Wired:

The only thing I have on U-Tapao is a partial map of the base housing & administation area. That's not enough to work with. I need either an aerial photo or map of the entire base.

Ajax:

Here's another picture that you might find useful. It's the Engine Shop area at Ubon.



The prefabricated metal and cinder block structures in this photo are typical of most maintenance shops at Ubon, as well as those at every other base in southeast Asia.

That's one of the reasons why it would be relatively easy to model the bases. You wouldn't have to create a vast array of building types. All you would need is a few simple A-frame structures and hangers in various sizes & colors (e.g., bare metal, brown, dark green, etc.) Also a few flat-roofed buildings in different shapes (square, rectangular, L-shaped & H-shaped), a typical corrogated metal hooch, and revetments.

I'm sure I missed a couple of essential items, but I think you get my drift. The same limited set of standard buildings & structures could be used for modeling every airbase.

By the way, I downloaded and installed ICQ tonight. My number is 162242132.

[This message has been edited by Sleuths7 (edited 06-11-2002).]

In the "Real World" section of Skunk Works, in addition to the resource directory and other things we talked about, perhaps we could have a reference section for scenery designers that has charts, maps, photos, and other useful information about each airbase.

For example, one of the basic charts might look something like this:



Of course, Ubon is the only base where I can identify specific facilities and areas at the present time, but hopefully we can get some input down the road from people who served at other bases. (I know they're lurking out there somewhere!)


[This message has been edited by Sleuths7 (edited 06-11-2002).]

Great stuff Sleuths7! I just wish we had this kind of pictures when we were doing our runways!

A couple of "warnings" about terrain making...

One, it is very long and involved process, much more so than aircraft modeling. There are a lot of elements that has be worked on and have to come together - from texture painting to 3d objects building to objects placements. So don't expect this process to be easy! Doing a simple Cuban map first, like being discussed here, is definately a good idea... And having great resources like what you've put here will definately help, too.

Another thing, no matter how fast your CPU is, chances are, you won't be able to place all those buildings you see in real life as 3d objects in game... remember each and every object you add - buildings, blast shields, bomb trailers, power carts, windsocks, etc - all have to be rendered, cast shadow, checked for collision etc, etc. So most likely, you'll have to live with much less objects in game, and this means that you might want to adjust the size of the base as well... having a real size base with half the objects, for example, might make it feel like the base is empty... So you might find that half-sized base feels more real than real-sized base... obviously, its something you have to play with, but just something to think about...

TK
--

TK

I think I may have come up with a way to get around the 3D object rendering problem, and I'd like to know if it is a viable approach.

Incidentally, before I get into the main part of my question, I'd like to say that I sincerely hope that scenery designers don't clutter up the flight line with dozens of trailers, power carts, service vehicles, etc., and put an unnecessary drain on system resources.

Now, for my question. Please take a look at the following aerial photograph of the housing area at Ubon.



Notice how, in typical military fashion, numerous identical buildings are neatly lined up in long, closely-spaced rows.

Even from this fairly close viewpoint, the individual buildings in each row almost seem to blend together.

Housing areas like this are hardly ever placed near the flightline or other operational areas where aircraft are likely to be. Therefore, during gameplay, they would be seen at a far greater distance, either from the air or at ground level. At such distances, it is difficult or even impossible to distinguish the outlines of individual buildings.

Therefore, instead of creating scores of individual 3-D objects to represent each building, wouldn't it be possible to achieve the same visual effect by creating one, very long 3-D object to represent an entire row of buildings?

By texturing and coloring the top and sides appropriately, I believe that a single 3-D object could convincingly look like an entire row of separate buildings when viewed from a half mile or more away, which is the typical situation. During the game, I wouldn't expect pilots to leave the flightline and go cruising up and down the streets of the base, or to buzz housing areas at low altitudes (that's a violation that could get you grounded!) So, most of the buildings on an airbase would never be seen except at a substantial distance.

Anyway, my question is this: Is this a viable approach, and could it significantly reduce the potential drain on system resources?

Dang right it is



This is just a five-minute job, so excuse the texturing and the lining-up...Sleuths had a brilliant idea- this is simply two boxes with opacity maps (front and top), with other boxes for the sides. Right now it halves the number of polygons, for three buildings...for a whole line of housing buildings for example, it would mean massive savings.

If we can use opacity maps with the engine, this would definitely be the way to go I think.

And I bring you the 96-polygon block...



Only three sides are mapped in this test, but using individual boxes for the three sides would mean 432 polygons

Oh yeah, and the thin black lines connecting the buildings are the result of the side boxes which are too thick, they can be made invisible without problem.

[This message has been edited by Ajax (edited 06-12-2002).]

Thanks, Ajax! Really nice job. Now we don't have to scrimp by building half-bases, or drastically reducing the perceived number of buildings.

I may have come up with the idea, but you were the one who actually made it work!

Now on to the next terrain issue!

How do we efficiently render realistic looking trees and forests? I've always been dissatisfied with the sparse, artificial looking foliage in flight sims.

Take a look at this screen shot from Links 2001:



Don't those trees look great! How do they do that, and why can't the same technique (or a similar one) be used in a flight sim to produce more realistic foliage?

Those trees do look good, I'm not sure how they are done, it's hard to tell from this distance, but I would imagine they are photo textures (256x256?) w/ alpha channel (transparency) on a single face then cloned and rotated.

The problem with these types of trees is they require alot of resources to render, shadow and collision detection etc. In a golf sim you may have to render 50, 60, maybe 100..In a flight sim you're looking at 1000's

One way to do it would be to have a HUGE single object that has maybe a hundred or so tree objects on it.

This is how the huge forests are done in Operation flashpoint. I think that if you could lower the individual trees to a single double sided face with 64x64 tree texture w/ alpha channel, good enough frame rates could be achieved.

I believe in LOMAC the tree LOD (level of detail) system is setup up so that the 3d trees are only rendered when you get below a certain alt and/or they are rendered in a radius of your position (maybe 1KM or so). The landscape further away just has normal green forest ground textures.

I wonder if it would be possible to disable the shadowing on single objects.

The Operation Flashpoint approach to rendering large forests sounds a lot like the method Ajax used to consolidate a whole row or block of buildings into one object. It could conserve a lot of resources. In fact, it would pay to make the area of each forest block as large as possible because, as Ajax demonsrated, the polygon savings grow geometrically as you consolidate more small objects into one large one.

I particularly like the graduated 3-D rendering concept used by Lomax. They have the right idea because foliage details are really only needed at low altitudes or at relatively short visual ranges horizontally.

What made me so concerned about this foliage thing is thinking back to my days at Ubon. A densely forested area paralleled the runway for almost its entire length. The sparse, stunted trees that are used in flight sims (including P1 based on the screen shots I've seen so far) could never even come close to representing that kind of real world forest terrain.

That's why I'm searching for a way to efficiently render dense foliage that looks more like the real thing. I understand the limitations - after all, not many of us are likely to be using Cray super computers, but even some improvement is better than none.

Sparse trees may be OK in the fictional desert-like campaign area of P1, but in the tropical rain forest environment of Southeast Asia, they just won't do. In order for a Vietnam campaign to be visually believable, we need trees, trees, and MORE TREES!!!!!