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mikew

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Posts posted by mikew

  1. On 9/26/2019 at 4:34 PM, geneb said:

    There's a 30 minute video that Tested did that you might want to check out

    Thanks! I've finally got around to watching it. If anyone else is interested, it's this one.

     

    In any of the 'through the glasses' shots. it seems they are still using that CastAR plate with 5 or so IR LEDs on it and not the dots around the edge for the tracking. So, a bit misleading.

    We know the visuals work well, but it's the tracking that concerns me as I could never get the CastAR prototype to work smoothly.

     

    Anyway, a few days left before the campaign ends. I'm getting slightly more enthusiastic. :)

  2. Had another look at simplifying the terrain by baking in whatever is on top of the base texture of the tile. There is a problem with thin things like roads and railways though, in that the single texture needs to be quite big to get anywhere near the definition. It's not too bad with 2048x2048, but not sure whether this is the way to go...

    An example is rlarbs_1.3, where on the right you see the road/rail texture z-fighting with the base texture if I just blindly convert the polygons to VRML.

    On the left, I've blended the road/rail polygons with the base texture into a 2048x2048 buffer and saved it as a png file.

    rlarb_1.png.752d1214d243d97e450fe5f5443a0a52.png

  3. Yes, v2.0 contains everything in one install.

    As I understand it, v2.0 was only released in the USA and I got a got a 'big box' copy from there via ebay which included a cut-down version of the Strategy Guide as well as the manual.

     

  4. It's more about how a TFX terrain sized terrain would be handled if we wanted more variation, ultimately with every tile unique.

     

    As an experiment, I created 160000 tiles, each with a 2048x2048 elevation grid compressed into .hfz format and a 1024x1024 texture compressed to .png. It took about 8 hours just to create the files and the resulting directory took up about 16GB of disk space.
    That didn't seem too bad without any optimization, apart from compression.

     

    What was interesting, was that if I right-click in and select 'Properties' of the resulting directory in Win7 or Linux, I get an instant answer of 320000 files and the total size. With Win10 it takes seemingly forever to get the same result.

     

  5. On 8/18/2019 at 10:51 PM, mikew said:

    Back to the terrain, and I've done an experiment using VRML's Elevation Grid (1025x1025) instead of an Indexed Face Set.

    It's basically the same tile (mont1c_1) but is now about 10MB (6.5MB VRML, 3.5MB BMP texture) in size as opposed to a few kB

    I forgot that Lean Viewer can use PNG files for the texture which reduces the 3.5MB 1024x1024 bitmap into the ~100kB range.

    It would be good if the Elevation Grid could be handled in a similar way, but as far as I can see, it is always handled as text. Maybe the complete VRML file can be compressed though.

  6. 6 hours ago, agathosdaimon said:

    ...but it gives the error message of no pci-bus detected - what is this about and is there a fix for that in just now dosbox?

    The Monster 3D is a 3dfx Voodoo card and would be plugged into the PCI bus. PCI bus handling is not included on Dosbox 0.74, so the 'EF2000 Reloaded' version contains a patch that does.

     

    The version that supports 3D cards is DOS only, but requires Windows for installation for some reason

     

    What's strange is that the 3D version was the last released, so I would have thought would contain all features.

    On mine, I get the menu with options in the following order:

    Quick Combat

    Simulator

    Campaign

    Multiplay

    Credits

    Quit

     

    If you press 'Credits', does the first line say ''DID Graphics Plus'?

     

     

  7. Never heard of Blood worms, so had to look it up:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycera_(annelid)

    ...seem quite nasty as you say.

    I haven't fished for decades, but we used Ragworms (that could give a little bite) and Lugworms which were totally harmless, but you could create a bit of a bloodbath putting them on a hook.

    Both of these could be dug for at low tide, but you have to dig faster than they can burrow which takes some effort.

    Much easier to buy them from a bait shop.

  8. No, that isn't feasible, as a few of those tiles would have the same total number of vertices as the current terrain.

    This is more for my own personal enjoyment where converting each terrain tile to a heightmap and texture allows for some experimenting with 'standard' tools.

    Here I'm using World Machine to slightly modify the terrain around Luxor.

    lux1.png.49a08ed1c15ebe69002f691e5d004566.png

     

    A bit pointless really, but it was either do this or go to IKEA. :D

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