SB Pro PE 4.0 - Discussion thread

[Koen]

22 hours ago, Kingtiger said:

Screw the TAM, there is 3D crewmembers in the hatches! 

 

 

AND HURRAH TO ESIM FOR ALL THE NEW STUFF !!

 

[Tjay]

4 hours ago, Ssnake said:

The new terrain engine is largely an infrastructure project and less one of immediate eye candy. It's an enabler for future development, things that simply couldn't be done without it.

 

How very unfashionable. You're obviously not an accountant.

[Hedgehog]

On 4/29/2016 at 9:19 PM, Rotareneg said:

Well... this is interesting:

 

 

BOUNCING.

F**KING.

ROADWHEELS!!

 

 

 

****ALL HAIL the_List!!!!****

 

For those of you not familiar with the significance of this:

17 hours ago, Ssnake said:

 

Well, "in principle" the engine will be capable of supporting that. Initially you're unlikely to actually see them in action simply because the old map editor provides no tools to dig such trenches in the digital landscape. We have one internal test map that includes all kinds of terrain obstacles (similar to an army test drive area, actually), and given a raster width of .78m a trench of 1.60m width is quite feasible.

And of course vehicles will react differently when trying to drive over such a trench.

 

 

 

Depends on what your vehicle is.

 

All that said, the terrain type resolution will stay at 12.5m raster width, so you couldn't assign JUST the trench area, say, "bog" terrain type properties. And unlike real terrain you shouldn't expect the edges of the embankment to crumble under the weight of your tank. Maybe later. The point is, the new terrain engine supports these things, so we can now actually consider implementing them as features. With the old engine we didn't even need to start thinking here.

The new terrain engine is largely an infrastructure project and less one of immediate eye candy. It's an enabler for future development, things that simply couldn't be done without it.

 

 

 

 

Yes. Road leveling requires that we modify the terrain under, and left and right of them. I'm currently preparing a video with a particularly extreme case of terrain that didn't work well with the old terrain engine; I will mix scenes from the old with the new so you can have a direct comparison how the new engine can improve existing maps.

 

This is up there with 3D Crew members.

This is one of those things we have been asking about for....well.... since version 2.238 (I think it was that) well lets say a long time. 

You can keep you're shiny new tanks.

This is what I live for.

 

'course I wouldn't say no to new units

 

 

This is a thing.

Edited April 30, 2016 by Hedgehog

[Major duck]

Nice gimmick

 

But hedge if you have time to sit and look at the road wheels your doing something wrong 

[Gibsonm]

I tend to agree, but you need to know that suspension / bouncy road wheels have been passionately advocated by some here for quite a while now.

[mpow66m]

should make for a smoother ride and better gunning on the go.

[Gibsonm]

Well I think it was modelled - just not displayed, so I suspect "no change" in terms of gunnery.

[Lumituisku]

It would be awesome to be able to dismount tank grew member, to do forward scouting on a defile or lets say urban area where is a sharp turn or something.  Like Commander or loader could go out of tank a small distance away and use binoculars to look around. Perhaps in somewhere distant future this comes possible. 

[Apocalypse 31]

1 hour ago, Lumituisku said:

It would be awesome to be able to dismount tank grew member, to do forward scouting on a defile or lets say urban area where is a sharp turn or something.  Like Commander or loader could go out of tank a small distance away and use binoculars to look around. Perhaps in somewhere distant future this comes possible. 

 

Perhaps a playable Rifleman/Light AT Model to support those tanks in urban environments instead?

[Gibsonm]

Well arguable its a combined arms thing - a defile drill.

 

The Mech Inf clear the urban area, supported by the tanks.

 

But being able to leave the vehicle in dead ground, dismount, do a recce and return would be useful for recce crews.

[Ssnake]

Actually, we never bothered with a proper model of the vehicle suspension. Our tanks were treated as rigid bodies with point masses, and some dampening for the transition when bringing the tank to a new spatial orientation when driving across a polygon edge. It did the trick as long as the terrain was of a resolution twice as highe as the typical combat vehicle's length and the height variance was (typically) much smaller than that: The smallest possible bump in the Steel Beasts world from 1999-2015 was 25m across and 38 centimeters (=100m divided by eight bit) in height.

 

However, by increasing the X/Y resolution by a factor of 256 this old approach no longer works. Hence we were glad to take this at an opportunity to work on a reasonable vehicle suspension model. It maintains reasonable vehicle behavior in the virtual world and increases the eye candy factor at the same time, so everybody is happy I guess.

[daskal]

3D crew seems to have finally arrived. Will we have them in all position - ie loader as well? Are there any animations for them - loading the gun etc.

 

The night sky looks fantastic based on that Picture - can't wait to start camping with my M1 at night in the desert!

[Marko]

Will the improved engine require a higher minimum spec then currently need to run SB.  IE,  better graphic card high running speed CPU  etc.

I know I ask this question ever time there's a new update. LoL

[Koen]

3 hours ago, Marko said:

Will the improved engine require a higher minimum spec then currently need to run SB.  IE,  better graphic card high running speed CPU  etc.

I know I ask this question ever time there's a new update. LoL

 

Some comments from Nils in post 14:

http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=41602

[Grenny]

28 minutes ago, Koen said:

 

Some comments from Nils in post 14:

http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=41602

can't access this site...

[Marko]

40 minutes ago, Koen said:

 

Some comments from Nils in post 14:

http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=41602

Thanks Keon.

found the post I should be ok may need to upgrade my ram, running twelve at the moment  may need to go to sixteen.

[TSe419E]

30 minutes ago, Grenny said:

can't access this site...

Nils wrote...

 

"It's still a bit too early to give the final recommendations, but since we're going 64 bit only we also recommend 8 GByte RAM or more (I have 16, and occasionally they are needed (when converting legacy map data). Likewise in the past I said that it would be better to have two cores at a higher clock speed than four or more. While the high clock speed still is a desirable thing - large parts of SB Pro are still single threaded, and probably will remain so for years - we DO have certain multithreaded operations now (mostly when it comes to converting old maps) where an i7 processor shows a massive advantage over an i3 and even some i5s.

Graphics cards - nominally no increase over 3.0 (Shader model 3.0, 1GByte video RAM recommended), but as always, faster is better. I have a (normal) GTX 980 and see no problems whatsoever in full HD resolution. But then again a 980, even if it's not a Ti version, is pretty much at the top of the food chain right now. Cards that "still cope" with version 3.0 will probably no longer cut it.

 

Once that we are done with a number of performance tweaks we'll have our beta testers to run a benchmark scenario that should represent typical game scenes, and based on the results we will give a performance indicator for at least the graphics card/processor combinations that we have in the team. That should allow you to make at least an estimate how your own system will fare.

 

In the end, try it out. Only you know what combination of screen resolution, frame rate, and graphics detail selection you find enjoyable or not. Our time-based licenses aren't very expensive and allow to run both version 3.0 and version 4.0, so e.g. a four month license is $24.50 in our web shop, so you could run 3.0 until end of August if you bought today, or switch over to version 4.0 in June for the rest of the time. ...and if you hate it, go back to version 3, no problem.

 

 

What can be said at this point is that map sizes generally inflate by about a factor 10...20. Given that we increase the terrain raster resolution by a factor 256 that's not too bad. Also, scenario file sizes will shrink back to a few hundred Kilobytes again, so the net storage space demand may actually be almost neutral if you had a lot of scenarios based on the same map, particularly if you chose to embed the full map data set. But as always, new fancy graphics options here and there, they always eat half a frame per second or one, and when you add ten or twenty of these improvements you're down from 35 frames to 20, and that certainly is a noticeable drop. At the same time we cannot make all graphics settings fully optional because, well, you want a level playing field in multiplayer sessions. Disabling smoke grenade effects may improve the frame rate, but you can't really leave that decision to the individual network client for obvious reasons.

 

 

...oh, our preview videos. Hope you'll like them. All based on late Alpha/early beta versions; expect some warts to be removed before release."

[mpow66m]

ok,its May 1st,lets get the party started!More info plz.

[ghostdog688]

Really appreciate the indications as to system spec. Thankfully I'm not going to need an upgrade right now.

i know there's been some folk (including me) saying this already and thanks for developing the picture over the course of the month. 

I'm really looking forward to hearing about the progress made in terms of 3D cockpits to existing vehicles and any additional ones. When will the BMP's and other early cold-war era tanks get some love? These would be great for recreating things like the six-day war and scenarios where the fighting is a bit more even-handed and tactically... Interesting

 

i understand if you do not/cannot confirm at this time, but is it something in the pipeline at all? 

[Gibsonm]

1 hour ago, ghostdog688 said:

i understand if you do not/cannot confirm at this time, but is it something in the pipeline at all? 

 

I guess we'll all find out over the next 4 to 8 weeks, its not that long.

[Hedgehog]

Dang, time for an upgrade...

[ashdivay]

Here take all of it !!!!  <Throws money at his computer>

[LoupGarou]

Erhm, have I got this right? Will the new 4.0 be 64 bit only?

[Ssnake]

Yes.

[BigBadVuk]

I cant tell you how happy i feel now that i opted for faster single core cpu then to go with the one with more cores but slower clock & architecture...