Combat Operations Forest map screenshots

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James Laker (BurNinG)   (Aug 29, 2006 at 12:13 GMT)

Looking good.

You grass looks wrong though. You could also put in some more stones and other things to fill the stage.

Have you seen the forest pack? Still coming. But that would up the framerate a lot.

Charles Andrew   (Aug 29, 2006 at 12:36 GMT)   Resource Rating: 5

no,i haven't seen the forest pack, and yeah the framerate is extremely low, and stones is a definite addition. Ill take a look at that pack, see if it's worth it

Nick Zafiris   (Aug 29, 2006 at 12:45 GMT)

I agree with James about the grass. I would also replace the default Torque terrain textures as one of the first things to do. Keep it up.

Nick

Jeff "Reno" Raab   (Aug 30, 2006 at 00:46 GMT)

A few tips to make forest-izing a level easier:
1) Make a relatively short line of sight as much as possible. By this i mean to have lots of hills or small cliff ledges or dropoffs, so that it not only breaks up the terrain, but vastly lowers the amount of stuff rendered.
2) make use of fog as often as possible. While you dont need to make insano 'soldiers in the mist' level, adding some fog(in addition to the hills/ledges in idea 1 so it doesnt look out of place) it can add a signifigant level of abmience if handled correctly, while boosting your frames.
3) replicators hurt your framerates. They use ts statics, which arent nessicarily the most effeceint things ever, and if you have a ton of them in one scene, you'll be feeling hte pain of low frame rates. My suggestion to help remedy this is to get a healthy dose of LODs on all your trees, so that you arent pushing as many polies as you would otherwise.
4) clever foliage use. Having several thousand billboards of grass is painful for any machine, but you can help remedy this using clever culling(which you can do by tweaking values in fxFoliage's cull settings) and good textures. a nice way to help clutter the scene without too many billboards is to make the grass texture a) a big longer than it is tall and b) have the edges of it round down to the ground. That way, it looks like there's more grass, and at the edges of the billboards, it doesnt look out of place when you have a part that isnt covered in said grass.
6) When it comes out, get the forest pack. It's designed to give nice boosts to effeciency with this sort of thing, so it'll help you a lot.
7) refer to point 1 again. This is important. I mean it. If you look at games that sucessfully pulled off forests and the like(my personal favorite example is Metal Gear Solid 3) you can see that while they use this so that it breaks up the line of sight, it also doesnt look out of place. Making the hills and ledges blend into the terrain is a sign of good design, and will make your computer happy. For a couple of shots of what i mean: www.todojuegos.com/modules/coppermine/albums/PS2/MGS3/mgs3_ss01.jpg (not the best) but you can see how they balance the use of trees and terrain to block alot of other stuff from field of view making it more pleasant on the computer.

Anywho, enough rambling, these things 'aught to help alittle bit i hope, and it's looking pretty good so far, so i hope my tips will make it better in the end.

Charles Andrew   (Aug 31, 2006 at 11:29 GMT)   Resource Rating: 5

thanks for your help, im sure i can get the frame rate up now :)

Plague   (Aug 31, 2006 at 18:24 GMT)

That grass is horrible, it needs work. I'd also recommend changing
the default terrain textures. :)

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