Looks pretty cool and more realistic in my own image of Afghanistan

Looks good. Should give players a better sense of speed as well.

The addition of the sparse trees look great.

Are they rendered the same for each player in multiplayer so can they could be used to identify a target location?

Trees are not randomly generated, they are consistent across clients.

That's a potential for 'understatement of the year award'!

Cheers

ah.. 'the Gardener of Afghanistan' eh!

Thanks.

64 bytes per per tree, he hand places, waters and tends to every single one.

"AD, what did you do today?"

"Spent some time planting trees and working in the garden."

I've been watching a few episodes of Ross Kemp in Afghanistan (Return to Afghanistan actually) and they show quite a bit of Helmand, en Afghanistan as a whole. Perhaps you have already seen it, or it doesn't add anything, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

In the darker moments when we need cheering up, we visit http://www.rosskemp.co.uk/ for a giggle.

"Ross Kemp believes all forms of transportation should have tank tracks in order to be effective."

Oh my sides.

You shouldn't have given that link, just wasted half an hour on it...

Who the heck is Ross Kemp? lol

Note #18

There's been some debate within the team about vegetation and how to get it looking better at medium ranges. We have some fantastic high poly vegetation that can only be rendered at close range and thankfully the Leadwerks Engine offers automatic vegetation billboard creation (low-poly distance trees). Unfortunately it renders the vegetation billboards without shading, that is without any kind of lighting or shadowing. The result is a flat face with a flat texture. It contrasts heavily with the high poly 3d models creating a heavy LOD pop when switching between the two. These flat billboards also create a flat looking scene.

The initial attempt to rectify this contrast (flat vs shaded) was to render the high poly trees to texture and create low poly statically lit 3d models.



These low poly models render extremely quickly and can render shadows onto the ground but they appear jagged at anything other than far range.

The answer to the issue appears to be a hybrid of pre-rendered/lit trees combined with the billboarding system.



As you can see in the middle row the trees without shadows are 2 poly billboards and the trees with shadows are several thousand poly 3D trees being rendered with shadows and highlights. The billboards blend in quite well with the 3d.

Cheers

Note #19

I'm slowly working my way up the map adding more detail to existing target areas. The area below is a market town about half way up the main road leading towards Herat city.













Cheers

Note #20

Lots more micro sized greenzones.



The town of Qaleh, south of Camp Stone.





And some more work on the larger greenzones.



Cheers

looks great! especially those first couple in update #19, really cool.

Looks like a good solution with the trees. Looking forward to see it in motion. :-)
Did I say yet that I love these shots with the mountains in the background? ;-) Man, I can`t wait to see some AA-vehicles rolling trough the towns.

Looks good! Have you looked into using Spherical Harmonics to render fast soft shadows? Works great in static scenes like landscapes and/or on trees:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~cs4162/slides/spherical-harmonic-lighting.pdf

there's also the simpler ambient aperture illumination. not as flexible (can only calculate shadows from a single source, usually the sun):
http://developer.amd.com/media/gpu_assets/Oat-AmbientApetureLighting.pdf

Getting exciting...

Note #21

Herat is chock-a-block with historical sites and beautiful aging mosques. One of the finest is the Goharshad mosque.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goharshad



The Friday mosque of Herat



Cheers