Constructive suggestion regarding collidable vegetation

[DickDastardly]

Hi all,

I was reading the patch thread in which the issue of collidable vegetation was raised again. I realise ED have stated that this isn't going to be changed in the near future due to limitations of the current engine, but it occurred to me that there might be a way to get most of the benefits of collidable vegetation without making any major engine changes.

 

Currently the rendering code and the collision detection code presumably both use the same dataset of terrain mesh. Rather than add extra code to the collision detection to check if the heli is in contact with a tree model, couldn't a small modification be made so that the collision detection just uses a different terrain mesh? This modified mesh could have exactly the same number of verts as the original but in forested areas they would be raised to approximately treetop height.

 

In other words, the rendering engine would draw the world as in the first pic below, whereas the collision detection would "see" the terrain as being shaped like the second pic:

 

 

This would mean that bullets and missiles would no longer be able to pass through forested areas, allowing forests to be used properly as cover in pop-up attacks. I realise the proposed changes wouldn't be perfect -the resolution of the mesh might not be sufficient to allow for small terrain spikes like that shown in the second pic for the lone tree on the left, for example, but even if the height changes were restricted to forested areas rather than individual trees I think it would still be a big improvement. (The other obvious problem is that it would be possible to land on top of a forest but tbh I don't think that would be a big deal either).

 

I'm sure one of the clever coders at ED could write some kind of automatic routine which would generate the new collision terrain mesh based on the old one plus the data for tree/forest locations, and obviously this would only need to be done once in advance to generate the new dataset (so there'd be no additional overhead whilst the sim is actually running).

 

Anyway, there's the suggestion, I'd be interested to hear what you guys think.

Cheers,

DD

[Panzertard]

There would be one more obstacle to using such an idea.

- AI wouldnt be able to see through that terrain.

- The player (or MP Client) will.

 

No suggestion on how to solve that though.

 

IMO - the current implementation is a good enough compromise allowing AI / players to react to units hiding in a forest.

Until a new method can be implmeneted ofc ;)

[Rhino4]

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=34398&highlight=tree+collision

Use the search function, please.