Vietnam's Map

[Gebhi]

+1 Wish to fly central highlands and base at An Khe

[upyr1]

On 12/16/2021 at 12:07 PM, Baaz said:

As much as I am drooling over a Vietnam map, looking at performance on the Marianas tells me we're nowhere near where we need to be to make Vietnam considerable.

This is one reason that I would rather see some cold war gone hot maps and assets. We could get the era without killing our cpus.

[Comox]

So now that we're getting an awesome F-4E this year, what about the only map EVERYONE is waiting for ??

[Fuchs]

+1 for this map

[Rick50]

Yea, a  lot of us want this map, for the history, alt history scenarios and such.

Might be a little "hot potatoe" considering the nature of that history... but it's been done in the past games/sims. 

But then there is the technical.  This isn't a desert, with a bit of hills, a few shrubs and a bit of bland textures.  This would be TRILLIONS of palm trees over millions of square miles, WAY more building structures, tens of thousands of river-stilt hut houses. And all the other high density of objects that Vietnam would have compared to say most desert maps.

Why does this matter?

1) maps typically seem to take 3 years to make. But this won't be typical due to the volume of objects to place with any plausibility. Might take TWICE as long for a map of 'Nam.

2) triangles and textures... too many and it chokes your PC, chokes your fancy 3D card.  Doubling the triangles and textures is usually not much problem for a high end somewhat current gaming PC. But if it's 5 times as much, or 10 times as much...  I imagine that a realistic looking 'Nam map might have 50 times as many objects within visual range, compared to say the NTTR map, or the Persian map. 

So we are left with a map that will take more resources and time to make, and then maybe not be able to get 2 frames per second with lowest settings... rendering the whole exercise null.

At some point in future, it will most certainly be doable. Maybe some AI help to build the map in a reasonable time. And then some monster gaming PC hardware that makes a 3090Ti look like a calculator... then sure, it'll be awesome for certain.  What's not certain is if it can be started today and work well say in 2026 when it would be ready... maybe it could be made to work well, maybe not.

 

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

5 hours ago, Rick50 said:

Yea, a  lot of us want this map, for the history, alt history scenarios and such.

Might be a little "hot potatoe" considering the nature of that history... but it's been done in the past games/sims. 

But then there is the technical.  This isn't a desert, with a bit of hills, a few shrubs and a bit of bland textures.  This would be TRILLIONS of palm trees over millions of square miles, WAY more building structures, tens of thousands of river-stilt hut houses. And all the other high density of objects that Vietnam would have compared to say most desert maps.

Why does this matter?

1) maps typically seem to take 3 years to make. But this won't be typical due to the volume of objects to place with any plausibility. Might take TWICE as long for a map of 'Nam.

2) triangles and textures... too many and it chokes your PC, chokes your fancy 3D card.  Doubling the triangles and textures is usually not much problem for a high end somewhat current gaming PC. But if it's 5 times as much, or 10 times as much...  I imagine that a realistic looking 'Nam map might have 50 times as many objects within visual range, compared to say the NTTR map, or the Persian map. 

So we are left with a map that will take more resources and time to make, and then maybe not be able to get 2 frames per second with lowest settings... rendering the whole exercise null.

At some point in future, it will most certainly be doable. Maybe some AI help to build the map in a reasonable time. And then some monster gaming PC hardware that makes a 3090Ti look like a calculator... then sure, it'll be awesome for certain.  What's not certain is if it can be started today and work well say in 2026 when it would be ready... maybe it could be made to work well, maybe not.

 

Important to read.

As our aircraft inventory is 40% accurate, that's not my biggest concern. Sure, there's a marked performance difference between the 21bis and F-13/PFM that the VPAF depended as well as the two Navy attackers we're getting are much more advanced than their 60s progenitors, performance is the biggest concern I have.

Future proofing didn't work for Crysis and that just became a joke people bandied about in gaming circles for over a decade. People want to play the game they bought *now*. Until ED can swallow its pride and develop a map with a reduced visual fidelity for the sake of the game actually being playable, then a SEATO map is going to be heartbreaking.

Telling us to 'upgrade' is not a valid retort. Especially when this would affect so many customers. I'd just outright not buy it since what should be a $60 purchase is now exponentially more.

I legitimately would want SEATO modeled. But, I'm not getting it if its a slideshow. I think the hell of it is that the people who do so desperately want a SEATO map would also be willing to take a hit on fidelity provided it ran well.

[Rick50]

There used to be a company that was well known for making the "only"  simulations of car racing... Papyrus. They covered CART / Indycar, Nascar Winston Cup, Nascar Trucks and probably a few other genres I don't recall. Their last Nascar apparently still lives on today through mods, it's physics engine and car / suspension setup is second to none even today.

But the company one day set out to make the best vintage racing simulator, or rather at that time, the ONLY vintage racing simulator, the subject being Formula 1 from 1967. They wrote all new code for the physics engine. The cars were a handful just to get rolling.  But there was a massive problem for the company: when it was released, no one had a computer powerful enough to run it.  If you turned all the graphics way down, and only rendered one or two cars in front, and only raced against say just 5 other cars, you MIGHT get an ok framerate... until another car came into view, then whoops, screen freeze and your car has now crashed. 

About 8 years after the sim was released, our average gaming hardware could do the sim justice, making a full proper race with all the cars, no stutters no frame drops, all the physics for all the cars not just your own, work properly. And it was SPECTACULAR!!  

Problem was, the company did not survive, largely, I think because their "magnum opus", their "David" just wouldn't work on the customer's machines upon launch, or even for years later. What SHOULD have been a stellar success that impressed everyone, crashed and burned in terms of sales. There was nothing wrong with the code... a decade later it worked brilliantly. It just required WAY more computing power than was available at retail for years after release. Truly a shame, as Grand Prix Legends later turned out to be the brilliant experience we suspected it might. The company did have success after GPL was released, but I believe that it hurt the company's financials signficantly, and I'm not certain that they managed to recover those losses.

I tell this story because it's a cautionary one, where just hardware specs and availability conspired to ruin what otherwise ought to have been a great success, much like  MiG21bisFishbedL mentioned about the action adventure FPS game Crysis, which suffered from the same issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_Design_Group

[stormrider]

On 2/2/2022 at 1:50 AM, Rick50 said:

There used to be a company that was well known for making the "only"  simulations of car racing... Papyrus. They covered CART / Indycar, Nascar Winston Cup, Nascar Trucks and probably a few other genres I don't recall. Their last Nascar apparently still lives on today through mods, it's physics engine and car / suspension setup is second to none even today.

Papyrus exists today in iRacing through Dave Kaemmer.

https://www.iracing.com/papyrus/

[Rick50]

Right, but it's not the same organisation. Maybe with the later titles they reccovered their finacials. Maybe they needed outside investors to recover and/or start the new venture. GPL was celebrated once people could play it, but didn't make the company enough money for the investment. Just because the same people are inolved, doesn't mean that they had success the whole time (though for the most part I think they've done well).  In the context that I presented, the game wouldn't run properly on the hardware of users at launch, and it hurt sales significantly. Similarly, Falcon 4.0 had a similar issue for many. You could see the poentetial, but....

[Gambit21]

On 2/1/2022 at 4:50 PM, Rick50 said:

There used to be a company that was well known for making the "only"  simulations of car racing... Papyrus. They covered CART / Indycar, Nascar Winston Cup, Nascar Trucks and probably a few other genres I don't recall. Their last Nascar apparently still lives on today through mods, it's physics engine and car / suspension setup is second to none even today.

But the company one day set out to make the best vintage racing simulator, or rather at that time, the ONLY vintage racing simulator, the subject being Formula 1 from 1967. They wrote all new code for the physics engine. The cars were a handful just to get rolling.  But there was a massive problem for the company: when it was released, no one had a computer powerful enough to run it.  If you turned all the graphics way down, and only rendered one or two cars in front, and only raced against say just 5 other cars, you MIGHT get an ok framerate... until another car came into view, then whoops, screen freeze and your car has now crashed. 

About 8 years after the sim was released, our average gaming hardware could do the sim justice, making a full proper race with all the cars, no stutters no frame drops, all the physics for all the cars not just your own, work properly. And it was SPECTACULAR!!  

Problem was, the company did not survive, largely, I think because their "magnum opus", their "David" just wouldn't work on the customer's machines upon launch, or even for years later. What SHOULD have been a stellar success that impressed everyone, crashed and burned in terms of sales. There was nothing wrong with the code... a decade later it worked brilliantly. It just required WAY more computing power than was available at retail for years after release. Truly a shame, as Grand Prix Legends later turned out to be the brilliant experience we suspected it might. The company did have success after GPL was released, but I believe that it hurt the company's financials signficantly, and I'm not certain that they managed to recover those losses.

I tell this story because it's a cautionary one, where just hardware specs and availability conspired to ruin what otherwise ought to have been a great success, much like  MiG21bisFishbedL mentioned about the action adventure FPS game Crysis, which suffered from the same issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_Design_Group

I had a Pentium IV with a Voodoo and ran it fine with a full field..  Of course it ran even better with later rigs with all the car updates etc. That was a fast rig for the time though.

[sangfhas]

+1

[Rick50]

On 2/25/2022 at 10:50 AM, Gambit21 said:

I had a Pentium IV with a Voodoo and ran it fine with a full field..  Of course it ran even better with later rigs with all the car updates etc. That was a fast rig for the time though.

 

How much did that unit cost ya? !!!! 

[Gambit21]

On 2/26/2022 at 10:12 PM, Rick50 said:

 

How much did that unit cost ya? !!!! 

Way too much, put it on a credit card like a dolt.

[Evoman]

I just saw the newest DCS Vietnam theme video that Phenom posted a day ago. It was a beautiful thing to see all of the aircraft that were used in that conflict in action. With the F-4 Phantom and the F-100 and A-6 Intruder on the way a Vietnam map would have the potential of countless mission possibilities  more than the average map.

 

 

[Razor68]

Wags have stated that they are going to make a Nam map.