256 Segment Theater tests

[Snake Man]

It was long ago when the large theaters were introduced into Falcon 4 and around that time I also tested the big one - 256 x 256 segment theater. It did not work at that time, CTD all over the place when running it so I came to the conclusion that ok this is not working at all.

Well now time as passed, lot of theaters ONLY on 128 segment size have been build, more theaters are helped to born and so on. Lot of experience on the theater building on my sleeve I decided to try out 256 segment theater building once again...

I did everything by the book and what happens? it works.

We have to understand that the size of the 256 segment theater is just mind blowing. As the default size is 64 and 128 theaters are "huge" compared to that, the 128's are little boyscouts compared to the big bad 256 segment theater.

The TGA image to create the TE/Campaign map is on 8096 x 8096 resolution and the size is about 65mb for that file. Yeah, think about theater download sizes, just a background image.

Tacedit job for 256 theaters is pretty easy, just change the theater size and thats it, no big deal.

The game TE/Camp map itself lags a bit on my 1.3ghz, 512mb ram computer but only to that point that you notice like "hey, were not in 128 theater anymore", its still fully playble. This is because the huge 65mb size.

In game I got it to run nicely on IA, TE and Campaign. The TE however has still the same issue as 128 had earlier when you save a mission and try to reload it, you get CTD. The campaign I had was just a small test one with 4 objectives and some squarons. Flights got scheduled etc, no problems there.

I got average reading on the bottom left corner to top right corner distance on the 256 theater and it was about 3000 miles, now if that doesn't take few air refuells I dont know what does

Anyways just wanted to post that if anyone ever thought of the situation with 256 theaters... It can be done.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[Red Dog]

Geez, Don't even think about it.
Managing 350 airbases or more before cleaning for a 128 theater is hard enough otherwise, we'll end up with one real big worlwide theater for F4



Red Dog

[ccc]

OMG!! you mean WW III is possible?!!

[codec]

quote:Originally posted by ccc:
OMG!! you mean WW III is possible?!!

Yes - but its sad we can't have interplanetary war modelled.... yet.

Julian

[ccc]

quote:Originally posted by codec:
Yes - but its sad we can't have interplanetary war modelled.... yet.

Julian

well..it's doable in Falcon X: The final frontier?

[Snowman]

Give them the world .. and they ask for the stars!! LOL

[WaveyDave]

How about using this huge theatres to emulate out of theatre flights coming in e.g. a base right on the edge with B52's that can fly in. Would look strange on the planning map maybe, but at least you wouldn't have 1000's of airbases etc to place.

Dave

[hduman]

Hi 2 All,

It's good news to know that 256 segment theater works.

Sometime ago, I tried to make a new 128 seg theater it work, but I couldn't.

However I wonder if I had reduced the resolution/scale parameter in DEM2terrain by half, and produce a 128 seg terrain covering the same area as 64, would the aircraft give me better sense of flying at high speed or would I just ruin everything?

Current DEM data is sampled in every 1 km, I guess. SPTinstall develops L2 file by DEM, and interpolate/extrapolate L2 to L1 and L0 dividing the samples by 2 and 4.

If I had a better elevation data, something like DTED 1, could I find a way to import it into L* files and improve the realism of elevation data?

Any comment is appreciated....

DUMAN out...

:p

[Snake Man]

Did some more 256 segment testing, this time in the campaign.

Here is in-game-campaign screenshot (merged) of the whole theater area.

370kb image ODS 256

There was over 18000 objectives on that campaign, when I flew one mission OCA strike I detected nothing out of the ordinary. FPS was just the same as when flying 64 segment theater.

Looks hot.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[kinggeorge]

quote:Originally posted by ccc:
well..it's doable in Falcon X: The final frontier?

I guess I start looking for Hubble space telescope images to make tile textures then

[ccc]

HOly! that scale is almost close to this...

[Snake Man]

More thorough look at the 256 campaign in tacedit shows 8492 records. Earlier I said it was over 18000 which in fact is wrong.

I apologese for my error, was not my intention to mislead anyone.

Next I'll be doing more testing to see if there will be any slow downs when we add more ground troops.

Stay tuned...

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[kinggeorge]

Thats 4.457.347 sqare miles or around 16 million km. Lo-mac btw has 100.000 square miles iirc: http://wuw.stusta.mhn.de/~u001907a/stat ... ompare.jpg

[krfrge]

Snake & CCC stop teasing us. BTW what are the specs of the system you are using to un this beast. What type video card would you recommend?

[Ami]

Hey CCC, do I see a pic from "Harpoon"?

[kinggeorge]

quote:Originally posted by krfrge:
Snake & CCC stop teasing us. BTW what are the specs of the system you are using to un this beast. What type video card would you recommend?

Video card is as always irrelevant in Falcon

[ccc]

quote:Originally posted by Ami:
Hey CCC, do I see a pic from "Harpoon"?

ya, Harpoon97.

[T_Rex]

I just gotta say that this potential is AMAZING!

You thinking of ever making this theater available for even just TEs?

[Snake Man]

While doing some development, I had to run my old buddy, desstorm256 theater into RedViper to try it out. It works on RV just as same as in F4AF which is very nice.

I havent even put any time or effort into the tacedit work for that campaign (there is no linking done etc) where the screenshot was taken, so who knows what could be done with it.

There is of course the normals calculation problem for the terrain, LxNormalFix will crash as the util is not capable enough to run large theaters (even 128 causes massive problems).

Here is a screenshot of the campaign ODS 256 RedViper - 211kb.

[T_Rex]

Oh Lord Almighty, that would ROCK.
8)

[ccc]

it has been rocking since 2003!! the best playground for B-1, B-2, and B-52!! 8)

[molnibalage]

Theaters for Redviper will be so big? When will we try it?

[Snake Man]

Its for RV, OF and F4AF, works on all of them. When... uh I'm not even planning on releasing it.

Do you want to try it out?

[molnibalage]

Of course! If you teach me a few more thing about Tacedit a campaign creation that I learned so far, I will try makeing campaign for these huge maps.

Can you do a huge European map, with Scandinevia and the northen reagions?

[Snake Man]

You're not trying to reach into the crazy theater guru position are you?

I guess we could do some campaign experimenting with this theater, needs some work and testing, but surely this provides huge amount of possibilities with all these countries and landscape.

Actually I have 256 europe terrain done, but its not playable in F4, its just the dem2terrain produced output.

Problem with 256 theaters is that they are so large, that there is so many countries included that the F4's 7 teams available is not even close enough to cover such theater of operation. We could have to make huge compromises when placing the country borders. Even in the official Europe theater there are tons of reds and blues and only few countries listed as neutral/etc.

Anyways, I'll see what I can do with the 256 theaters to be shown as developer type releases to anyone who wishes to experiment with them.

[Snake Man]

Not ingame but theater.L2 and tdf/csv done.



It cannot be moved any more north because the greenland starts to get way streched out. Thats the best we can do.

[Snake Man]

Against the community wishes, here is the ODS 256 theater release! Muhahahaa!

Screenshots: ODS 256 AF and ODS 256 RV.

Readme

Falcon 4 - PMC ODS 256 / DesStorm256 Theater

v0.1 released Aug 1st, 2010.

This is the most feared theater of all times, the one that people didn't want to have released

Its 256 x 256 segments middle east terrain (Korea / Balkans are 64 segments).

This is purely a demo, a test version where you can have some fun and experience how large theaters the engine is capable of running. There is Tactical Engagement and one campaign included, but do not expect normal theater standards. Terrain has the "normals shadow" bug because we cannot run LxNormalFix for it (it just crashes), meaning there is ugly black shadows on the terrain. Most likely some other bugs are present as well.

This theater will NOT be developed further.
This theater will NOT replace Operation Desert Storm.
This theater will NOT replace Afghanistan.

So understand that this is demo, test version and then you can have some fun with it.

This theater should run on Allied Force, FreeFalcon 5.5.1 and OpenFalcon.


Install

1) Run the PMC_DesStorm256_Theater_v0.1.exe and choose RV/OF or AF.

Done!


PMC Tactical
https://www.pmctactical.org/
Snake Man, PMC.

No need to send feedback, this is just for fun

Download PMC_DesStorm256_Theater_v0.1.rar - 63mb.

World with limits, is not the world where I want to live in...

Enjoy.

[ccc]

Geeez...256 monster is back..even terrain rebuilding process will take quite a long while!!

[ccc]

while installing ODS256 on FF5.5, a popup ask me point out "base theater direcotry" ?

[Snake Man]

Yep appears to be bug in the install script because I had to change to SPTinstall. Just point it to Theaters\DesStorm256\terrdata directory and it works.

Thanks for letting me know.

New version has been uploaded, should work fine now.