Blurred terrain line

[VasFURY]

This may be the limitations of the engine, but even on the best GFX settings, I get quite a distinct line between decent terrain gfx, and then suddenly there is a line and everything beyond it is blurry gfx. Is there a way to get the blur line to appear further away?

[Kieme(ITA)]

Actually, the only way to avoid, or limit, this visual problem is by modding game texture files, take a look at these two screenshots:

 

vanilla game

 

modded game

 

The still screens don't give enough credit to the modded version, but I can assure you that the effect is bearely noticable with the moving camera, try to move your eyes farther from the screen and see the difference.

Take a precise look at the forest terrain on the right side, as you can see, the modded terrain has still a strong transition, that's because I modded the close terrain tile and I haven't done the dedicated mini ground texture yet. Please note that the difference between the grass and Yellow grass textures is due not only to the different color and saturation, but also to the dimensions, the modded textures being 4 times larger than the vanilla ones.

 

The game uses two textures, as far as I understood since now, to represent the ground tiles, one for the closer tiles, another for the farthest ones. The latter, called "mini" texture, is a shrinked version of the standard texture; the shrinking process changes saturation and brightness, depending on the base texture it might also get more or less blurried. All in all, in my opinion, most of the blurry problem depends  on the mini textures, if you manage do modify them to practically make them resemble the original texture (by getting the right size/color/brightness) you can actually make the transition line barely visible.

Personally, I hate this visual issue too, that's why I am working hard on the mini textures of my modded terrain. 

Edited January 14, 2015 by Kieme(ITA)

[Reiter]

Kieme(ITA). what tree mod you are using? I tried one transparent mod, but the trees were too ghostly, I did not like it, but your screenshots look good.

[Kieme(ITA)]

The trees in the modded screenshot are a fresh mod I am working on for CMBS. I mainly changed some color values and, generally, desaturated the colors (I have a personal taste preference over desaturated colors). Moreover, the distant trees (which by the way use a similar system of the ground Tiles to represent very distant tress) have been changed in order to limit the bloody transition effect.

 

I did a much less advanced and complete mod for the trees in CMRT some months ago, you should find it under the name of "desaturated trees" or something like that in CMMODS site, should take care of the saturation problem at least.

Edited January 14, 2015 by Kieme(ITA)

[VasFURY]

OOOH! Very sexy. Is it difficult to Mod the game engine? Anywhere I can find the files + instructions?

[Kieme(ITA)]

I'd like to release this mod for CMBS, when it comes out in a couple of weeks; if the files are the very same as I suspect it will fit CMRT as well, and perfectly.

 

As regarding modding, the graphic modding, you might want to take a look at the game manual, where the functionality of RezExplode program is explained, an embedded program to unpack game files and get simple .bmp image format files that you can elaborate and change as you want.

 

Try lookin for Aris terrain/ground mod for CMRT, it was a very good mod for this game.

[Vinnart]

Those transitions in your mod Kieme look very good. Currently I use a custom terrain set that is a mix or Aris, and stock, and even a few tiles from an old CMSF mod I have. I use gridded terrain always so I don't know if that adds to transitions that do not look as smooth, also I have found the only way to get rid of terrain shimmer is to reduce the resolution of the tiles.

 

I use the "desaturated trees" mod, and think the colors look much better than stock, and look forward to checking your terrain mod out when released.

[mjkerner]

Wow, nice job, Kieme! 

 

Gimme!

[Kieme(ITA)]

Thanks,

 

I am still working on the trees, and some last bits of terrain. I mainly follow my own taste, so I hope you can enjoy the mods as well or, in case, just grab the parts you prefer to use.

 

When CMBS releases I should be able to send out the following mods:

 

-complete terrain in HD, that is, 2x textures resolution (4x in some cases) (standard version under consideration)

-roads in HD

-improved doodads

-reworked foliage

-alternative crops

-alternative walls

 

 

Some teasers of the reworked trees and alternative crops, editor button/tiles changed accordingly:

 

And one of the alternative crops in game:

Edited January 16, 2015 by Kieme(ITA)

[MOS:96B2P]

Thanks,

 

I am still working on the trees, and some last bits of terrain. I mainly follow my own taste, so I hope you can enjoy the mods as well or, in case, just grab the parts you prefer to use.

 

When CMBS releases I should be able to send out the following mods:

 

-alternative crops

 

An interesting alternative crop for CMBS would be field corn.  If it is not already in the base game.  If I recall Ukraine had a big 2013 corn harvest.  Just a suggestion. 

[Kieme(ITA)]

Thanks for the suggestion, corn is already modded as crop number 3.

 

Unfortunately it will be young corn, since it's impossible to resemble mature/adult plants (that should be common in july/august, at least it is here in Italy) because of the size of game's doodad, which is not tall enough.

 

So, I decided to substitute cabbages and potatoes with corn and sunflower. The information I found gave me a good background for the crops, and I belive that the sacrifice of cabbage is quite acceptable (these are mostly grown in greenhouses or smaller Patches and are, generally, less common as they are in the larger groups of vegetables crops, not to mention that there are more varieties of cabbages that grow during winter than during summer), while I really don't like to ditch potatoes, since they are indeed common crop there, although I prefer the corn (and I really didn't like the bushes of potatoes); I kept sugar beets, even if their visual impact is not great, even my own plants, being made from scratch, still don't look very interesting at medium distances, the plants are too small for a good visual effect. 

Anyway, in the end people can use what they want out of the mod, can't stress enough how modding is first of all a matter of personal tastes.

Edited January 16, 2015 by Kieme(ITA)

[Bulletpoint]

How strange that we need to mod the game files simply to remove this blur line. It should be part and parcel of simply selecting a higher detail setting. 

 

(The game engine has an arbitrary setting that controls at which distance the lower detail models and textures are used. Setting the highest detail settings should mean that lower details are not used at all. Of course, this comes at a performance cost, but that's the whole point of detail settings - you get the best graphics that your hardware is able to produce)

[Kieme(ITA)]

The blur line doesn't get removed, it's just a visual trick. The more similar is the distant texture to the closer texture (in terms of pattern, brightness, saturation etc.) the less evident to the eye is the line, yet, it's still there.

 

I belive that the game engine could potentially render the same detail of the closer view up to 2 or infinite number of kilometers, but that would mean to force the computer to display a 1024x1024 pixel texture, per game square, at a distance where you couldn't get any detail out of it anyway, so you'd not only need a super computer to do that, but also wouldn't be necessary.

 

The actual options let you partially move this dread line farther or closer, but for not much distance. I'd also like to see an option more directly connected to this matter, maybe with some strong variations, not sure how my rig would manage it, but I'd like to try.

 

An alternative I thought about, but from my own ignorant point of view of non-game developer, was to have more than the two options for each texture, now we have the big, best texture that renders the terrain close by, and then the tiny version for everything more distant than that, so I wondered if adding 1 or 2 more "intermediate" versions of the texture would reduce this problem or not.

Edited January 23, 2015 by Kieme(ITA)

[VasFURY]

Hey Kieme, just wanted to follow up with you, to see if you have had any progress with getting that blurry-ness removed or reduced with your mods?

[MikeyD]

Lets recall we 'want' things that work at cross purposes to each other. You want hi rez art in all circumstances, but you also want blazing fast framerate, and multiple battalions all fighting at the same time, and huge highly detailed maps. Somethin's gotta give. With CMRT, BFC concentrated on increasing framerate while significantly enlarging map size capability. They did a near miraculous job at that.

Edited May 24, 2015 by MikeyD

[Bulletpoint]

Lets recall we 'want' things that work at cross purposes to each other. You want hi rez art in all circumstances, but you also want blazing fast framerate, and multiple battalions all fighting at the same time, and huge highly detailed maps. Somethin's gotta give. With CMRT, BFC concentrated on increasing framerate while significantly enlarging map size capability. They did a near miraculous job at that.

 

No, I want adjustable level of detail, so those with fast computers can have more detail, while people like me with ancient computers can dial down the detail to make the game work anyway

 

And we already HAVE adjustable detail in the game. It's just a matter of adding a higher notch to the scale, which would make the blur line either very distant or disappear entirely.

[Muzzleflash1990]

I'm not involved in the game-kind of programming, but the blurred terrain in CM is one of the few, supposedly technical limitations, I do not understand. Take a terrain 4km x 4km. Thats 500 tiles x 500 tiles = 250.000 tiles. That is 500.000 triangles that have to be rendered and textured. I believe current graphics hardware process triangles in the severals millions per second. Sure comparing triangles is not a good measure, there also other 3d models, lighting, water and smoke effects particularly trees and so on to render, but it still seems like very little. Even if you need to use lower quality textures - didn't mipmapping solve this problem satisfactorily at least a decade (or two) ago?

[Bulletpoint]

I'm not involved in the game-kind of programming, but the blurred terrain in CM is one of the few, supposedly technical limitations, I do not understand. Take a terrain 4km x 4km. Thats 500 tiles x 500 tiles = 250.000 tiles. That is 500.000 triangles that have to be rendered and textured. I believe current graphics hardware process triangles in the severals millions per second. Sure comparing triangles is not a good measure, there also other 3d models, lighting, water and smoke effects particularly trees and so on to render, but it still seems like very little. Even if you need to use lower quality textures - didn't mipmapping solve this problem satisfactorily at least a decade (or two) ago?

 

The way I see it is that the C2 engine is a bit like a veteran car. It can run well and look great on a sunny day, but it's way behind current technology.

 

Yes we all love the game, but let's be honest about its limitations. Some of those limits might be inherently unfixable due to the ingenious spotting system etc. and that's perfectly understandable. But other issues could be solved by simply allowing each player more freedom to decide the best mix of performance and graphics.

 

(I'm still running the game on "balanced", and it chugs along reasonably on my ancient laptop, while looking quite good... thumbs up to BF for that)

[Bradley]

And we already HAVE adjustable detail in the game. It's just a matter of adding a higher notch to the scale, which would make the blur line either very distant or disappear entirely.

 

 

 

 

+1 to this, if at all doable.