisibility mask. He wouldn't be invisible, but rather hard to detect.

[HKFlash 9]

Thats a damn good idea Frederf! I hope BIS hears you...

[mr_centipede 31]

@Frederf

wouldn't that make the muzzle flash obscured too?

off-topic abit, but does clutter could have view-lod too? i remember in BIS Dev Blog said the trees created in LINDA will autogenerate the view-lod.. i would assume it is the same with grass/clutter.

[no use for a name 0]

that is a cool idea! They muzzle flash might be obscured; but the lighting on the grass and the smoke probably wouldn't

[No_Smoking 10]

Is there really a point to draw grass further out? I can see a point if its a forced thing for all clients, but if its just personal settings (I.E. You have your grass maxed, but the guy 200m out that you can't see, CAN SEE YOU because his isn't maxed out).. your only going to hurt yourself if you enable it. :eek:

[frederf 0]

Extending the range of grass is not a real fix for the unavoidable fact that rendering takes PC power and we have finite PC power. A real fix attempts to make our finite PC power irrelevant to the problem.

My idea tries to focus on the end result, the enemy being blended in, instead of the intermediary goal of putting grass everywhere (which would then cause the enemy to be blended in). If there is one enemy sniper out there you don't have to cover 50 km^2 of terrain with grass just to hide him, you make a localized hide.

[LJF 0]

Another idea (as well as that brilliant one by Frederf) would be a really low-Q grass that was rendered past the normal stuff, maybe out to 1km or something. Just something to break up the sat-map a bit, because at medium range ... it looks terrible :(

ArmA2 atm is a mix of superb and just plain bad. They can't just leave it like it is, it just doesn't look right, and like was said, it affects gameplay as well.

[Hyp3rdyn3 10]

Delta Force's voxel grass can't be beaten.

Grass needs to work first and foremost. Stuff the animation, density and rendering of individual blades. The current grass situation wreaks of eye candy over functionality which is completely at odds with the ArmA philosophy. Stupidly, instead of immersion in grass improving your odds of survival, it only serves to reduce it by obstructing your view.

Edited July 3, 2009 by Hyp3rdyn3

[Poppis 10]

Frederfs idea looks amazing. A lot better than "sinking" in the ground.

[topeira 10]

The solution I always though was cute was to place a selectively invisible-making mask box around the object at a far distance.

Remember the old ArmA1 bug where you could see through the hangar walls when looking through the AV-8B's cockpit glass? Imagine the same thing except the hangar wall is the enemy man at 700m and the cockpit glass is an invisible box around the enemy man. Now imagine that the cockpit glass was painted in such a way that it only had that invisible effect on the lower half.

The left pane is normal. In the center section shows in red what parts of the model would be made invisible when viewed through the mask. The right pane shows the final result. The mask in the example would be for some rather tall grass and up close it looks weird.

Imagine an enemy at 500m where you can make out 5-20% of him through the invisibility mask. He wouldn't be invisible, but rather hard to detect.

yup. that is my idea exaclty as i wrote it in my second post in this thread, only i suggested a zebra alpha pattern - stripes. not dots.

i wonder how this idea might look like with soldiers at 150 meters. the screenshot u got is of a man about 30 meters away.

[cm 0]

I think the texture pack in the BIS forum provides a decent improvement. Gets rid of those hideous mid-distance textures.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=75964

[mrcash2009 0]

^^^ you might want to URL those images, your way over the hotlink size limit mate :)

Just thought Id say that ECS mod in Arma1 actually had a config setting and you could extend this value of grass drawn/terrain.

Check out how ECS did it then get it modded for Arma 2 :)

[topeira 10]

^^^ you might want to URL those images, your way over the hotlink size limit mate :)

Just thought Id say that ECS mod in Arma1 actually had a config setting and you could extend this value of grass drawn/terrain.

Check out how ECS did it then get it modded for Arma 2 :)

that's what i hoped to get ppl started -

i know nothing about modding so im not the guy to do this but maybe this thread gets back to the plerson who made the aforementioned mod so HE can convert it to arma2.

for those with the rig to handle it it might be useful.

basically i think there should be a way to reduce the density of the grass clusters and farther their draw distance. it might get the grass in close proximity to look less dense but not too much so it looks barren and the reward is an overall better looking ground.

who knows....maybe it'll get done.

[retrofly 0]

Quite surprised in this day and age no one has figured out how to conceal players when drawing grass/bushes at a great distance cant be done.

It's quite a big floor in a simulator, in theory the person concealed cannot see a person in the open, yet the person in the open could see someone "concealed" at a great distance because the grass hasn't been rendered on his screen.

So thats what? Err the opposite of reality, I know you can't get exactly like real life, but you can at least try and get close, instead of reversing the idea :bounce3:

Whats the point in modeling ballistics if you can't get a field right