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IDing terrain?


76mm

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I take back what I said about time of year not making a difference.

When compared side by side it does.

However, even at it's brightest, CMRT is less vibrant than CMBN.

CMRT: September 30th, noon, clear

h36et.jpg

CMRT: June 22nd, noon, clear

k1l0.jpg

CMBN: June, noon, clear

p2rw.jpg

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Desaturated looks closer to reality.

Careful throwing the "R" word around there, son.

CRMT stock graphics shows especially green hues less saturated than what you'd actually see on a bright, sunny midsummers day. So if you did a strict, scientific measurement of the hues coming off of a grass blade on a bright summer day vs. what's coming out of your monitor while playing CM, it's way off "Reality."

However, what's really important in a graphic image is the impression of reality conveyed. For whatever reason, CM players (even those who don't use "War Movie" mode) seem to prefer a less saturated color spectrum. Seems to be a wargaming thing...

Not sure why; might be because we're used to seeing historical images from the period in black and white and this skews our perception of what things should look like. Might be because your color perception actually decreases with adrenalin (fight or flight reaction), so a less saturated palette looks more "exciting" and "dramatic." I don't know for sure.

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For whatever reason, CM players (even those who don't use "War Movie" mode) seem to prefer a less saturated color spectrum. Seems to be a wargaming thing...

Not sure why; might be because we're used to seeing historical images from the period in black and white and this skews our perception of what things should look like. Might be because your color perception actually decreases with adrenalin (fight or flight reaction), so a less saturated palette looks more "exciting" and "dramatic." I don't know for sure.

Might be because of modern war movies going for a desaturated look. To make things look more grim.

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D'oh, I had had this screenshot sitting in Photobucket all along but had forgot about it. I was illustrating something-or-other, I forget what. The atmospheric shading effect isn't linear, it affects light objects more than dark. I remember there was one snow terrain in CMFI that looked just fine in mid day but at 9am in mid-December the whole texture went medium grey. The smallest adjustment got it to display correctly.

waitamuinute_zps75e8cc0d.jpg~original

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RT looks better than BN, imho. Desaturated looks closer to reality.

Except that it doesn't really. I suspect that psychologically people expect it to and that's why they keep asking for it, but it's not how nature works. One exception: If there is a lot of smoke and dust on the battlefield, then yes some dimming of the light might be expected. Maybe that falls under the heading of dynamic weather though. Same thing if clouding rapidly develops over the course of a battle.

Michael

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One other thing, in addition to saturation and brightness, a third factor, contrast, also has a dramatic effect on how the image looks. And a slight increase in contrast is one of the things I am looking for.

Ideally, a player would be able to adjust all three of those factors independently to get the kind of image quality he likes. Then everybody (more or less ;) ) might be happy. But I reckon that is a loooong way down the road.

Michael

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Why exactly would it be so complicated to list all of them? We're listening.

The code would have to be able to recognize more than one type of terrain at a time and know how to list them all. Isn't it obvious that that is a more complicated task than identifying a single type of terrain as in CMx1?

Your turn.

Michael

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I have no dog in this fight - but the code already knows about the different terrains in an AS - obviously because otherwise movement, LOS, cover, etc wouldn't work in any AS with more than one class of terrain object such as a tree and house on grass with a road. Software is very good at iterating through an array of variables and displaying them.

Basically since the software (mission/map editor) exists to create multiple terrain instances in an AS, the game/code can handle it, whether it be in an array for each AS or a database for the map - the values can be retrieved - for LOS, movement, Tac AI decisions, whatever.

Having said all that I've never felt the need for information on the terrain under my cursor :)

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The code would have to be able to recognize more than one type of terrain at a time and know how to list them all. Isn't it obvious that that is a more complicated task than identifying a single type of terrain as in CMx1?

To say that it is more complicated to identify two or three types of terrain then one type of terrain might be true (and I'm not sure that is correct, since presumably the data for each tile includes all of the terrain types upon it regardless of their number), but it does not necessarily mean that it is particularly complicated...while it is more complicated to walk and chew bubblegum than simply to walk, somehow most of us manage to handle both! :)

I would guess that UI issues would also be a factor, although I can't see how they'd be an insurmountable obstacle.

Just to be clear, I think this feature would be a "nice to have" but not critical, and at this point not near the top of my features wishlist.

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Collingwood & 76mm,

You both could very well be right. I am not attached to my position. I do believe I am passing along something that BFC has commented on, but it was a while back. It is even possible that I am misremembering. But they do not seem eager to spend the time at the moment to develop such a tool although it has been requested numerous times and would obviously be useful. I do assume that there is a reason for that a little beyond "they haven't gotten around to it."

Michael

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Careful throwing the "R" word around there, son.

CRMT stock graphics shows especially green hues less saturated than what you'd actually see on a bright, sunny midsummers day. So if you did a strict, scientific measurement of the hues coming off of a grass blade on a bright summer day vs. what's coming out of your monitor while playing CM, it's way off "Reality."

However, what's really important in a graphic image is the impression of reality conveyed. For whatever reason, CM players (even those who don't use "War Movie" mode) seem to prefer a less saturated color spectrum. Seems to be a wargaming thing...

Not sure why; might be because we're used to seeing historical images from the period in black and white and this skews our perception of what things should look like. Might be because your color perception actually decreases with adrenalin (fight or flight reaction), so a less saturated palette looks more "exciting" and "dramatic." I don't know for sure.

I agree with your position on perception, but when I look at grass on a bright sunny day, I don't see green so bright it's near the yellow part of the spectrum. BN isn't cartoonish, but it's closer to that than RT is, imho.

Except that it doesn't really. I suspect that psychologically people expect it to and that's why they keep asking for it, but it's not how nature works. One exception: If there is a lot of smoke and dust on the battlefield, then yes some dimming of the light might be expected. Maybe that falls under the heading of dynamic weather though. Same thing if clouding rapidly develops over the course of a battle.

Michael

I understand your position, but I still think it does.

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Again with this argument over grass color. Have you ever held a car pain chip up close, then compared it to the car sitting on the far side of the lot? The distant car will simply not be the same PMS 200 red as the chip two inches in front of your nose. If you walk across the lot and lay the paint chip on the hood they will be the same color, but not from 30 feet away on a humid day at 11 oclock in the morning, sitting next to a bright yellow car.

There's a convenient utility handy to settle this, Google Earth Street View. If you Street View up and down the back roads of Normandy you'll see green fields so vibrant they make your eyeballs hurt. Drive up and down Sicily and you see a landscape very different indeed. Then drive up and down the back roads of eastern Poland. You get nothing like the vibrant greens of Normandy.

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If you Street View up and down the back roads of Normandy you'll see green fields so vibrant they make your eyeballs hurt. Drive up and down Sicily and you see a landscape very different indeed. Then drive up and down the back roads of eastern Poland. You get nothing like the vibrant greens of Normandy.

Okay, I can certainly live with that. All I wish for is that the green fields of Normandy look as bright as they were. It was an especially wet summer that year and I bloody well know how grass looks a day after it's rained and the sun has come out.

BTW, 'brightness' as I use the term has little or nothing to do with what part of the spectrum we are talking about. The grass and flowers I have in mind do not look at all yellow (well, some of the flowers might). And looking at photos is not necessarily a good guide, at least film photos. For years I was photographing in rural environments and I know only too well how nearly impossible it was to get true fidelity of reproduction. Used to drive me to despair. However, with todays digital cameras and programs like PhotoShop it can be done. In fact, I see lots of examples of going too far with that and producing artificially intense colors. Yes, our tools place limitations on what we can do and BFC cannot be held responsible if a player's monitor simply for whatever reason will not reproduce the colors or brightness coded into the game. But I doubt that is what we are talking about here.

Michael

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All I want to be able to do is tell if my units are under certain types of cover. Am I missing something? Say I want to sneak a scout to the edge of the forrest, how do I do that right now, without any kind of terrain information at the cursor?

Assuming you're sneaking out of the forest and want your scout to peek across the wide open vistas beyond, you plot a waypoint to a series of APs and check the LOS outbound from each of them. Then you cancel all those WPs and actually move the scout to the one that's deepest in the forest which has the view you want, probably Slow-ing the last 8m or so. Partly that's because the terrain the scout is in matters less than the terrain that's between the scout and what they want to observe, so knowing what terrain the scout is in is less useful.

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Assuming you're sneaking out of the forest and want your scout to peek across the wide open vistas beyond, you plot a waypoint to a series of APs and check the LOS outbound from each of them. Then you cancel all those WPs and actually move the scout to the one that's deepest in the forest which has the view you want, probably Slow-ing the last 8m or so. Partly that's because the terrain the scout is in matters less than the terrain that's between the scout and what they want to observe, so knowing what terrain the scout is in is less useful.

Works for me.

Michael

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