Technical feasibility of procedural high fidelity ground level granularity?

Especially over the last two years DCS World has made great strides in the shape of aircraft released, engine improvements (looks) and maps released. I really like me my NTTR map and Caucasus 2.5 is looking really, really great.

All three maps in the latest iteration, as well as the upcoming Persian Gulf map, look really great, and even when taxing on the airfield or flying fairly close to the ground (helos) they look a great deal better than what we had before. But the overall flatness of the ground is still apparent and better textures and grass implementation only go so far to amend this.

There are many so called open world games that cover huge areas that increasingly come with very high degrees of ground level granularity. Its not just the textures that are HD, but the overall level of uneveness of the ground in combination with HD textures gives these digital worlds a high level of believability. There are rocks, furrows, grooves, trenches, small humps and hills with ridges everywhere, trees and bushes placed organically.

Lately, a number of space games have started to build whole planets procedurally, and that with an astonishing level of detail when standing on the surface. Yes, big budget productions and without having to rebuild real world areas, thus having artistic freedom to a higher degree.

I am in no way trying to be salty about what we have atm and i am aware that this sort of stuff depends to some degree on man power and financial resources, HDD/SSD space and hardware on the consumer side and technological feasibility on the development side.

I am especially interested in the latter point, technological feasibility on the development side. What would it take to have DCS World maps display that aforementioned high fidelity ground granularity that we see can be achieved with procedural generation? Is that mainly a question of consumer hardware limitation and developing tools to procedurally build this stuff simultaneously fitting in with the specific regions sattelite imagery would be the 'easy' part?

I'd be more than interested to hear some thoughts from ED's map team devs on what they think how this could be achieved or what the stumbling blocks are likely to be.

Again, this is not like...''why was this not implemented yesterday, i want it all, and i want it now!''. I am just curious what the road to this could look like. For me, this is the one thing i'd be most keen to see happening for DCS World since we have all those great helos and planes, and most of the lighting can look incredibly good. I know lots of people want other things improved first, but this thread is about ground level granularity.

Especially over the last two years DCS World has made great strides in the shape of aircraft released, engine improvements (looks) and maps released. I really like me my NTTR map and Caucasus 2.5 is looking really, really great.

 

All three maps in the latest iteration, as well as the upcoming Persian Gulf map, look really great, and even when taxing on the airfield or flying fairly close to the ground (helos) they look a great deal better than what we had before. But the overall flatness of the ground is still apparent and better textures and grass implementation only go so far to amend this.

 

There are many so called open world games that cover huge areas that increasingly come with very high degrees of ground level granularity. Its not just the textures that are HD, but the overall level of uneveness of the ground in combination with HD textures gives these digital worlds a high level of believability. There are rocks, furrows, grooves, trenches, small humps and hills with ridges everywhere, trees and bushes placed organically.

 

Lately, a number of space games have started to build whole planets procedurally, and that with an astonishing level of detail when standing on the surface. Yes, big budget productions and without having to rebuild real world areas, thus having artistic freedom to a higher degree.

 

I am in no way trying to be salty about what we have atm and i am aware that this sort of stuff depends to some degree on man power and financial resources, HDD/SSD space and hardware on the consumer side and technological feasibility on the development side.

 

I am especially interested in the latter point, technological feasibility on the development side. What would it take to have DCS World maps display that aforementioned high fidelity ground granularity that we see can be achieved with procedural generation? Is that mainly a question of consumer hardware limitation and developing tools to procedurally build this stuff simultaneously fitting in with the specific regions sattelite imagery would be the 'easy' part?

 

I'd be more than interested to hear some thoughts from ED's map team devs on what they think how this could be achieved or what the stumbling blocks are likely to be.

 

Again, this is not like...''why was this not implemented yesterday, i want it all, and i want it now!''. I am just curious what the road to this could look like. For me, this is the one thing i'd be most keen to see happening for DCS World since we have all those great helos and planes, and most of the lighting can look incredibly good. I know lots of people want other things improved first, but this thread is about ground level granularity.

Great insight and question in my honest opinion. I kind of understand what you are talking about, reminds me of VBS Blue i think it's called. I believe it's by Boeing...i might be wrong.

But I need to Google ground level granularity to get a good idea of what it is since I don't know how it works or what engine facilitates the implementation of it

''ground level granularity''....i just made this word combo up to hopefully best describe what i mean. I don't have the Persian Gulf map yet but from what i have seen in all the videos and trailers over the last couple of months, the ground level 'flatness' or 'ruggedness' is on par with NTTR; the new Caucasus and Normandy, i.e. the ground is a perfectly flat, textured tile that appears to have some ruggedness from a certain distance augmented when covered by grass and foliage.

Now ED has increased the terrain mesh (don't recall by how much) for the Caucasus map which is especially apparent in the mountains, particularly the peaks. I am not entirely sure what 'mesh counts' actually means in terms of DCS or game eingines in general, probably exactly what it sounds like. If one imagines all textures, grass and objects removed, that mesh probably looks like an unevenly layed out fishinig net with varyingly spaced and sized meshes. While each mesh/loop can be at an angle to its surounding meshes/loops, it itself is perfectly flat. The bigger the average mesh size, the more flat the map feels i should reckon.

So ED probably needed to develop some procedural tech that makes each mesh/loop appear rugged and uniquely uneven but still organically bound to its surroundings. Probably the same techniques (bumb and normal maps) used to make characters and objects look detailed and rugged without increasing the poly count. As i understand it, usually an artist makes a highly poly model and derives bumb and normal maps from it, bakes them so he can drastically cut back on the poly count without loosing detail.

While it might be a good idea at some stage, if you took the 10m circle around a player (which isn't very big), and procedurally broke it into 1cm^2 triangles, you'd have a 3.1million poly mesh just for that terrain + textures, bump / normal maps.

I'm not sure my GPU is up for that...

Plus you'd have issues like lumps suddenly appearing where you thought was level ground, which if you're trying to take off or land on the dirt might make for some unpleasant surprises :)

Well said, neo. I've wondered about the peripheral areas in NTTR. I know they said areas further away from the main points of interest would be much less refined. It makes sense so I'm not really complaining because, like neo, I'm super happy with the new maps. It is a bit of a bummer trying to fly anywhere near the eastern or western edges of Nevada; however. It's kind of like, "Hey, I was at Bryce Canyon down there last year! Wait....it's....flat....and looks like water.....with small pyramids in it." So then I fly to the west. "Yeah, Death Valley! And Mount Whitney is over there. It's the tallest mountain in....wait....that can't be it. It's a brown hill."

Anyway, no worries, I just fly around other parts of the map instead. Which kind of feels like a waste of space since the map is there but I don't care to fly over it.

That being said, the maps offer a lot of great new areas to fly over regardless and I've been loving the Persian Gulf so far.