Grass layer not the best solution?

[runforrest 10]

this is the ticket: http://dev-heaven.net/issues/show/8285

ive also didnt noticed it until the last days, as i already described, and im also a big fan of ofp/arma since the beginning (fanboy suits me better :D), and when i discovered this it was a shock tbh and i am still shocked

sigh

sry when i sound a bit agressive, but this issue really gets my blood boiling

i can not understand how someone can even think about that the hitbox model isnt fitting with the visualmodel, thats INSANE especially in the arma context ... theres so much talk about realism and accurate simulation of so many things... and than the most basic stuff ... like hitting accurately on 300m distance IS NOT POSSIBLE! HELLO??? i dont understand how someone can not be upset about this. in a S-I-M-U-L-A-T-I-O-N

if i was responsible for the CIT(thank god im not) i would have set a deadline for BIS to change this, and if it wouldnt, BAM finito end of arma and end of CIT because its not worth it when most basic things dont work

im aware that the the grass clutter is a big problem and not easy to solve, but why in all heavens "fix" it and create a new problem that really breaks the very basic logic of shooting = seeing something,shooting on it where u see it and hit it, when done right

Edited May 1, 2011 by RunForrest
make more clear what i mean with "basic"

[maturin 12]

like hitting accurately on 300m distance IS NOT POSSIBLE!

YES IT IS, OTHERWISE EVERYONE WOULDN'T BE DOING IT

That is all.

[metalcraze 290]

Well the flaw is there and needs to be fixed.

But it certainly doesn't render the game unplayable. You just have to aim a few pixels above whatever body part of enemy you want to hit.

Was the ticket for this created? Because I will make one if it wasn't.

[=kct=blackmamba 44]

yeahhh thats because the enemy was lying on the ground at 728mtrs instead of 700 mtrs pffff.... wich u would have known when u use your range finder...

oow yeah but the second is lying 40 mtrs further away and have ive spend 6 bullits to take him out...

thats why u are a sniper, calculate the trajectory bevore u shoot.. re adjust your scope and whait for the right moment. JOKE

[BasileyOne 10]

yeah, remind me world deadliest sniper story/tactic/equipment - 90% kills with ironsight, 24% made my SMG.

YOU're weapon, not iron, you handling in hand.

BE deadly[not realy on hardware] !!

[nkenny 1051]

yeah, remind me world deadliest sniper story/tactic/equipment - 90% kills with ironsight, 24% made my SMG.

YOU're weapon, not iron, you handling in hand.

BE deadly[not realy on hardware] !!

Sniping during World War 2 didn't happen at thousands of meters. Think something in the nature of 150 to 300 meters-- with very odd shots out to 500+.

According to interviews with the best (and surviving) german snipers they had about a 50% accuracy record. ie: Approximately every second shot proved deadly... and still they spent an inordinate amount of time setting up that shot-- and this was for the very best.

Certainly there technology (and methodology) has improved since those days-- but this doesn't change the facts. And there are still some rather romantic views about sniping.

On topic:

Certainly having a grasslayer is better than having none at all?

-k

[=kct=blackmamba 44]

in real life there is nothing fancy abouth being a sniper..

imagine lying on the cold floor for hours maybe even days in the same position to recognize the, and go up in your surroundings.

looking trough your scope for hours waiting for that one shot if u are even tasked to shoot it might be just a reconaisance mission but lets say i get the task to kill

after hours maybe even days u have to evade while your enemy is on full aware cause u just killed a high ranked oponent.

your bones and muscles are all cold and stiff and u do not want to get caught now

u must have balls of wolfraam to be cool at this moment

ok on topic its just a game sitting in your armchair clicking mouse buttons :)

let it be as is right now it would look even worse if there wasnt a grasslayer like we have right now.

i think when u let the enemy dissapear in clutter u get negative fps aka stutterfest when u move your scope to the next target i think it would be pretty cpu intensive to calculate the position and amount of clutter where your looking at while there is allready going on so much around u.

[Brainbug 10]

I always think back to the old DeltaForce 1 and 2 (not 3!) that was based on the VoxelSpace engine by Novalogic.

Crappy graphics maybe (and a CPU hog), but the main advantage was the grass. It had different depths, so at some spots it was just ankle deep and at other it was deeper, and you could prone into it and not be seen, regardless if the opponent that was looking at you was 10m away or 1000m.

Never ever found anything like that in a (polygon based) video game. I think if the next big step in the Arma engine fully exploits all DX11 possibilities, maybe something like that would become possible again. But then again, we'll probably never loose the LOD problem. Maybe only with a pure raytracing engine, but that's certainly a thing for the next decade.

Edited May 4, 2011 by Brainbug

[Dwarden 1124]

voxel based engine / grass was really one of things which we will remember about DF 1 and 2 ;)

[maturin 12]

voxel based engine / grass was really one of things which we will remember about DF 1 and 2 ;)

So Dwarden, is it doable to make the lower part of a soldier model invisible? Then it would look the grass was covering them.

Otherwise you will have to raise the apparent position of low-LoD landcape, or spawn low-res grass locally around units. Edit: Nevermind, this would just give away their position.

Edited May 6, 2011 by maturin

[Velocity 10]

Just to satisfy my curiosity - what would be the performance hit (approximately) regarding low-res grass?

In conjunction with this topic, may I ask your opinion about the so called "unlimited detail technology", which is promoted via various sources (e.g.

) - I'm by far no expert related to these topics which is why I'd like to share and have your thoughts/knowledge on this. Edited May 6, 2011 by Velocity

[mr.g-c 6]

.....but the main advantage was the grass. It had different depths, so at some spots it was just ankle deep and at other it was deeper, and you could prone into it and not be seen, regardless if the opponent that was looking at you was 10m away or 1000m.

Its funny that this was exactly what Maruk (BIS CEO) promised us in the first Interviews before Arma2 was released.

The more disappointed i was, seeing there was no grasslayer in the first-place at all after buying the game and it had to be introduced way way later after community made a lot of pressure and voted this issue as #1 in the Community-Issue-Tracker. Issue Resolved? Partially only... :o

I think this should be something high-priority for BIS to optimize. Even in a next big engine update, wheter this will be DLC or Expansion2.

[maturin 12]

The bugtrackers makes it look like the grass layer will switch off in scope view.

[kuIoodporny 45]

Well, not totally. It's about decreasing the effect significantly when soldiers pretty much fill up the screen - thus the cover would be gone anyway.

Wonder if it could be optional (difficulty options - serverside?) so one could choose between more realistic sniping or more realistic grass cover all the time.

Sorry, I don't buy the story like below.

Edited May 9, 2011 by zGuba

[rexehuk 16]

There is a map config option... but not tried it its affects on FPS.

clutterGrid = 1.61;

clutterDist = 120;

noDetailDist = 40;

fullDetailDist = 10;

minTreesInForestSquare = 3;

minRocksInRockSquare = 4;

Anyone tried maxing these out and seeing what a fully grassed world does to FPS?

**Edit**

Just trying putting them to 1000, I crashed the rendering buffer, lmao :D.

"RENDERING BUFFER TOO SMALL"

**EDIT 2**

Just tried it on Razani... has some interesting results, maybe its the solution for FORCING it on users, but yeah... as you can imagine this will probably murder 95% of the Arma communities machines.

Image 1- http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/9341/arma2oa2011051021205202.jpg

Image 2 - http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/426/arma2oa2011051021204626.jpg

Someone feeling not lazy and wants to try it on Chernarus?

Edited May 10, 2011 by rexehuk

[maturin 12]

Whoa. That is the solution for making maps that actually look like Afghanistan, not the blurry grey moonscape that is Takistan. And on a map with Arma-level details and visuals we could get away with it. Did that destroy your FPS?

[rexehuk 16]

Hmm... FPS was okish, but it definitely has an impact. Trying the same method on things like chernarus end up with a LARGE increase of ram (was hitting 4GB a minute ago).

Not sure how much RAM razani used, shall give it another test and post the config here.

Some stats for you:

Editor = 350K MEM util

Ingame = 950+k MEM util

CPU = 15-25%

GPU = AMD 5850 @ 30/35% (50% ish when zoomed on mountain)

Config:

clutterGrid = 1.11;

clutterDist = 850;

noDetailDist = 900;

fullDetailDist = 700;

FPS:

Around 30 with NO units down on the map

More screenies (Skybox is a temp solution - ignore it)

1: http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/9045/arma2oa2011051021555474.jpg

2: http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/9615/arma2oa2011051021554473.jpg

3: http://img848.imageshack.us/img848/2683/arma2oa2011051021553976.jpg

Edited May 10, 2011 by rexehuk

[kuIoodporny 45]

wow, that looks amazing. Shame my rig won't keep this up due to shitty GPU :>

[Defunkt 431]

Does look very good, something to look forward to in a year or two when I have a PC that laughs at ArmA.

[rexehuk 16]

I don't see it being a usable method. That would mean anyone who doesn't have a few gigs of ram couldn't play the map. All depends on settings ofcourse.

The defaults for the maps are like 100 distance, even 40 in some cases... no idea why they are so low! I've pushed it 8-10X in this Razani one, but still get 30 FPS, I imagine if you moderated it slightly you could achieve a nice balance.

[Brainbug 10]

The "few gigs of RAM" are not the problem, atm most PCs of Arma players have more RAM than the game uses. I think an improved version of the engine is what we need.

[PuFu 4591]

arma2.exe doesn't use more than 3.5gb of ram anyways. At least from my experience

[rexehuk 16]

arma2.exe doesn't use more than 3.5gb of ram anyways. At least from my experience

Mine got up to 5GB before it died in flames :p. Obviously it wasnt very happy trying to cache a few miles of textures.

[velebrz 1]

Someone feeling not lazy and wants to try it on Chernarus?

greetings all...sorry for bumping this up again

Im more than interested in researching this thing. The grass issue has always been an enigma for me

I am not a master of the editor by all means, if anything im a newb, but I have some edxperience with scripting and modding, so if you give me pointers on how to edit the map config quickly, ill do the test on chernarus and other maps too, and post the results with ram, cpu usage and screenshots

[james2464 176]

Those results look great! So the fix is just a matter of changing the config?

Also will this ticket be fixed for 1.6 Beta?

Can computers really not render grass over the whole map yet? (sorry im new)