Q about the future of current map.

[dooom]

I am curious what the intentions are to either increase of modify the current theater. While i am aware of the Third party afghanistan and pending nevada terrains, it bothers me that a substantial part of the polygon budget seems to be underutilized in the Crimean peninsula while critical terrain like the southern border with Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan is under modelled. Furthermore, critical eastern hotspots such as the pankisi gorge are not modelled at all.

 

I am wondering if anyone of credible comment could answer the following:

1. is the Crimea going to be reintroduced?

2. will terrain features (forests, roads and villages) be introduced to existing terrain south of Khashuri.

3. will well known hot spots like pankisi gorge, Samtskhe-Javakheti and other contentious regions get some modelling love?

4. is it a poor assumption of mine that a polygon budget even exists? ( as described in other sims i am familiar with)

 

There are sooo many wonderfully rich and interesting areas to build maps upon in the sim but I loose immersion when trying to build out in these areas.

 

Thanks !

[Frostiken]

From what I heard the reason most of the western area is undetailed is because they ran into a limit of sorts on the engine, and thus only the eastern part of the Black Sea is modeled. Sad :(

[EtherealN]

Frostiken is generally right, but there are some nuances:

 

When the Crimea was "removed", the total area that was "populated' was actually not reduce; you could say that the map moved to the east in order to include more of georgia. I'm not sure why this decision was made (was before my time), but there was no loss of square kilometres. My understanding is that they made the decision they wanted to have more "russia" for DCS:Black Shark (makes sense), and the Kerch Straits aren't exactly good combat ground for a chopper like the Shark either, so the decision was made to move it all eastwards, which is where the memory limits (32-bit engine issue) took effect and forced the removal of the Crimea.

 

I can't comment on 1 through 3 of the OP's questions, but on number 4 I'd say there will always be a polygon budget, but the way it manifests might change. For example, the "old" issue isn't really the same as when we normally think about polygon budgets - we think about GPU performance then, which isn't quite the big deal here, it's more about how the terrain engine ends up handling data. And on that, the best thing I can say is to just keep looking forward to Nevada and future work on EDGE.

 

Speaking personally, I think one of the best things that could happen for DCS would be to get a easy-to-use terrain SDK in place for the community to use. I still suspect it would still be too big a job for it to be effectively used by modders on their spare time (at least if we want quality like Nevada or the old map), but if we could get to a place where people could band together and make add-on payware maps (and ED get kickbacks from those sales), really cool things could happen. But I'm not the one asking the tool-devs to make it (and even less one of the devs that has to actually make it) and I suspect this is a lot harder to make happen than it sounds.

[dooom]

agreed on the payware... I would certianly shell out considerable extra dollars for extra maps. The dev time for and SDK would likely be either large or maybe even out of the current teams scope of expertise...

 

either way, I'd be happy to vote to have the crimea dissappear altogether if I could have extra cities and trees to flush out the remaining Georgian areas for mission development.

[Wichid]

Absolutely. Supporting a dev community with a SDK would be awesome. I'd buy an afghanistan map or a third party dynamic campaign generator etc etc etc...