Has anyone tried using ENB Series mod on Panzer Elite? Fella on youtube says it works. I've never tried using one before and not sure how to go about it. Would love to add some new lighting effects to PE.

Coding 3D bridges is proving more problematic then I first thought, but it's making progress.
http://www.pex.panzerelitemods.com/beta/images/bridge.avi

Good luck on this, Aldo. Looks promising. When you have the time, tell me more about the challenge of using a finer terrain mesh resolution in PE. What a difference that would make!

But I think, as is, you would always "win" due to the enemy panicking and fleeing the battlefield when they see your tanks levitating, on the attack...

PE uses a common erra 2.5 meter grid system with whole numbers. You can do it finer, but not with the 65536 system that PE is done on. Teut always said convert to float.

as to the rest, it's either funny or sad. no enemy has ever survived my levitating to the attack.

I believe I have time now. PE uses various terrain resolutions.

Which aspect of simulating terrain and what resolution would you like to discuss

Last month, we did find the bug where spotting calculated landscape height every 40 meters rather then every Edit: 2.5 not .25 meters.

Thanks, Aldo - nice to see you. I had a couple of more immediate thoughts or questions. The very sharp changes in the terrain height is the specific issue, I'm not sure of the technical term for these, but as a vehicle is moving along and encounters a distinct change in the height of the surrounding terrain or a road, the gradient is very sharp. The impact raises the vehicle and can expose the belly, slow forward progress, and raise one's view forward to a significantly greater degree than I believe is realistic.

So I was wondering whether the resolution could be made finer, thus smoothing these recurring encounters. I believe you replied above that this cannot be done with the "65536 system that PE is done on," and also referred to converting to "float."

Does the former reference to 65536 mean there is no practical way to improve the terrain resolution(leaving aside theoretical possibilities that would involve tons of money, programmers...building an entirely new sim)?

Is "float" more of an inside joke, or does it refer to an alternative terrain system?

I'm asking about this because to a person much less familiar with PE than you and your compatriots that have worked hard on modding and improving PE over the years, but appreciative of sims such as this and more modern ones, PE has moved quite far down the road from its creation...finer resolution of the terrain not just for the sake of appearances of the terrain, in terms of the eye candy perspective, but the practical impact on vehicle movement, employment, exposure and so forth to me would be a major step forward.

But if practically speaking, this is impossible, that would be good to know also.

Regardless, PE remains an excellent WWII armor sim and I thank you and the others for the many upgrades and improvements that make it so.

Float is not an inside joke. It is a referance between intiger math and decimal math. Older computers do not like decimal math (called floating point math). The fastes math for a computer is bit shifting, a power of 2 math. 1 << 16 = 65536 (one shifted up 16 times. That is the math PE uses.

With the pentium chip and above it would be faster to use decimal math, rather then "shift" back and forth as much as we do. This would require rewriting the entire rendering system are require an understanding of code that I am just now getting up to. But that is not the question.

PE's world is a 10 x 10 meter world. Elevation of the map is determined by a 256 color grey scale image. Each color is 10 meters differance. These values are then "shifted up" 16 times. This gives us a precision of roughly 1.5 mm ( 10/6553.6 = .00152588 ) and a maximum measurement of 655.36 Kilometers. Everything seems problem free so far.

The PE landscape has 4 levels of detail.

The 10x10 grid are used for PE's LOD3 and LOD4. LOD3 uses a 16x16 pixal texture where LOD4 uses a single color. LOD2 splits the grid into four 5 meter grids and applies a 32x32 pixal texture. LOD1 splits the grid into sixteen 2.5 meter grids and applies a 64x64 pixal texture.

2.5 meters is the smallest unit of measure for the landscape mesh

When PE renders the landscape mesh, the height of each poly is compared to the height of those to it's left, right, up and down. An average is then used. If you have very little or very linier elevation change you will get a visual step.

Including the verticies at the 45s (upper left, etc) would help this smoothing. Increasing the range from one vertex to two would also help. The questons with both of those approaches is how much of an impact would that have on FPS and would it make the landscape too smooth.

PE does give the landscape maker two tools to deal with this problem. The first is the landscape texture editor. This tool has the ability to adjust the landscape height inside the 10x10 grid. In the original PE landscapes that most complain are unnaturaly rough, a random height change was used on nearly all textures. The second tool is the map generator inside of the scenerio editor. This tool is used to place landscape textures based on the slope of the landscape. The landscape creator can assign 3 slope ranges and up to 5 textures to use within those ranges. It is also possable to create special landscape tiles that overlay the landscape tile to modify a single 10x10 grid.

I have never seen a scenerio that uses the landscape editing potential of PE to is fullest.

Sorry for the delay. I was watching WW2 in HD on the history chanel

Hope you don't feel like this now

Hey, Aldo - that series looks terrific. Enjoy it.
And thanks.