That damnable dust! CMBtB essential?

[gunnergoz]

I was watching that most interesting History Channel series on the Eastern front war last night and was taken by all the color footage of the war on the steppes.

After a few minutes, I noticed how much dust there was flying around...especially as units moved and convoys traced their way through these endless plains.

Surely this was of importance in pointing out to the troops where the advancing enemy was coming from? And more often than not, would it not have hindered observation for units at the rear of the columns? Wouldn't gunfire be raising clouds of dust that would be a dead giveaway of their position, not to mention obscuring subsequent shots?

All of these things came to mind, and I began to see how vital it would be to replicate this in CMBtB.

Now, I may be deaf, dumb and blind, this was probably discussed in previous threads, but I find that I cannot do searches on this forum for CRAP any more...nothing happens except timeouts and error messages. So, if this is old business, please excuse me for my gaffe...if it's new business, let the discussion begin!

[ 06-26-2001: Message edited by: gunnergoz ]

[lcm1947]

If I recall someone answered in a previous post that it would require a lot of computer power to show dust so it won't be done until maybe the engine was redone? I don't know what I'm talking about just trying to recall what the answer was only days ago. But you get the point I hope. Someone will come along and answer you. But if not there you are. No dust until some engine is reworked.

[gunnergoz]

Well, maybe so but I say balderswoggle! If we can have smoke rounds, we can have dust trails. Maybe non-persistent, maybe not too much but we should be able to have some effort to simulate this in part...C'mon BTS do somfink!

[Gyrene]

I agree that dust could be represented the same way as smoke, but slower systems will get a performance hit in much the same way that massive amounts of smoke do.

Nice way to spot moving vehicles, it would be a great feature, it would be even sweeter if tanks and vehicles could back up into their own dust to conceal themselves.

Gyrene

[gunnergoz]

Like we all know, features that slow some systems can simply be turned off, right? I hate to have something left out if most players can take advantage of it.

[Mr. Johnson--]

You guys dream a little too much. To be able to do it an do it right we would need the NSA kray farm to help us. We gonna need to wait a good 8 years or so.

[Andreas]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by gunnergoz:

Like we all know, features that slow some systems can simply be turned off, right? I hate to have something left out if most players can take advantage of it.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Err, Gunnergoz I don't know what kind of system you have, but you could do me a favour, and DL the scenario 'To the last man' from Der Kessel, and check whether it slows down your machine when you go for high or even low quality smoke on. My guess is that it will. It slowed down a G4 noticeably. Now imagine a larger map, and larger dust-clouds.

[Slapdragon]

Dust would be a big VRAM hit if it were applied across the board. Think: every tank needs to kick it up for it to work, unlike smoke. Also, they would need to move to a complete ray trace model or the smoke and dust would look similar, haze and dust needs ray tracing to do correctly.

What they could do is limit the game to one or two tanks to make sure that they do not have to bump up the VRAM to more than 32mb (which is eseentially what Unreal and the like do, they limit the how much art can show up on screen at the same time. Sometimes the editors for things like quake can mess this up, but the more atmospherics they add, the more they have to limit scope). Or, they could use a proprietary engine in the game that specializes in psuedo-ray tracing. Then the game would require for example a 32mb GeForce 3 card instead of being able to run on any system.

Finally there is the time issue. Recoding the visual is a BIG task. Possible, but it is something BTS was planning for the updated engine in the future.

In other words. lots of neat things can be done, but some of the limits are constraints on the system and time.

[Sergei]

A must in North Africa...

[Stacheldraht]

Main gun blasts also often kicked up dust, particularly with some of the very low-slung StuG and Jagdpanzer IV types. That could temporarily block the gunner's view and make the tank easier to spot.

[Holman]

As a partial solution (and one that avoids the performance-hit problem), perhaps the "Sound Contact" generic unit could be used to simulate "dust-sightings" available on certain terrains under certain conditions. This would indicate that you know something is there, but you don't know what it is.

Martyr

[Mord]

Or recolor the fog, say a brownish yellow, and have the whole battle field dusty. This would give everyone dust, it just wouldn't come off every vehicle as they moved. it'd be all around, like how it would be once everything goes into action.

Mord

[gunnergoz]

I'm likin' what I'm hearing...

[Michael Emrys]

Yeah, Martyr and Mord are moving closer to a viable solution. Here's another thing, smoke and dust from explosions and fires gather as the battle progress and should cause a general degradation of spotting. If this is treated as a semi-random number added into the spotting equation, it wouldn't require any additional VRAM and would be only a slight hit (I think) on the CPU.

Footnote: What I mean by "semi-random number" in this case is a number derived by keeping a count of the number and size of explosions that have occurred over the course of the game to that point, considering enviromental conditions, allowing a certain amount of it to have settled out, and adding a randomly generated number to account for imponderables, then using the resultant in spotting calculations.

Michael

[ 06-26-2001: Message edited by: Michael emrys ]