Note #1:

"What, really? I have to do it? Are you sure that's wise? ... "

Being part of a team of two, you're never short of work; If one of you doesn't do it, the other one will at some point have to.

Having completed the major artwork assets (Apache, apache cockpit, ground forces and base objects) the task of producing the terrain has come to the foreground. Richard's busy making things go in and out and spin around, I'm not, so ...

Unlike most software companies that actively encourage the generation of hype and excitement, we feel it's important to try to present a realistic expectation of what the sim will offer.

Firstly, the Leadwerks engine was not exactly designed for flight simulators. Aside from the limit of 40KMx40KM, it has a rather strange terrain tiling system. While normal simulator terrain engines use hundreds, even thousands of individual 'tiles' that are lovingly arranged on a 'terrain grid' to make a textured landscape, the leadwerks engine allows us the use of 5 terrain texture samples. The net result is repetitiveness. From one end of the map to the other, the colouration appears much the same.

The second problem with this texture sample issue is that while at both, low and high altitude, the terrain looks very good, at medium alt it looks somewhat bland. The texture samples blend together and you get more of a colour than a texture.

It's not all bad news because the Leadwerks engine can do somethings fabulously well. As stated above, at low-alt the terrain looks fantastic, which is obviously important for a helicopter sim. It can also do vegetation, lots of it. The atmospherics are fantastic, bloom, hdr and other assorted acronyms that nobody understands anyway.

Here are a trio of screenshots from various points on the map. Hopefully they will illustrate the good, the bad and the ugly.







I'll be updating the thread periodically as I add in natural features, bases, target areas, vegetation etc.

Cheers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLvCX9XXZSE&feature=sub

New video up at YouTube!

I think all three screenshots look quite nice. That's just my opinion though.

THE VIDEO IS SO DAMNED COOL! I cannot wait to jump into that cockpit!!!!!!

:o

Yes, and that`s all what we need. Tell me if I´m wrong, we do not have a helicopter sim yet with pretty looking ground/vegetation.
And the all pivotal question is: Will trees be solid objects? If, yes in what degree? Like in Arma, where you crash if you just hit the tip of a branch? Yes, I guess Afghanistan isn`t full of trees ...but.

All of the vegetation models, from grass to trees, are to my knowledge, non-collidable.

Cheers

Oh it has trees. Oaks too. The green zone is lush.

When the vegetation system is complete, trees will have a collision shape that is different from the visual model (at present this is not the case). So collisions with the main trunk only. Branches meah.

I think there's some new vegetation culling system going into the engine atm, we'll have to see what that does (and if it breaks anything). Nice that it's getting some attention.

Back to my locker..*scurry*

Collision shape sounds great!
From reading the blog it must be very time-consuming to place vegetation. Yes, hopefully they give you some better tools soon.

Well I can't speak for the rest but for me those terrain screenshots are simply breathtaken (awesome)!

BTW, the cockpit video is also excelent.


For me having a tree colision with the main trunk only and not with the branches is good enough for me.

Note #2:

'When all you have is a hammer, nothing wants to be a nail'

The software we're using to build this terrain is primitive and at times, barbaric. It crashes regularly, sometimes it simply won't tile the terrain samples, often it saves out 0 byte files and worst of all, it refuses to cooperate with photoshop.

The special functions it does have, such as roads, that work great on low res terrains are painfully slow to render at 4096x4096. An auto-generated road across the terrain would take 3-4 minutes of pre-rendering time which would result in painful frame rates for the duration.

Therefore pretty much everything has to be done the good-old fashioned way, by hand. Which is preferential in some ways, as it means we'll get the terrain we really want.

The first job has been adding in the main river/canal that runs West-East across the northern part of the map. There's no native river support so to create this river I dug a slit trench across the map and placed river 'primitives' into the trench every 1KM.

This canal forms the heart of the Herat greenzone. The banks of the canal will be bulging with life. The greenzone will be a lush paradise full of villages and vegetation separated by dikes represented in 3D. It'll also be a dangerous place to fly over as the vegetation and dikes will give perfect cover to enemy forces.



The major east/west & north/south roads are represented along with a network of minor roads that wind their way through the highlands in the east. Eventually the crossroads and end points will feature Afghan settlements and target areas.





Cheers

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=68278&id=768464854&l=40b3fde61a

Here's from my deployment, except for three from Boston Times.

Your pictures look way better than ours.

Thanks for those, they show a lot of varied lighting conditions too, which is helpful. And the buildings close up, way more primitive than the stock ones I bought in at the start. We've done a lot of photo research and we've discovered that the world is a very beautiful place we can never do justice to.

We're just learning how to overcome shortcomings of the primitive editing tools to get reasonable results. We get better as we go though.

http://combathelo.blogspot.com/

Note #3

All of the roads have been leveled and painted which is a massive job out of the way. 80-90% of the terracing artifacts have been smoothed-out and the map is looking much better for it.

Although not very green yet, the greenzone is coming to life. The dikes and mud divisions that run between fields are being constructed directly in the height map. It creates a 3d effect that is actually usable for cover (for ground troops that is. ). I dont believe any flight sim has built terrain in this way before.

The following screenshots show the dike structures for the major greenzone that runs East-West from Herat out into the mountains. It's a 25KM area of lush vegetation. There will be several green zones on the map. There's still much painting and planting to do but when we're finished they'll be as beautiful as they are dangerous.







Cheers

That is some kick-ass work, AD. Looking good!

Everytime I look at these updates I get all tingly

Great idea about this development diary. Looking forward to fight some enemies among those trees.

Unfortunately that's all I have. I had more but lost it in a computer crash, but usually you can get a good selection from the CJTF-82 site, as they show pictures from all over.

And as a country (without the fighting), Afghanistan is no different

CJTF-82 Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/tos.php?api_key=fb69b9a00dd7f79a1c69a900e2620c6d&next=http%3A%2F%2Fdailyphoto-1402445175.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com%2Fdailyphoto%2Fapplications%2Fbuffer%2Fid%3A2%2Fpid%3A6528485937902888684%2Ffrom%3Apublisher.attachment.own.image%3Fref%3Dnf&v=1.0&canvas&locale=en_US#!/CJTF82?ref=nf

Note #4

The villages have been laid out on the map and the basic field structures have been added. An undercoat of green has been applied to all of the fields. All of the vegetation is still to be added. Then it'll be onto placing compounds, special buildings, bases and target areas.





Cheers

I took some pics during some of our day flights around Kabul and Kandahar, an put them online as well. May be marginally helpful for aerial views of built-up areas.

http://halo5.net/gallery/v/notwork/astan/

Nice shots!