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mr.g-c

Grass and "distant-grass" improvements

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Hello, here i will write my suggestions for Arma2 Grass improvements.

1. Distant-Grass drawing and "Mega-Textures".

According to all screenshots and videos we saw so far, there is one point which is not fitting at all in the other beautiful graphics of Arma2 - its the distant grass/textures drawing-way.

Currently (like in Arma1) you let the grass be visible some meters around the player and then you'll draw a out-washed mega-texture which looks so unbelievably ugly in my eyes that i thought i dedicate a own thread to this issue.

Picture-proof (Thanks to Crystal for it):

1_7.jpgimg16.jpgpica.jpgvegetace_small.jpg

Clearly in my eyes this is a no-go in 2008/2009 for a game which would utilize multi-cores and most recent graphics hardware properly....

But i won't only complain/moan about it, i also would like to give some cause for thoughts.

First of all i suggest, depending on your hardware and (hopefully) far extended graphical set-up possibilites, grass should be able to be drawn up to 4 times as far as it was in Arma1.

Then i think there could be a way to create some grass distant-LODs. I mean in other Game grass is also drawn at distances and so i think it could be done for Arma2 aswell.

Additionally i would like to suggest that when looking through any scope far away, that you would see there grass aswell.

If this above suggested is not working at all, then please do at least get rid of "mega-textures" for distant-grass and colorize/saturate the textures at those places just like the grass-color would be there...

2. Grass types/grass lenghts.

I think what would really great fit into the landscape of Arma2 is the use of different grass lenghts. I mean everyone in the world who lives in a similar environment like in czech (basically nearly whole europe), knows that grass is not always so short like it was in Arma1. I mean just today i was out for a walk and i saw some meadows here in germany which where tall up to my chest. And because i know that the czech environment is very similar if not equal, i think there should be some of those meadows. They would be perfectly places for Soldiers to hide.

Additionally, with this you could then really make some proper crop-fields, like wheat-fields, corn-fields and so on. They could be additionally hide-places in battles and add a lot to diversity of the overall landscape.

Of course also for this some distance LODs would be needed for performance reasons.

Thats all what i would suggest for a grass improvement. Fell free to reply here with your suggestions for Grass.

Best Regards, Christian

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I agree about the grass height.

It would really add to the atmosphere to crawl through meter long grass on your way behind enemy lines!

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I agree with everything. If the distant grass was higher quality then it could really improve the look of Arma 2. More environment detail, including grass length and farms, is also something I'm really hoping for. In Arma all the buildings and stuff looked so randomly placed. There were no parking lots, no buildings had entrances like this (I can't think of what to call it, but I'm talking about the concrete area with lights and trees), in fact, alot of buildings didn't even have sidewalks.

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In Arma all the buildings and stuff looked so randomly placed. There were no parking lots, no buildings had entrances like this (I can't think of what to call it, but I'm talking about the concrete area with lights and trees), in fact, alot of buildings didn't even have sidewalks.

Right, they have failed with "love for detail" in Arma1.

But it can be done properly, just look in the most recent screens of the new Mapfact Real-Time-Editor what beautiful buildings and environment around the buildings you can actully create.

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Foremost better ground texture quality at distance is way more

important IMHO.

You can test different size of clutter (grass, etc) and drawing

distance of clutter with the PROPER World test addon. wink_o.gif

Update will be out soon too to allow more tweaking.

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this is something i hinted already long ago including way 'how to' easily improve it w/o breaking anything ...

http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....texture

the problem is simple texture from certain range (medium to distant) looks just flat and usually huge single colored blocks and too plastic/non natural ...

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Yes, the medium range texture is too blurred.

Adding grain as dwarden tested really fools the eye. it's quite effective for simulating detail without actually having super-hirez pics or grass hundreds of meters around you (beware of flickering though...)

Another way to smooth out the transition could be to make various concentric circles with decreasing density and quality of clutter (LODS):

- circle 1 : 1-5 meters high qualtiy dense clutter

- cirlce 2 : 5-20 meters medium density/quality clutter

- circle 3 : 20-100 meters low/density low/quality clutter (large billboards instead of individual clumps)

- after 100m = simple noise pattern.

At the moment the clutter transition seems rather sharp at around 10m and doesn't seem to use any lods at all.

The further in the distance, the lower can be the density since your view angle is almost horizontal anyway...

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This is one of my pet hates about ArmA. I think distance grass and distance shadows are important, mostly for when you zoom in on a far area. Since the old screenshots are 6 months old, I hope this blatant immersion-killer is improved by now, or in the near future.

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Quite interesting Dwarden. Did you ever send Ondrej that info?

Not only the land looks better - also the water looks great.

However one needs to see it in motion - care to make a small video please?

Overall I don't understand really the reason why the quality needs

to be decreased that much at distance.

My knowledge is quite limited in the regard. I think its related to

MIP-Maps which are automatically generated to reduce GPU texture

space.

Anyhow anyone able to explain why the texture quality needs to

be degraded THAT much for ground textures at distance?

Now ArmA's SAT technology needs quite a lot of textures for

ground visualization. However if you only count the ground

textures loaded in the players visible area how much of size do

they need?

Compared to the old OFP WGL CWC island retextures I still find

ArmA's overall visual quality a lot less good. confused_o.gif

Especially take in mind these pictures have reduced quality from

JPEG compression. If you run 1280x1024 with 2/4 AA anf 8/16 AF

these are spicy. banghead.gif

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_CWC_Islands_Texture_Replacement_Pack

WGL_Samak_Hills

WGL_Samak_Hills

WGL_Samak_Hills

WGL_USMC_Gaia

WGL_USMC_Gaia

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So now the grass is too short?

In the early versions the grass sucked so much that most servers would run with it off (very low terrain).

It gave horrible performance in North Sahrani, made us blind while prone in the grass, got us shot while blind by the grass... it was a real nightmare.

Im actually very pleased to see very low grass in the Arma 2 pictures. I say pistols.gif the grass.

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Would be very strange if you have no/low grass in a war zone were golf isn't favourite sport. Who's gonna mow the lawn (during combat) ? biggrin_o.gif Those grass brings back a little piece of realism instead of those flat OFP terrains. Lets hope ArmA2 AI will find a way through and won't stuck anymore on little obstacles.

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For a few reasons tall grass isn't really practical at this point in time. First is the performance hit, although this could be mostly removed with some optimization. Second, how to handle grass occlusion for distant objects - IMO sinking soldiers into the ground doesn't look good. Third, tall grass is a disadvantage for someone walking through it since it greatly occludes their view - more so than in reality since binocular vision means that at least one eye will see a distant object occluded by a blade of grass.

Short grass with tall tufts is a good compromise, I think.

As for appearance, IMO the most important thing is to have grass and the ground texture below matching. Both in shade/hue and grainyness. Otherwise there's the unsightly grass rings.

Personally, I miss the lumpyness of OFP's terrain on med-high settings but I know ArmA handles terrain differently now. An alternate way to get the terrain to look lumpy, or the grass to look shaggy would be with bump maps (not sure, my guess)

Example: (Mount & Blade)

grassbump2.jpg

IMO this method makes mid range terrain look excellent. It would be a welcome addition to ArmA 2...

Also, shadows need to be rendered at very far distances in ArmA 2, otherwise the surroundings looks very matte and artificial.

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For the culling of people behind tall grass: Ain't it possible to use some clever occlussion culling algorithms to occlude polys hidden behind those grass panes? Also a picking (raytrace) test could manage to test whether or not polygons are hidden behind grass objects from the viewer's position / look-at. Fire the ray from the eye's position and if you hit an object first that is from the flora class, and then right behind a player's object, put some shaders on it to make it semi alpha blended and/or tone it a little green or so. In addition, a proper status call of the player's object also makes sense if you want to keep the costs low. You would not to have to calculate what polys are excactly covered, but you would simply apply the alpha blending or whatever to the whole object, once the object is in state: crouch, prone or something similar. One could combine this with the intel what type of flora was hit exactly. If the grass is tall enough to hide a player's object completely, apply the blending even when in crouch position. If it's just small grass, one need to go prone to get alpha blended. Of course, one need to refine this approach, because of situations like, what if the head is visible above the tall grass and stuff like that. Anyhow, you do not need to draw grass up to the horizon, just blend the character at distance, location and status.

For the cluttering: is it already branched geometry instancing? Dumb question maybe, since it seems ArmA already utilizes the GPU Gems articles or examples from the DX SDK and it is perfectly decsribed therein. Some articles and examples seem to be ported over to ArmA including some of their artifacts, depth of field effect for example. However, it can't be faulted.

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Thanks for the info Sosna - looks very good.

Downloading the game again to check out it myself. smile_o.gif

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About the grass...

I got an idea when it comes to grass, can't Bis make a option in mission editor under say weather settings and have a slider to adjust the lenght of grass, if they really got the time they could make it possible to place out special marker or trigger in mission editor that sets the grass in that area to a longer or shorter lenght. smile_o.gif

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About the grass...

I got an idea when it comes to grass, can't Bis make a option in mission editor under say weather settings and have a slider to adjust the lenght of grass, if they really got the time they could make it possible to place out special marker or trigger in mission editor that sets the grass in that area to a longer or shorter lenght.  smile_o.gif

Ohh yeahhhh that would be a revolution in Editor-Features....

Awesome!!! When you as the mission-creator could chnage the length of the grass at the position you want to.... awesome idea...

yay.gif

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I hate that to say but confused_o.gif

exm1 exm2 exm3 exm4 exm5 ... ... ...

You know what I mean?   confused_o.gif

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...................

goodnight.gif

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About the grass...

I got an idea when it comes to grass, can't Bis make a option in mission editor under say weather settings and have a slider to adjust the lenght of grass, if they really got the time they could make it possible to place out special marker or trigger in mission editor that sets the grass in that area to a longer or shorter lenght.  smile_o.gif

That would imho mean to implement some realtime growth. Guess its just to hard to combine this with the current cluttering with fixed models. You could stretch the panes vertically as a simpler way, but that on the other hand would look really strange. If they implement such grow algos (not LINDA, as an offline growing machine) they could also take the leafs into account to change their appearance according to the time of the year. Remove them in Winter, decrease the ammout of leafs in autumn and tone them brown, render them all and green once in summer - and for spring, decrease their ammount and let them be green. Due to multitexturing you could also apply some snow textures to the landscape and tree trunk textures. Voila - you have not only realtime day and night cycles plus realtime weather, but also support for visualisation of seasons. Sounds easy eh - bet it is by far more complex than that. Anyhow, sounds great and i guess no game has such a feature currently wink_o.gif

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I hate that to say but confused_o.gif

exm1 exm2 exm3 exm4 exm5 ... ... ...

You know what I mean? confused_o.gif

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...................

goodnight.gif

You're not making any sense, what am I not getting here?

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I hate that to say but confused_o.gif

exm1 exm2 exm3 exm4 exm5 ... ... ...

You know what I mean?   confused_o.gif

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...................

goodnight.gif

You're not making any sense, what am I not getting here?

That BIS seems to had longer grass in Arma1 long before release and shortened it probably because of performance issues.

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That BIS seems to had longer grass in Arma1 long before release and shortened it probably because of performance issues.

What? That grass was in the release version, they cut if off in one of the later patches because of community complains.

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LOL, g-c and Crystal have you ever played vanilla ArmA 1.00 - 1.05?

So if you want long grass just make sure you complain a lot on the forums about it wink_o.gif We allready had it but lot's of complaint's where posted about not being able to see through the grass but the AI did.

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There is little to no relation between grass length and FPS.

Like I told you in this thread before mr.g-c .. it is possible to

change the length via the config .. download PROPER World and

see for yourself if you are REALLY interested. wink_o.gif

@paragraphic :

What about PvP play (without AI or with proper AI viewblock for

grass model wink_o.gif ). Better to have the choice and both options.

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