CombatHelo Blog (RSS Import)

is there huge bodies of water in this game?

which fps are you running with the large camera view and tree view distance?

It looks really good already. If you find any techniques that can improve the scene even more, let us know!

No water plane. Water planes don't work well at all with large maps or long draw distances. So we built the river that runs east/west across the whole 40km map from 3D meshes, in sections. And cut into a a "death star" trench in which they are positioned. This eliminates z-fighting. The steep banks don't look natural but it's far less noticeable than z-fighting.

 

A few oasis are being added to give some focal points to otherwise empty areas.

 

Draw distance is currently set at 6km (6000 units) but will be adding a variable view, fog and shadow range based on camera height.

 

As far as FPS goes, it varies greatly depending on in-cockpit or over the city, or green zone. With an nVidia 460 it's around 40-50fps in cockpit which is quire remarkable considering. The fan gets a workout. For helicopter flight my personal taste is for a min of 20fps. 9800GTX manages around 30fps average. Add 20fps when on foot or free-cam mode. The cockpit is quite CPU intensive with the avionics and flight model.

 

Still using 2.31 due to the fps style LOD ranges introduced with 2.32 which are no good to us at all.