NordKindchen

A small summarization: The current system lacks quality at mid range because there is only one texture with the size of 1024px*1024px that gets tiled over the whole island. This texture combined with the satelite map (with a resolution of about 1pixel per 2sqm) is all the detail we get at mid range. My suggested system would result in a huge quality improvement in the mid range with minimum work and performance inpact by integrating a logic map into the workflow. The below images show a comparisation. For a complete and easy to understand/follow explaination - pls refer to the example below. DONT FORGET TO VOTE Best regards! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yay update! I managed to be able to show how the system looks ingame! This can be considered as absolutely representive! Keep in mind, that this example is made with my taste. Other people may prefer some calmer pictures. All that would however be possible with the explained system. Here is the example in small Here is the example in big. ------------ ------------ Here is another example! Here is the example in big. ------------ ------------ Here is another example! Here is the example in big. ------------ ------------ Here is another example! Here is the example in big. Pls notice that I put 3 soldiers into the next picture to show you how much the camouflage will improve with the new system! ""Sadly the maximum number of images per topic is 13 so I cant post any more thumbnails form this point on. Here is the next example in big . Sadly the maximum number of images per topic is 13 so I cant post any more thumbnails form this point on. Here is the next example in big. Spread the word! And thanks for your support! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Original Post: So here is finally my elaboration regarding this theme. Its quite long - and I think this one time it will be ok to even another thread for this elaboration. And dont be scared by the size of the following^^ I tried to visualize as much as I could with pictures. I also opened a new Forum Tracker Entrance DONT FORGET TO VOTE Best regards Ps: This thread is born out of this discussion Mid range textures are -sadly- very bad Introduction Arma 3's graphics have evolved a lot compared to its predeccessor. The close up environment looks really nice and thanks to the satelite image the world is made of, the far distance can convince even more! Nice_ExamplePic_1 Nice_ExamplePic_2 Nice_ExamplePic_3 Nice_ExamplePic_4 Nice_ExamplePic_5 Nice_ExamplePic_6 Sadly..whilst the visual quality from close and far distance got crucial improvements, the mid range distance was left out completey . I can yet assure you that they used the same texture for the later explained midrange_texture as in Takistan! Sadly_Bad_ExamplePic_1 Sadly_Bad_ExamplePic_2 Sadly_Bad_ExamplePic_3 Sadly_Bad_ExamplePic_4 Sadly_Bad_ExamplePic_5 Sadly_Bad_ExamplePic_6 This results in a very inconsistent look. But the worst is, as Arma veterans know, that that distance is the main engagement range! There are allready lots of people aware of it and complaining about this issue. Most information can be found here: here. However I'm here to write down a rundown and several wenn conceived suggestions. I will even deliever some example pics of how the suggested fixing method could be accomplished and brought into a work flow. Explanation of the current system and why its not satisfying. The current system shall be explained by the example of Stratis. Overall/long range The whole map consists of a very big satelite image. Its consists of 1024px*1024px*64 pieces creating a satelite image of 8192px*8192px. Each 1024px in length and width is approximately 1km. I created an image to illustrate this. This means we've got a resolution of about 1px/m. In other words - our smallest detail on the map is about 1m² size. Closeups Now if this would be all the engine does we would be having blurry textures everywhere! Even at the closest distance. So to refurbish the close environment there is a radius of, lets say, 50 meters around you where the satelite map is overdrawn by a close up textures. But these close up textures are generic. This means they are basically small tileable textures which are being put together infinitesimally. You just don't get to see that because they are under your feet and most of the time hidden by foliage etc. So how does the game know where on the map it shall put road textures, where sand and where gras? Here is the place where the logic_map comes into play! This mechanism will be important for my suggestions to fix the blurry mid range textures! The logic map its basically a "map over the map" which defines where to put which texture in closeups. Each colour stands for a different texture kind, like red for grass for example. Mid Range The mid range is basically the satelite image - thats the reason why it appears so blurred. (Keep in mind: the resolution is about 1px/m.) Now the Devs thought about a way to give the blurry midrange a bit crisp by putting a texture over those areas. Thats the midrange_texture I spoke about earlier. As I said, its even the exact same as they used in Takistan OA. (That alone is not a bad thing - the texture for itself is pretty good. If a desert texture was the right texture to choose for Stratis it would be another story) What the engine does is the following: The midrange texture overlays the blurry environment at midrange.(midrange_texture the original texture used in Arma2 OA and in Arma 3 just blurred to death because I dont want to give away non-official BI-data - in reality its sharp as s***t) To make you understand this better I made a few examples for you: 1.image: Original Arma 3 pic 2.image: Arma 3 how it would look without this midrange_texture 3.image: The exact midrange_texture put ontop of the second image via photoshop As you see, its very close to the "quick photoshop remade". So its basically a simple overlay from the engine. The problem with this overlay is that this texture is the same for the whole map at mid distance. If one texture reaches over different colour patterns, as it is the case, it doesnt look natural at all! The solution is to introduce different details on different colours. Basically like yellow := sand details, green := gras details Some other processes to sum this up Of course there are also several normal and bumpmap maps applied to close range textures. This is the basic scheme in which the engine renders the game. The wohle process of objectsrendering, lightning etc. is placed on top of it Suggestions for Solutions There are basically two ways to increase the mid range detail. First the "bad one". Bad because it has more drawbacks than the second one. Solution_1: Increase the size of the satmap This is the simpliest solution to this problem but comes in with a whole lot of problems. But first the advantages: Advantages The advantages are simple. You get more px/m so you get more details. Basic math. Also this will render the different distances EVEN BETTER. This would of course be the way to go if there was no performance hit and if you had all the manpower youd want. You could draw infinite special details on every part of the island and it would look great - if the resolution was big enoug. Disadvantages 1.A goddamn whole lot of work....Increasing the detail enough to make it count will be a huge amount of work and basically means recreating Stratis (and probably Altis) since the satelite layer resolution is likely to be final after the first creation of the map. 2. Every detail would require to be painted individually making the progress even more time consuming. 3. perhaps not even feasible to increase the satmap resolution enough while still keeping the game playable. 4. Since Arma is 32bit it wont profit from much RAM - therefore this will be even more performance intense. This means there must be a solution for lower Res PCs - maybe this could be achieved by differently resoluted satmaps. But maybe not since the satmap currently is saved in a non compressing procedure. Since these are a lot of disadvantages I spent a lot of time thinking about another solution. And I think I found one! Solution_2: Creating a logic layer and corresponding textures for the mid range This solution is based on a system that is allready integrated into the game. BIs is allready using this, as already described (close distance). A step into the future would be to implement this system into the mid range rendering, with a bit of adaptations though. Operating Principle: Instead of having ONE midrange_texture - implement MANY DIFFERENT mid range textures just like in closeups. This way each different ground type will get its very own details. Each applied texture must not exceed a certain texture size. The texture must be tileable. The satmap texture will then be overlayed with the new midrange patterns which are tiled as often as needed. Dependant on the Mid_range_logicmap the related texture will be chosen and placed onto the satmap. Quite as in closeups, only that instead of a complete ground texture with normal maps etc, the chosen textures will only be an overlay. Thereoretically its the same system as now, only you use different textures for the different grounds. To visualize this to you I made a few example pics. (As shown above - the technique to produce this images is very similar to the enigne procedure. The result will be quite similar) 1. This is the original picture. 2. This is the picture how it would look without any mid range texture. 3. And this is my vision of how it could look. 4. This is the "logic map" that I created to achieve the shown results Pls keep in mind that this is a quick mashup, the end result could look even better! Of course there is room for optmization but I think the current results are allready positive. To keep the process as close as possible to the engines procedures I worked as follows: 1. I blurred the ground to create the second picture 2. Then I chose specific colours of the image with the "wizards tool" to determine the thresholds 3. After that I downloaded several textures from cgtextures.com and made a tileable texture for each colour of the logic map. 4. Now I created a big picture out of one texture (basically like this) and overlayed it with the satmap where the colour fits. 5. I repeated this for every texture and looked at the result. This is how the engine would work too! So its actually representative. Here is the same example for a longer range: 1. Original_pic 2. My vision of how it should look 3. Logic map The system for creating the logic map can be automated: MatLab for example has a feature that can do exactly this. The system is easyly scaleable - for example: If you want to redo the current system - just fill the whole logic_map with one colour and connect it to the current texture. Or if you need smaller textures for different graphic options - relatively easy to implement. Additionally the system can deliever plenty of special details for unique environments. Just put a special colour into the logic_map and create a unique texture just for that special part on the island. It should be relatively easy to implement since you allready have a similar system working, it is not completely from scratch. Once implemented you could in fact let others do the job for you if you haven't got enough manpower to implement it completely on your own. I would be willing to put much effort into the textures for the better of the community. Just ask^^ You could even implement it and still keep the current midrange_texture, meaning that the work effort could be stopped at any point if required. Performance wise it shouldn't be that much of a hit since the textures will be tileable and the logic_map only needs to obtain the integrated colours. This means it can be an indexed picture, reducing the data and workload even more. Ontop of that: Nobody even needs to have a performance hit with it since they can stick with the current system by disabling the logic_map - just keep it as "low setting" in the options. I bet your artists will be eager to implement details in mid range;) I am sure they would love that! Even the workflow is simple to use and ontop its even a workflow you are allready used to! This minimizes errors for you! Of course there is still some work related to this. But as I explained it is most flexible. You could stop the work as soon as the functions are integrated and before even one new texture was drawn. Of course there could be an impact on performance too but since its so easy adjustable, its not really such big a disadvantage since every one can choose to switch it off. Advantages 1. looks much better than the current texture at midrange 2. relatively easy to implement due to present mid range overlay. BI is already halfway there! 3. perfectly scaleable with hardware capabilities, just make an option to enable the current texture or to lower the resolution of the midrange overlay textures 4. great accessability for modders 5. perfectly scaleable with dev effort, integrate the logic map functionality and leave there rest to the modders, no need to put many person-hours at stake! 6. can be partly automated 7. can also be used for further customization of the map, specific accents could be set in certain locations for a unique look 8. the workflow is well known, no surprises to be expected Disadvantages 1. still, one more work package to be funded 2. possible performace hit The mid range is one of those very few things that don't look wonderful in Arma3. For all I know the second suggestion is quite cheap and very effective. To be honest, I don't think that anyone should release a first person simulation with texture pixels of 1m² size in 2013, those times are long gone.

I am curious if you are going to fix the awfully broken hit animations? And if you are really going to improve the thermal vision in the game? The flawed integration of thermals has bugged me since the release of the alpha. Also, are you going to improve the explosion effects? Something similar to what we had in ACE Arma 2? Looking forward to your release! Best regards.

I would really like that THEY FIX THEIR BROKEN GAME! Theres so much stuff in the game that other companies wouldnt even publish in an Alpha. The effects still look like from the year 2000, the animation system is only half way build in (soldier turning withtout moving their feet, bolt action rifles reloading themselves magically without help of any of the soldiers hands, f*cked up hit animations and so on and so on and so on) I could write an essay over 10 pages about whats absolutely unacceptably broken in Arma 3. It wont change so why bother. What Arma really needs, way stronger than an Addon, is a competitioner who shows them how its really done. Then we might finally see a polished well designed wanna-be-simulation. Oh btw: Bipods missing since Operation Flashpoint. But Arma 3 is "infantry focussed". Jeah sure...

BIS strikes again. Yet another unpolished feature that, if we are honest, should have been integrated polished way back in Arma 2. Not to mention Bipods. Oh dear...I could make a list as long as the whole side with unfinished, unthought through, unpolished things in Arma 3. BIS tought me to never buy a game during the Alpha again. Thanks for that at least.

You guy most likely now that a big part of why it is nearly impossible to use camouflage at distance is because the shadows get disabled while looking through a scope. Switch to 6:37 and you will see that this is quite possible with todays technology and brings a huge improvement. Best regards

looks nice!

That was exactly what I wanted to suggest! Armas lighting engine sadly is not capable of giving good results with high area light at night. Another suggestion I have is if you could town down the yellow of the sparks a little bit? The whiter a spark is the hotter it appears. And the yellow sparks sometimes dont really fit. Other than that: I am eagerly wating for the video ;D Keep up the good work!

I am curious!

This is so F***cking ridiculous. Why cant BIS not let you drive the tank as if it was you in the driver seat? The AI messes up with the movement since OPF times and it doesnt even make sense. When you want an AI to drive forward into a tree he should do it! But atm he decided to drive slowly back and forth left and right and eventually goes straight. Its frustrating and unneccessary. The AI should perfom the actions you tell them to no matter what is in the way. Only expection should be waypoints. But the forward, left, right commands should never be questioned by the AI! Design flaws like this are at every corner of the game.

Has anyone tried Red Orchestra 2? I found the weapon handling extremely satisfying there. However due to regulations in my country I never came to shoot rifles myself so Iwould really like to know what people with shooting experience say about RO 2 weapon handling. Best regards!

The way all big games do it is this: They have a dying animation and if the dead player released to a force while dying (explosion) or after he finishes his dying animation (dying on a stairwell) he then proceeds to ragdoll. What we have now is: Ragdoll. And that doesnt make for very satisfying dying effects... Red Orchestra 2 was mentioned earlier. Actually RO 2 has as I stated above: a dying animation and after that a ragdoll. Its what Arma should have had. But jeah....whatever

Exactly my thoughts! =D

Dude... I am aware of that. It was just a sarcastic statement that should point out that we are still waiting for bipods since OPF times.

I am not quite sure if next gen hardware can handle it but if the possibility exists I would dream of bipods! But I am no fool and know that the hardware is still not quite there yet.

Shadow distance is quite interesting!

Cmon guys! Its only one year since the feature is requested! You need to be patient. I bet if we stay calm for...mh like 3 years we might even eventually get it!

BIS needs competition. So many only half thought through elements in the game.

Those dont look like the standard muzzle flashes. New effects incoming?

Thats again a misunderstanding=) Good effects dont necessairly need a big performance hit. Neither do they need tons of particles. I can garantee you that you can build good effects without any of the above. However thats something that requires a lot of skill and love for detail to do. I wish there would be a tutorial on chaning effects out there. I actually even asked Optical Snare to maybe create a small tutorial but I got no answer.

This is abolutely not true. Many important problems of the AI can be fixed without much impact on performance as is proven by various mods for Arma 2 and Arma 3. Many other problems can be fixed by simple tweaks. For example you cant tell me it would be an enormous performance impact to implement a realistic accuracy for burst firing at distance in different stances for the AI. Same as that the AI instantaniously shares the knowledge of your position once you are spotted (example: 10 AI soldiesr standing 500 meters away. One of them spots you. The other 9 start INSTANTLY firing at you. IT was even proven that this works through bushes - so you can be shot through bushes when you are spotted by an enemy AI with line of sight to you.) These basic flaws are not connected to performance issues but to bad fine tuning. Thats whats Armas problem is in nearly everything. Example? -The body armor system: Nice on the surface, but when you cannot kill someone with a shot to his plain face because the hitbox of the helmet is still over his face thats definately bad implementation! -Armor system: The current system is based on HP while they have the ability of a Penetration related damage system lying underneat this. They just dont use it. And how long did it take the a single guy to mod something similar into the game? That should have been BIS job! -Sittting in vehicles: You can sit and look out of the back of vehicles or the side of little birds but can you shoot? No! Because as BIS states: It is impossible to implement sth like this. (they really said this). Soooo....jeah... ....-The new stance system: Its a good and nice idea! However the animations are not nearly finished!!! If you go into one of the new stances your soldier wont move his feed but instead hover above the ground like a manneqin fixed to a crane. -The "new movement system": Arma 2 had an aiming deadzone. Arma 3 has this forced off. Good decision. However they broke their animation with it! Where before your soldier would move his torso left and right before attempting to move his legs, now with the new system your soldier will ONLY be able to move his body in its whole! This is highly unrealistic and looks rather bad for the trained eye. And on top of that it was even implemented right before the change and was broken after it. -The effects: They are just laughable and they are just a plain copy from Arma 2. Even games like BC2 3 years ago had better effects. I am talking about better and not hollywood like ones. And yes I know Blastcore but thats BIS job and not Optical Snares in the first place. I could go on but I am sure you see the pattern: There are a lot of good ideas but they are not worked out to the end. And in my opinion its not that BIs has had to ambitious plans. They were quite realistic plans. But somehow they didnt manage to finish them right though. Thats just my feeling after a year of Arma Alpha testing. Best regards

Just a very short answer: I am talking about these pictures http://media.pr2game.com/news/announcement/fools_road_02.jpg http://media.pr2game.com/news/announcement/fools_road_04.jpg Greetz

Sadly what can be seen from Project Reality 2 doenst look very stunning graphic wise=( The environments look like a half life mod=( But theoretically PR 2 is a great project! Hopefully they improve.

I found this topic very interesting to follow. Even through all the ranting on the last pages. The quintessence I got from reading it is following: While there is no dire need to take a completely new engine it is obvious that RV has its flaws and is not well optimized. It may be right that theres no other engine that succeeds in every way the RV engine tries to succeed. Still as pointed out several times in this thread this is mostly because the developers of said engines aim at completely different properties. The RV engine was constantly updated to keep up with the time. (Even though its still falling behind) The same can be done to any other engine. Because of this an engine that is well designed from the beginning would be a better starting point. (for example the use of multiple cores and more than just 4 gig ram) Of course the time needed to upgrade a new engine is a strong argument against this since the work can be put into fixing and upgrading the RV engine. Still I slowly get the feeling that its harder to change the RV engine to current standard than to upgrade an existing proven engine to the needs of Arma. The number one reason I believe this is because Arma is restricted to the usage of maximal 4 GB Ram and one core since forever. And I read a long time ago that BIS has a hard time upgrading the engine because the guy responsible for the development left the company a long time ago. And on top of that left barely any documentation behind. That makes it so much harder to actually change core features of the engine. Now lets take a look at what makes Arma an Arma. For me Arma is defined through: a sandbox with a huge customisation (editor) a big island a realistic approach combined operations sophisticated AI (that doesnt really work and therefore is not necessary for my Arma experience - still a big part of Arma) massive multiplayer mods! What distincts Armas engine from different tripple A engines is the sandbox the AI the size of the map MODS!!! Now lets look at the list: -the sandbox is without any restrictions well implemented. Arma is a mission makers dream if I am not completely misguided. However the engine doesnt react well to mission placed objects. -the AI is just far from perfect. It may be true that it can do a lot on paper but it falls short in every aspect in a real game situation. Wayfinding?: Did I not just read about how AI is not capable of driving over bridges?; Convoy traveling?: Cant do; Fighting in houses?: No; Realistic behavior: If the AI spots you you are INSTANT spotted for every unit connected to the spotter. That means 10 guys instantly starting firing at you for example. Ai has a shooting behavior completely different to humans. It can burst way better than humans can. AI cannot be supressed. etc etc etc. So in the end the AI is not even a big plus of the Arma game. Yes it is more sophisticated than most other current AIs but that doesnt stop it from falling short. -The size of the map, as stated before, is to big in my opinion. Chernarus was big enough allready. Even there hardly any mission used the terrain in full potential. Even half the size would allow for 80% of the current missions. On top of that the size of map is responsible for many of the performance flaws and took a huge amount of the development time. Also a smaller map would have helped to avoid those awfull midrange textures. Still one of the bigger flaws for me - Mods are what keeps Arma alive in my opinion. Thats a huge and important part of it. Now if we look at current engines, for example the cryengine since its been talked about a lot. -mapsize: We havent seen any maps in the size of Arma in this engine. However I highly doubt that it isnt possible to update the engine to fullfill this part. - the sandbox: The creation of a sandbox is just a question of development. - AI :On top of that it contains a very sophisticated AI. HOWEVER the Ai is player centric. That would be a big part of work to improve. However Armas AI is not that close to perfection in the first place. - Mods: Cryengine is modable out of the house. Now I just wrote this list to make it clear what we are actually talking about. IT IS possible to fullfill the needs of Arma with other current engines. What does BIS need to improve on the other end to compare to AAA-engines? - real time shadows (deferred lightning e.g.) - network optimisation - performance and usage of the current hardware - new animation system - new particle system - new destruction system - new sound engine - a new system for the midrange environment! How about more than one 500x500px texture for more than 250km2?mh? Thats a lot of work too! I am not here to say they should switch to the cryengine. I am here to say that the RV engine has lots of flaws that need urgent work. And I have to agree that companys with more money wont necessarily build better games. If you look at all the AAA titles of the last time that fell short its obvious. However the miliarty simulation genre strongly needs competition! Arma at least didnt fullfill my hopes sadly... Now on the other end it seems as if the Arma community doesnt even long for current state graphics. Why else would All in Arma be so successfull. In the end its a godsent still that we have a game like Arma. Without it it would be even more of the mainstream shooters. We just need more Armas! Best regards

BIS definately hasnt got future hardware on their mind when creating the VR-Engine. If they had, theyd developed an engine that is accessing multiple cores. The fact that Arma runs better with newer hardware is simply because even one core of current cpus runs faster than old cpus. The fact that you can get better performance on multi core pcs when you are running your own server on one iteration of the game and play the game on another one still on the same pc is proof enough that the game is very very poorly optimisted. A long time ago I read that improving the engine is particulary hard for BIS because the people creating the engine left the company a long time ago and didnt leave enough documentation behind to make the code understandable. That could very much be the reason why the engine is lacking so much. Still its no excuse.

I would love to actually see FINISHED animations before working further on them. Its absolutely awful, non finished and unprofessional that your feet dont move at all when you are in one of the new stances. Instaed your whole body hoveres left and right. On top of that your soldier moves his whole body ALLWAYS when aiming left and right. Instead he should first move his upper body and then begin to turn the whole body. (feedbacktracker) The whole animation system is not finished yet! And I am sick of this half finished stuff we get everywhere. Even the bolt action snipers: When you shoot the bolt moves back and forth magically as if it was an automatic mechanism. Even RO2 3 years ago managed to implement proper reload animations for this! But wait! Thats not all! In fact when the soldier reloads the rifle he pushes the bolt back before emptying the magazine. So there even is an animation for that in the game! But its just not implemented! I am tired of this half finished cra* On top of that: The feedback tracker is a farce in its self. Its been nearly a year now since the introduction and BARELY NONE of the demanded features that are even marked as assigned are beeing worked on!