Better terrain clutter for maps?

[rogueranger1993 7]

Hey, all. I love Strike Fighters, it's an amazing game that I love coming back to and flying again and again.

Despite this, the terrain is a bit underwhelming for me. I have the hi-res tilesets, and knowing the game is as old as it is means that those don't really bother me. What does is the lack of 3d clutter - buildings, trees, bushes, etc. Particularly in cities, you get a flat image showing many buildings, but only a few 3d buildings. This is okay when you're flying high, but when you're down in the mud this lack of the third dimension really stands out, and not in a good way.

So, I wanted to know if it would be possible to add more clutter to maps, if so how, and if not, what's stopping it from happening? I would probably choose to use buildings with collision models and simple, low-poly details that mostly use a skin to provide the appearance of detail, followed by billboard trees and scrub/bushes that don't have collision models to save some memory usage. Flying over Vietnam would be really cool if you could have huge jungles populated by hundreds of thousands of trees, and cities would be even cooler when you could fly over them and see all kinds of buildings filling the streets, or flying between high-rise skyscrapers like you can in DCS Worlds version of Dubai.

It's a project I'd love to do, though I'd like to be able to have some kind of brush with a variable size that I could use to lay down lots of trees at once - buildings would just be done one-by-one or in a template making a row of them. That said, does anyone have any comments, ideas, help/advice to offer? I'd love to hear some feedback from the community on this idea and just how feasible it might be.

[Wrench 9,429]

You're fucking kidding me, right???

You're obviously not flying on the right terrains....I'd highly suggest spending some time in our handy Terrain download section.

add GreenHell3 for your Nam experience.

Also, remember, we're working with a 20+ year old terrain engine. You'll never get DCS fidelity in this game.

Terraforming is abso-fucking-lutely not for amateurs. We've got guys here that try, and fall massively short. And the 2 or 3 of us that actually know the "hows, whys and wherefores" are more than a bit overworked.

 

[rogueranger1993 7]

I'm certainly not asking for DCS-level quality, I'm well aware that such a feat would be impossible, and I'm just fine with the SF-series not putting huge amounts of model quality/fidelity into the terrain. I just would like to have maps that add more buildings in cities, more details to the airfields, and more trees to the terrain in logical places. So far, I've focused my flying on the desert map used for the mercenary campaigns, so I haven't had a lot of time to explore the other map mods I've installed. I just happened to notice that while flying over one of the nearby cities during a ground attack practice mission I'd set up for practice that the city just felt, well, kinda empty.

What I'd really like to do is set up cities so that they feel more crowded and alive - I'd love to model cities block-by-block for ultimate immersion, but that may end up causing a massive performance hit, and it would be very time consuming. However, I've seen some work done in IL-2 mods (for v1.12) that are really inspiring, in particular the Spain 2019 map mod - and IIRC, IL-2 is even older than SF2, so better map clutter is at least theoretically possible I would think.

[+allenjb42 4,118]

56 minutes ago, rogueranger1993 said:

 Flying over Vietnam would be really cool if you could have huge jungles populated by hundreds of thousands of trees,

Like this?

Narcos terrain from the YAP Drug War addon.

 

Photoreal British Isles

 

1 hour ago, rogueranger1993 said:

cities would be even cooler when you could fly over them and see all kinds of buildings filling the streets, or flying between high-rise skyscrapers like you can in DCS Worlds version of Dubai.

Like this?

Rends Germany terrain

[rogueranger1993 7]

Yeah, pretty much exactly like all of that. I'll have to check out those maps!

[+WTRAdmin 471]

Still in-development, but here's a sample of the quality you'll get with the When Thunder Rolled project:

Downtown Hanoi

 

And one for the Mud Movers...

 

Low Altitude Mig Patrol - North Vietnam

 

 

Edited July 25, 2019 by WTRAdmin