NW American Coast 'RED DAWN'

[Maddogmoody]

Who remembers the 1984 film Red Dawn. The wheat harvest has failed in the Soviet Union, NATO has fallen apart and the USA is isolated. Russia and her allies invade the NW states of America and the southern part of Canada for resources. An ideal map would be the west coast around Portland, Seattle and Vancouver.

 

Lots of mountains, a coast line for marine operations and some major cities with airports, major and minor.

 

Lots of what ifs could be played out.

[Cayman41]

This would be immense and I think a lot of fun!

[Cake]

Amazing area to fly airplanes ....

[The_Pharoah]

Loved that movie. Definitely agree. Assuming this includes Alaska?

[HILOK]

Who remembers the 1984 film Red Dawn. The wheat harvest has failed in the Soviet Union, NATO has fallen apart and the USA is isolated. Russia and her allies invade the NW states of America and the southern part of Canada for resources. An ideal map would be the west coast around Portland, Seattle and Vancouver.

 

Lots of mountains, a coast line for marine operations and some major cities with airports, major and minor.

 

Lots of what ifs could be played out.

 

in the meantime, you can have a look at ftx/orbx. it's for other sim platforms, but still nice to fly in.

https://orbxdirect.com/product/pnw

https://orbxdirect.com/product/us-washington

[The_Pharoah]

oh and it'll have names we can actually pronounce corrrectly!!

[Rick50]

Well... not criticising your choice of terrain, but the original 1984 movie took place in Colorado, not Washington State or lower BC!!  

 

One minor downside to your own choice of WA / BC, is that the amount of data details to be created, stored on HD's and then be processed/rendered in real time flights, would be higher than all other DCS maps combined.  There's SOOO much cities, so much detailed mountains valleys and other geological features that it would become an issue. Then add a trillion trees.  

 

Now that said, another flighsim was released in 2020 with that kind of details, and seems to work pretty well on powerful machines...  I'm just saying it won't be easy or smooth on lower spec machines.  After all that though, it would be spectacular if it can be made to work well!

[Baaz]

On 3/5/2021 at 11:20 PM, Rick50 said:

Well... not criticising your choice of terrain, but the original 1984 movie took place in Colorado, not Washington State or lower BC!!  

 

One minor downside to your own choice of WA / BC, is that the amount of data details to be created, stored on HD's and then be processed/rendered in real time flights, would be higher than all other DCS maps combined.  There's SOOO much cities, so much detailed mountains valleys and other geological features that it would become an issue. Then add a trillion trees.  

 

Now that said, another flighsim was released in 2020 with that kind of details, and seems to work pretty well on powerful machines...  I'm just saying it won't be easy or smooth on lower spec machines.  After all that though, it would be spectacular if it can be made to work well!

You haven't spent much time up there have you?  Outside Vancouver, Seattle/Tacoma, and Portland area there's not a whole hell of a lot.  Towns are rather small, and once you get east of the Cascades, things turn barren very quickly.  You can even see the sudden change in the images above.  It really is night and day between east and west side of the Cascades; something I love about the area.  Can be on the beach, an hour later be in high mountains, and in another hour be in high barren plateaus.  Square area may be more, but I'm not sure if we're talking much more data than the Caucasus 

[Rick50]

 I've lived in Vancouver for 30 years, and traveled quite a bit around the rest of Washington State, the lower half of BC and a modest bit of Oregon too. Spent a bit of time in Seattle, Yakima, Kelowna, Victoria, Nanaimo and others... These days I'm in Calgary. 

 

It's true I'd agree there's not a MASSIVE population in this region, if comparing to say SoCal, or South Korea, Mexico City or Chong Quing. But... a map for DCS doesn't just deal with population density. The geography is itself a whole lot of data, more so than normal, probably something like 50 to 100 times as much geographical data as the Persian Gulf map. The trees would be far more numerous than the Caucasus map, and the other maps have few trees. 

 

One thing to consider is that the Caucasus map would not measure up if released today, say compared to the Syria map, which has far less trees but a lot more detail and population density. To represent the West Coast properly would probably be something like double the data of the Syria map, in large part because of the much higher tree density needed for much of it. Also, while "barren" might sound like low requirements, there's a lot of shrubs and rock formations, and that means data to create store crunch and render. It's neither the NTTR or Persian Gulf map, much more to design and render.

 

The biggest stumbling block to the map you propose is it's total size. Your proposed map of all of Washington, northern bit of Oregon and southern BC... is large, roughly about double the height and width of the Syria map, so just in terms of square KM's probably about 4 times the map data for a dev team to create and then have us render at 60 fps. Not insurmountable, but it's a challenge to overcome. By the time such a map were finished development, our PC's might be able to render it well. 

 

All that said, it WOULD be a cool map for DCS! 

 

I wish for a terrain map of the Norway Sweden and Finland, with a few bits of Russia, like an old DOS sim of a typhoon from the 1990s did... but that's a HUGE area and would be an even bigger challenge to developers and our hardware to run it... but I can dream!