So that's what volumetric clouds are for! Finally someone explains it! Thanks.

"Enemy Engaged: Comanche v. Hokum had a crude implementation in that forests and jungles where foilage-textured terrain 'boxes'"

Actually, those graphics weren't "crude" per say...that look was intentional. The developers when for the "real militray" simulator look and feel for the graphics for both games.

Yeah, the legend goes that one of the dev team had the jungle code all worked out, but the project manager axed it in the last minute to uphold the 'real military sim' atmosphere. :p

I think Razorworks made the (at the time) wise decision that there was no way to get jungle to look halfway decent and still run on current-level machines (remember one selling point of Comanche v. Hokum was the [*gasp*] 32bit rendering option [via command line]) but - equally wisely - opted to do their best to implement some of the gameplay implications of the jungle. The only reasonable way to do that at the time happened to be the same way used in military helo sims, so they turned it to their favor, emulated it (instead of reinventing the wheel) and the marketing guys cleverly spun it to "look, just like the real thing!".

Of course that's just my take on it, but I came to that conclusion because the forests are really the only thing reminiscient of real military sims in the game. Everything else was high-grade eye-candy, much of which IIRC had not yet been seen at that level at the time (e.g. pilots and co-pilots ajusting instruments and things in flight, working MFDs and HUDs from outside view, to name a couple).

I'm not complaining, mind you. Like I said, they did a great job of modeling some of the aspects of the LOS and detection problems in a jungle environment. I just never bought the "we could have done better, but it's intentional, you see?" part. Judging from the framerate hits around towns and cities in EECH they probably couldn't, at the time...

I absolutely loved the practical direction razorworks took with graphics of EECH and Apache Havoc. Also, of course the practical decisions in Rowan's BoB .... anyone see a trend? Where have all the British developers gone! Some of the best designs to date. (another thread for another day)

With that stated, SFP1 and I think WOV take a practical approach to graphics, just a different style.