Cliff textures

[Guest artmartin]

Probably late to get this on the wish list but maybe it'd be easy to do. High cliffs in the sim get this stretched out texture appearance that hardly seems realistic, even when dealing with photoreal textures. Would it be possible to be able to include a cliff texture file for an area that would cause the desired image to be mapped to the sides of cliffs in a defined geographical location? Imagine if we had a feature like this for an area like the Grand Canyon. You could have a horizontally layered red rock texture that would get placed over all the vertical or near-vertical polys that get created by the dramatic mesh. I think the effect would be stunning. The code could look for polys that are within 5 - 10 degrees of vertical and map that texture on them based on altitude. The texture file would be a simple mip-mapped .bmp file covering let's say 10,000 feet of elevation change from top to bottom. The graphics engine would choose the horizontal section of the texture image that matched the elevations the poly represented so that horizontal layering always matched.Might work.Art

[Guest Dan G Martin]

Well one never knows as other than higher res textures you seem to be the first to bring this up! although some of my "scenery buddies" and I have talked about the fact that the rendering engine only seems to "know" about applying terrain textures only along one axis I.E. flat. Maybe one of the kind people from the team at Microsoft could comment?.I think it might be that in effect the world mesh is one big model in a way(some sort of displacement mapping applied to a real big ball) on the fly as each area come into draw distance and it's probably really hard to check each and every tile's elevation points and adjust the mapping axis accordingly. But I am amazed by the terrain engine anyway it's one ot the coolest parts of the sim(at least to me). Dan Martin. Team Flight Ontario

[Guest artmartin]

Oh, I so agree. The graphics engine boggles the mind when you understand that it must be able to instantly render any spot on the globe taking into consideration lighting, weather, season, altitude, and tons of 3D objects. People tend to try to compare the FS graphics engine with their game software that encompasses this tiny little slice of an area with carefully constructed borders and limitations on the user. So much of those environments can be hard-coded into the game where a global simulator must be very wide-open. I just love flying through canyons though and I have to compromise that amazement a bit when those canyon walls are often made up of stretched lines. It makes perfect sense why when you think of what the overlying texture looks like but it still detracts from the experience a bit. Of course this would get removed from my wish list if it caused the graphics engine to get substantially slowed down in its renderings. Art

[Guest EdrickV]

Can't say for sure, but this may be more a mesh UV mapping issue then a graphics engine issue. I think the texture gets stretched because the cliff is being mapped as a bunch of polygons that are really tall and so the texture gets stretched. If the texture was repeated on cliff sides instead of stretched it would look a bit better. It's all in the UV mapping. (Or whatever FS uses for that.) Descent 3 had some similar mapping issues with really tall cliffs."Let me help you out. You're cleared to taxi any way you can to any runway you see."

[Guest Dan G Martin]

Well you are right when you say it's a mapping issue what I am talking about is the fact the angle of projection relative to a surface. When a projection is applied at an angle to a surface it will look "stretched". One analogy would be a movie projector at some obtuse angle to the screen you will get a distorted picture on the screen because the projector is not "inline" with the movie screen. The same applies to a projection in the 3D world as well. For the Renderingterrain engines to display a "vertical" texture with out distortion the rendering engine would have to look at the orientation of each polygon and adjust the projection for each one on the fly based on the surface normal of every ground polygon. Since the terrain mesh is created on the fly(all ready a huge job) adding the above to the games code is in all probability really too compute intensive to do in real time. But you never know what the people at Microsoft have up their sleeves, like I said the terrain engine and above all the rendering engine are truly the art of both mathematics and coding coming togetherand giving us all the visual goodies that we see in the sim. Dan Martin. Team Flight Ontario