Foliage cover and drawing distance?

[antoineflemming]

Not necessary, if one could work out an opacity map system, they could easily create a gradient for it. No need to blur the image, just to make sure it blends a bit better with the background, especially when there's no movement...

Oh, yeah. I was thinking of a straight transparency value for the entire model. A gradient would help. But that's about the same as blurring. Essentially, that's what blurring does (edges blend more into background). It'd produce the same effect, but the opacity map would probably be easier on systems.

[MessiahUA]

The main problem I see right now in arma2 is simple shadow draw distance. Of course foliage drawing distance and total new lightning engine are also part of this, but simply drawing shadows for any object on any distance will drastically improve things. Don't know how much GPU intense it will be, but that's a massive drawback personally for me right now. You can very easily spot targets on long-range, because they are shining against the background. In close combat it's a lot more harder (even without grass). Also one should be able to force them on dedicated server, otherwise any person can disable them and gain tremendous advantage over other people.
Screenshots for comparison:

[-Coulum-]

The ability to see people so easily from far away in arma is definitely something that needs to be improved. To me there are two problems.

At far distances units seem to loose there colour and turn from green or brown camoflauge to a dark blob of pixels which stands out against most backgrounds.
and
Foliage is not rendered from far distances so people thinking they are safely hidden behind tall grass, a bush or combination of the two will actually be very easy to see.

To fix the first problem I think some sort of gradient or blur, as mentioned already should be applied to make it harder to see units especially if they are stationary. I think the reason the characters seem darker at ranges is because the game tries to show the shading and shadows on the character even at far range, which results in some of the character appearing black and the some appearing normal coloured. Maybe disabling this shadowing effect at long ranges could help? Also, the ground needs to have better more complex textures. For me, the ground looks very plain; light green with large spans and swirls of slightly darker and lighter greens. It is easy to pick out something that doesn't fit in on this type of backdrop. If the ground textures had more variety and randomness at range I think that it would be harder to spot characters and would be closer to reality.

The second problem could be fixed by simply making the parts of characters covered up by grass slightly or fully transparent depending on the grass height and what not. I think this would be a much better solution than lowering the whole characters so he appears to be half under ground, which is what is implemented now. The entire character would never go 100% invisible however.

I think these changes or other similar changes would really be benificial to the game and they are one of the key things I think need to be improved in arma. It will lead to more realistic and interesting fights and tactics.

[lsp]

Your vision may degrade but things don't go invisible, specially not at 500m. The above solution is a little better thought out, but it will still look funny having half invisible men walking around the battlefield so no thanks. Things like DOF and blur(better textures) would be more acceptable to me and maybe some form of super low res grass lod for distances. Honestly the way it is now isn't a huge issue for me it can be annoying yes, but there's other things in the game that are far worse(yay for arma3). Plus I don't play much pvp and if I did I would just exploit it anyway and turn the grass off.

[Smurf]

Where is that Dwarden's post that adress this "shadow x distance" in TOH?
He said they were trying to improve it (performance wise) to use in A3. That should do most part of the trick.

EDIT: Here it is: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthrea...ShadowDistance

[metalcraze]

There is no need for increasing draw distance of grass in order for effectively camo units in distance. There is a need for some kind of workaround - for example a shader that will be applied on units in distance and distort their models enough so that human eye would not notice them. Maybe even some kind of gradual model transparency would work.

Not distort. A mere 75% transparency shader will be enough.
That way the soldier will keep the human form majorly and some background texture will also be added to it. That it's some unnatural shader won't be noticed at that distance.
Of course when looking through optics/coming closer - the shader should be removed.

[-Coulum-]

Speaking of optics, I really hope that when zoomed in, grass will appear farther away. especially when using high magnification weapons. it looks really ugly right now when you are shooting at a guy who appears to be on a totally grassless green plane and is half submerged in the ground. When zoomed in these shaders, gradients, transparencies, etc would need to be toned down or completely turned off depending on the magnification level.

but it will still look funny having half invisible men walking around the battlefield so no thanks.

It wouldn't be much different from what happens now where people are half sunk into the ground. and in most cases it would only be the feet of the character that are transparent. If prone it would be just the bottom few inches of the guys body missing. at the ranges these things would apply (200m+) you wouldn't be able to necessarily recognize that half a guy is magically invisible without some kind of optics. it would simply look like he is concealed behind some grass and only certain parts of him are visible through it. It would look bad if you zoomed in with a scope on him but like I said, hopefully grass and what not can be rendered further away if zoomed in.

[CTCCoco]

It's easy to say: yes, let's put 10000km distance view with all details. But when any computer can't handle it, then cry and says that this is not optimized...

[gammadust]

... that increased variation based on mipmaps could be worthy of deeper look. Aside of maybe even providing better looks overall, always found the ground textures, at distance, lacking in that department.

Hum...

[-Coulum-]

... that increased variation based on mipmaps could be worthy of deeper look. Aside of maybe even providing better looks overall, always found the ground textures, at distance, lacking in that department.

Agreed. Not only does the current map textures look bland and ugly but it doesnt really match the look of ground with clutter drawn on it.
In my opinion the ground needs to Be much more varied, random looking and detailed from far away. And it would be great to get rid of the big dark blotches that surround every piece of vegetation.

This will help with camoflauging units as well.