What is Streaming Technology then?

I know we had large areas in OFP and there was that Nevada test range map that was the largest (I think) to date. But with ArmA delivering "...over 200 sq. kilometre" size maps, how is it possible? Can anyone answer in layman's terms.

I hope they keep the natural barrier of the water / sea. I'd hate to come up against some bizzare impassable rockface or an invisble wall :shudder:

IMO it will be something like Dungeon Siege. Things will only appear as you get close to them. Close by OFP terms, might be like 2-3 km distance or something. The rest of the island would be completely blank. That was one of the advertised features of Game2. I guess they're doing the same for ArmA, just on a smaller scale.

By looking at the new screanshots, I must say I am a bit worried. Though the game is not finished yet, it looks kinda wierd. The textures are a bit "blury" on some objects. The ground textures are sharp, although we can see WAAAAY TO MANY patterns on the ground textures.

And when it goes for the water, well.. The one picture that shows it, displays waves coming from one end of the lake to the other, and that aint realisic, the last time I checked .

so..

1) I hope the creators can radomise their ground textures, so that we cant see tht patterns. (it look so "amature-ish" in todays state) Perhaps improve weapon textures as well.

2) Fix the water wave drift to a more realistic look, and make it reliant on wind or something... someting realisic..

Then the game will look grate!

Im guessing its gonna be the same as any streaming technology (video, music etc) its just gonna constantly stream the map out instead of loading it all up at once and keeping it in memory. Im also guessing that this will improve multiplaying no ends as streaming technology reduces bandwidth usage hence why i think bis are now saying 60 players. Looking forward to seeing a demo of it, fingers crossed they may release one before the release date.

As far as I know Elite has streaming technology so they can actually make full sized islands for a computer(xbox) with only 64mb RAM. With this technology you can make the islands infinite.

could that also mean they would use a.i spawning and creation when player gets "nearby"? 1-3 sqkm or so

anyways good idea by bis to make islands streaming it will be very nice to to play fresh graphics and so with maybe even better frame rates , damn im starting to drool about armed assualts features. Nice that they will be work out missions more , the original game had some really solid missions and its good to know the same skilled crew is working on the game and its different parts wich will make it even better than the old ofp

Keep up the work Bis, praying for a publisher to get onto the project as soon as possible and also anyone know what H1 stands for?

H1 stands for the First Half of the Year. Between January and July I guess.

If its same system as Falcon 4.0 used, then the terrain file(s) can be huge, lets say 1100 x 1100 kilometers, but the game engine only loads for example 1.5 x 1.5km at time.

How about this "island" with realistic distances for OFP?

If it works like the F4 terrain system, then I'm baffled how the AI would handle themselves with waypoints beyond this loaded range. I mean if you setup a patrol around a city or through it... how they walk around the buildings when player is out of the range AND what happens when he appears in range, how can OFP tell if the AI units are inside a building or other object. I have no clue.

Anyways the terrain would not be empty/flat beyond the loaded range... it would just not exist. Imagine 1.5 x 1.5km OFP island, it would be really small compared to the standard 12 x 12km BIS islands and 25 x 25km & 51 x 51km possible user made islands, meaning very light on CPU and memory load.

Streaming terrain is very interesting in ArmA, I cannot wait to get it.

I think the only issue that might come up is decorating/filling a 200 km island . It will take alot of work while achieving good visual quality, thats what made the cwc islands so special, the details and placement of vilages, farms, forests, rocks and bushes, they were mostly very nice to look at and interact with, i think they will come up with a way to decorate the islands faster , but it wouldnt feel so nice if it was to look empty or with some sort of generic patterns..

I believe the game does the streaming so essentially it is the same amount of work per-km as it was in CWC/Res. If you wanna make a huge land-mass, you will need more time, durh. I say this is an EXCELLENT thing because now we could make dynamic parts of countries instead of just islands.... Great stuff!

Imho it is about the compression technique. If you have a good compression technique, you can have HUGE maps with a very small file footprint size and very little if any performance hit. That is what I hear anyways.

Hi all

Map streaming data is something the military have been spending millions on trying to solve.

Kind Regards Walker

Hi all

Map streaming data is something the military have been spending millions on trying to solve.

Kind Regards Walker

!!And BIS solve it, we love you BIS!!

Well the new pic's that I saw just threw me into an drooling catatonic state

I saw the panoramic pic with the solider on the ground, and immediately wanted to grab a sniper rifle and watch that road down below. I agree on the water ,it looks kinda weird. Maybe it has to do with distance , not sure. They could use the old ofp water for me , as long as you can swim in it. And add kegs tweaks to it.

I can't wait to see a nights sky in AA with the star constellations. Might need it incase my map gets stolen

does anyone from BIS want to give an official explanation?!

What would be interesting to know is whether BIS are working on geometry clipmaps, chunked lods or something similar. They are sort of a lod system for terrain so that the ground closest to you can be very detailed and still have a huge view distance. It would be like the different terrain details in OFP but only the ground closest to you will have high detail.

Söldner has streaming terrain with a lod system if I'm not mistaken. The terrain and textures are very blurry though and the game sucks in general. I still do believe that BIS could do a much better job at keeping the sharpness of the terrain.

The streaming nature of the world in Dungeon Seige as mentioned earlier worked really well giving the impression of one huge world and preventing the immersion loss issues with loading screens. This worked, but was not of importance on a global scale - each enemy would sit there indefinatley until encoutered whereby it would attach. What you did in one part of the world had little impact on later events and areas.

It sounds a bit like the larger areas behave like the living world in stalker, that is that everything is calculated globally, be it very simple calcs determining general movement depending on the individuals needs, and the outcome of any encouters with other individuals/animals, with the detials filled in within x metres of the player (specific movement, animations, behaviour etc....)

As long as we dont have the repeating landscapes as displayed in Delta Force, then I will be happy.

From what I've read it's only the AI that would be calculated globally in STALKER. There would still be loading screens inbetween zones....a lot like HL2. In fact from what I've seen the game will be similar in many ways to HL2.

Yeah, I think I confused my post by mentioning 'loading screens', but the principle still applies. that the amout of calculations on an object should vastley reduce with distance, but that each unit is still acounted for.

streaming technology is similar streaming videos on the internet, witch loading video during show movie vs. realtime streaming island

I personally think that they have not quite played there hand yet as far as graphics technology is concerned. One thing for sure is BIS will follow there own formula as they always have, pioneers they were when ofp was released and pioneers they will be when armed assault is released, one things for sure - Armed Assault will shadow future game releases in rpg/fps for many years to come and that I have faith in..

I'm just looking at scans of Enemy Territory : Quake Wars and how they "excited" there about so called "MEGATEXTURE" technology ...

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

because i'm unsure if i can post directl links to scans i posting link to one of forums with the scan links ...

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=61306

and the question is ... is ArmAs "streaming" technology similar to the "MegaTexture" ...

for me this "MT" sounds like good name for hype feature up (good PR though) ...

- For the mile you'll see to the horizon, the texture you're standing on is unique from the point where you're standing right until the very end of the horizon, says Wedgwood. That underlying megatexture allows you to affect things like vehicle traction as you move on and off different surfaces, pick up different particles when artillery explosions come flying down, so the level of immersiveness is easier to achieve if you have something like that from John Carmack to start with.

- In most 3D games, developers will create the geometry for a level, and then "skin" it with a variety of small textures. In the beginning, textures served a purely cosmetic purpose, but newer graphics engines were able to assign properties to textures, like different sound effects. The megatexture can actually blanket a huge portion of the map, allowing a variety of properties to be applied in different areas. "You go driving on the road, which is tarmac and then gravel and then sand, and you can affect gameplay," explains Wedgwood. "You can set friction properties on vehicles and you can make certain vehicles better at crossing certain surface types. If you're a ranger sneaking around trying to shoot people and you're walking on a path with gravel, if you walk on the sand you're going to make less noise. So there's this huge depth that comes as a result of that."

Hahaha; that "MegaTexture" sounds like plain old CfgSurfaces to me. In CfgSurfaces you can set different sound environment and friction for different textures (with wildcards; ie runways: rw*)

OFP had this technology since the beginning.

The only thing that sounds different is the texture being unique until the horizon (the horizon is at 100m?). Sounds like a procedural texture to me, which isn't all that new, since games like Black&White already utilized procedural terrain textures.

This has nothing to do with terrain streaming; Streaming means that all data is already statically on the hard drive (or elsewhere), and is loaded into memory continuosly and only when needed (like a movie, 6 GB doesn't fit into memory).

if You read the PC gamer slides they already speak there about 6+GB megatexture files for whole map ... for me it sounds like "another" term for streamed terrain landscape ...

also heard about 'clipmap' ? http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx....map.pdf

OK, I've read the scan, and yes, they have to stream the "6GB texture" (how should it fit into 8MB video memory otherwise?) so it is indeed somehow comparable to terrain streaming.

But I don't know what's so different to normal tiles? In this case you have unique tiles as opposed to repeating tiles (you still have to do tiling on the terrain).

So, if ArmA does not have the 512 Texture limit, then ArmA already has that MegaTexture-technology, as you already can define physical properties of a texture (as Metal, Sand, Rock, Water, Snow, a.s.o.), and the audio part, too (though vehicle sounds are not affected by the surface).

Of course I don't want to sound like someone who codes the MegaTexture on a weekend  

I surely am not able to do this (yet...)