Please for the love of god, do a ticket about this in the ArmA3 CIS.
This would be so amazing. But hopefully for all units, not only soldiers, because currently in for instance Chernarus, even the camoed Tanks. stand out of woods (especially at some distance) quite extreme. To easy to spot, etc.
Marek Spanel: [...] Every single element is well taught so that it fits together. So this is a significant change, because with ArmA 1 it was just random, really.
We made some units because we had to. There wasn't much passion from our side with the first ArmA, to be honest. This time it's different. (Videogamer.com Interview
one of the problems with grass in A2 is that there is no in-between grass and no grass. For most, a blending system would help a lot here. http://youtu.be/pdMaFWGLxKE?t=2m20s
on the other hand, the fact that the terrain texture is seen almost tangent at 99% of the time at the distance, doesn't help with the concealment, on the contrary, making units stand out.
one solution could be something along the lines DMarkwick described, by working with an oppacity layer. Another would be to actually render that grass at the distance, especially when looking through a scope (just like with switching LODs for vegetation), but the obvious result for that would be increased draw call.
Would it help to make grass in distances up to 2000m some kind of semi-translucent grass-coloured ground fog? That way concealment would be gradually reduced with hight above the ground. You could achieve a similar effect if you'd draw a ground level and above it a transparent level with a different image than the satellite image. The fog or the transparent image could even be blended with rendered grass for a smoother transition.
Would it help to make grass in distances up to 2000m some kind of semi-translucent grass-coloured ground fog? That way concealment would be gradually reduced with hight above the ground. You could achieve a similar effect if you'd draw a ground level and above it a transparent level with a different image than the satellite image. The fog or the transparent image could even be blended with rendered grass for a smoother transition.
I don't know if it would be more efficient, but that my friend sounds like a very good idea. Of course the "fog" would have to match the colour of the grass/ground and its hieght would also have to match that of the grass. I have trouble visualizing it, but it sounds like a very good solution to the problem. I also think that the draw distance of this fog would be something like 250 metres X the zoom factor the player is looking through, that way it doesn't cover up "far away" ground textures which in my opinion look fine. I don't know if its possible but also adding kind of "static/fuzzy look" to the fog might help to make it appear more like grass, and less like mist. i would much prefer this solution to the current one of dropping the unit into the ground, which makes sniping quite random and doesn't really make it that much harder to see a unit.
hehe. I remember the first time I tried to post an image I did the exact same thing. Dragged the image to my chrome browser and then copied and pasted the address. It didn't work like I expected. What you need to do (what I do) is creat an account with imageshack, or a similiar website, upload your pics there and then copy the link to here. Good luck I am interested to know what "arma2oa 2012-07-04 04-07-38-06.bmp" is.
one of the problems with grass in A2 is that there is no in-between grass and no grass. For most, a blending system would help a lot here. http://youtu.be/pdMaFWGLxKE?t=2m20s
on the other hand, the fact that the terrain texture is seen almost tangent at 99% of the time at the distance, doesn't help with the concealment, on the contrary, making units stand out.
one solution could be something along the lines DMarkwick described, by working with an oppacity layer. Another would be to actually render that grass at the distance, especially when looking through a scope (just like with switching LODs for vegetation), but the obvious result for that would be increased draw call.
some time ago I wrote this post about units camouflage in distance in old OFP (open the spoiler button).
Spoiler:
After finishing OFP (Arma: Cold War Assault) campaign recently I realized one, I would say, important thing.
The units (at least those Russian) are blending with the environment really well and are hard to spot even from distance (something that should be a matter of course when you think about reality ) and even without all the grass clutter we have in Arma 2 now.
I really don't like the fact that in Arma 2 units in distance of, let say, 500 meters are really easily distinguished from the rest of the environment because the clutter or bushes are not visible because of the level of detail in your options menu. In Arma 2 you see one slightly different object in a field and you can be 90% sure it is a soldier because there is no other object that would confuse you. So while OFP suffer even more from insufficient number of objects in the distance (at least on my PC it does) it still manages to mask units really well even if they are moving and even if you look at them through binoculars or a scope and even on a fairly flat ground.
I don't know if it's texture of the ground in Arma 2 which is clearly less mottled compared to the OFP one (I love how confusing the ground texture is in the OFP excluding Desert island of course) or if it's the lighting system that make the units being lighted differently than the rest of the environment or if it is the colours of particular LODs of units that are not chosen well so that they appear somehow much darker than their surrounding and therefore do not blend very well.
So while we don't have photo-realistic games yet (and we will not have for some time) that would show us all the objects and clutter with a reality-like detail in unlimited distance I would like to suggest some kind of compensation for this issue. Current half-sunk-object solution for distant units as we have now is simply not sufficient enough. Units are still visible too easily. I am sure BIS will be able to find a solution for this now because they managed to find it 10 years ago in the old OFP game.
I would LOVE to have similar difficulties with spotting in the third Arma game as I had in OFP. It would definitely make the game more thrilling and fun and challenging (as OFP was).
My point is that maybe we don't need any hi-tech solutions for this but just careful texturing/coloring of LODs with respect to terrain texture.
What do you think?
EDIT:
And I would again want to point out what Whirly have written:
"After veiwing this video I have discovered that the mosaic of different colors is what produces the illusion of detail, the illusion of depth, high and low spots, nooks and crannies. This disruptive patterning of color makes distant units much harder to see even at medium zoom and helps them 'blend' into the background. Why is the environment suddenly blandly colored by comparison when on max zoom? The plain coloring is the root of the problem."
Originally Posted by Steakslim
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