Terrain Detail

[BiggerBoat]

I gave the preorder beta a try this morning. I hate to focus on the graphics, but for a sim that is focused on low-level flight, I am pretty disappointed.

Simply put, the terrain is a mess. Ground detail is very low resolution, even with all settings cranked to their max. Roads have absolutely no detail. Buildings pop in the distance rather than using some sort of alpha fade. You get bubbles of blurry terrain that sharpen very obviously as you fly (but only sharpen a bit, unfortunately).

The colors seem all wrong for the area (I live here, and know what it looks like from the air). It sort of looks like black-and-white satellite imagery that has been recolored (like what I remember from Flight Unlimited 3 from 1999). The scale of the houses and trees seems off.

Frame rates with everything cranked up (i7 2600k overclocked to 4.5 with two GTX570 in SLI) are OK but not great .. around 20 in demanding situations. 30 or so for most flying.

Downtown Seattle buildings look great. The sky is beautiful. Water is great. Lighting is nice. The detail and animations of the helicopters themselves are great. But the muddy, blurry, oddly colored terrain just ruins it all.

I can only compare to FSX, which came out more than 5 years ago and wasn't exactly cutting edge at the time. The terrain textures have much more detail. With addons such as Orbx/FTX, the gap is widened even further.

I love the ARMA games, and I didn't expect the same level of detail at ground level, but I sure didn't expect anything this bad. I really want a solid flight sim with a fun, underlying game. But, I just can't find any immersion in the actual flight when looking at this scenery.

I'll leave open the possibility that this is a Beta issue or something specific to my machine. I'll certainly revisit things with the full release, but at this point I'm deeply regretting the purchase and disappointed that this may not be the sim for me.

[Shadows]

I have to agree, although I find the simulation great and really enjoyable the graphics just don't cut it, the models seem nice, but the textures are terrible, and even if the reflexion on the skyscrapers kind of look nice, the filling texture between the windows and on other buildings seem equally as blurry.

I have the same processor and the exact same video card so it might be driver related to the GTX570 series.

Knowing that other people might not have the same issues would reassure me that it's driver related (I'm on the beta 285.38 nvidia drivers) I tend towards that explanation because the ingame graphics (cranked to max) don't mesure up to the videos or screenshots on the website and I trust Bohemia didn't alter them (not their style from what I've seen from them on all their other excellent games)

[_YoYo_]

Remember this is a photextures - so never it looks like modeled 3d objects. In FTX scenery (for FSX) in most of them - 3D models + sometimes phototextures. But if You take for example Real Germany of Aerosoft, VFR France ect here is better with bigger resolutions. Try to put HIGH level or VERY HIGH of textures + Default memory.
I wrote about all settings here (after many hours of testing of settings) and influance for FPS : http://92.60.132.84/~apacz/smf/index...60878.html#new (but its in Polish so try to use Internet translator). Im very happy with FPS. 40 or more in missions from virtual cocpit. On external 60+.

[BiggerBoat]

Remember this is a photextures - so never it looks like modeled 3d objects.

Yeah, it would appear to be a big photo texture laid on top of the terrain, and then overlaid with 3d buildings and a few other 3d elements.

However, I've seen high resolution photo textures work just fine in FSX and other sims. There are plenty of scenery products for FSX which cover huge areas with very high resolution photo textures (take a look at the Horizon stuff for England/Scotland/Ireland for example). They take up lots of hard drive space, of course, but performance and quality is great.

If high resolution satellite scenery wasn't an option, then I'd argue that TOH shouldn't be using them .. perhaps something more like repeated textures (as in FSX default), with some photo scenery for specific areas (i.e. downtown, key mission areas).

I'm generally hoping I'm having some system-specific issues here, and I don't want to completely discourage people until all of the facts are in. I understand that everyone may have different levels of tolerance for this as well. For me, a low-level helicopter sim focused on a specific geographic area absolutely must have crisp, immersive scenery. I'll post a couple of screenshots later today.

[lusht]

I hope FTX will get their hands on it and crank this stuff to a decent level.

[_YoYo_]

@BiggerBoat
Sure but this HD max superb ect resolutions textures always looks... to same blurry from human eyes level and many of this addons looks like a desert and only good looking from 100Flight level + no autogen. The helicopter actually lower altitude than aircraft so here it looks more blurry but... (still again "but") You have very complex something like autogen + objects and buildings (never see this level of downtown city like here in simulator). Perhaps phototextures + objects is an compromise here. You wrote about 20fps, so try to imagine this level of quality of scenery + more 3d objects? FPS Killer for sure. I prefer more detailed textures for sure too but maybe this is an compromise?
I spend many hours to fly in FS9/FSX from many years so Im accustomed for this quality of photextures or worse.

@lusht
If BiS gives consent to why not ! I hope so.

[zoog]

Just a tip in general: make sure you set 3D resolution to 100% (same as screen resolution). For me it was set at 75% by default.

[_YoYo_]

Here my examples of textures from TKOH from low flying. Id like to have to same quality sametimes in FSX.

[BiggerBoat]

The rurual textures don't look quite as bad, because there's less detail involved. It's the urban textures that just look terrible to me.

Case in point:









Take a look specifically at the last two images. Seattle-Tacoma airport is the center of Puget Sound aviation, but it's just a blob here.

The last image shows the I-5 corridor through the center of downtown Seattle, which is just a gray blob.

Note: these images are all a bit dark. I guess that's a factor of the cloudy skies, though I think it's a bit overdone.

Are you guys seeing better quality than this? Sea-Tac would be easy to compare, since the runways and markings can be used as a reference. I've played with the detail settings quite a bit, but can't find anything that looks reasonable.

The downtown buildings look wonderful, and most of the other buildings look good (though I'd argue the house colors and roof colors are wrong for the area) but the detail of the 3d objects is in stark contrast to the lack of detail in the underlying terrain.

[txalin]

agree o this topic. terrain texture look very very poor