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Spintires Tank mods.


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8 minutes ago, mpow66m said:

whys the TC so small.?

Terrain looks fake,DCS 2.5 is better IMHO.

General mud has won more battles then any other commander. 

Spintires is not a tank sim nor will it ever be.

But the terrain model is very realistic IMO. Deep sticky mud rivers that have to be forged

I have no interest in spintires as a sim but i can only imagine terrain like that implemented in SB 

 

 

 

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To be fair, Spintires: Mudrunner (or just plain Spintires) does work quite well for what it does: simulating off-road driving. In fact, I actually use it to work out how to properly conduct recovering off-road using a winch, how to properly climb the sides of hills, etc. 

 

Not that the desert has much mud, mind you. 

 

 

 

That being said, the terrain engine, while nice, would be kind of silly to add into a tank simulator. The Abrams, for example, doesn't have a transfer case to manipulate, locking differentials to activate or deactivate, or tires to air down to a specific PSI. You just shift the transmission into drive and power through it. Now if you are talking about wheeled vehicles, it is a different story. 

 

 

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34 minutes ago, RENEGADE-623 said:

does not look enticing to me at all.  plus, the model is all wrong, tc hatch on the wrong side

 

It is a limitation of the game engine: Spintires focuses on off reading old Soviet wheeled vehicles. This is a third party mod.

 

Also, the "TC" is turning a steering wheel. :D

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This video is fun to watch.

The BTR seems to handle the terrain well.

The reason i would like to see a engine like Spintires it would add to the fidelity of SB 

In the real world an army on the move does not always have the luxury of using main roads 

 

 

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It's one thing to model a single vehicle or two like this.

Steel Beasts must be capable of moving entire battlegroups. To do it with that level of fidelity whenever a player teleports into any random vehicle requires a server farm to handle it. One day, maybe, but don't get your hopes too high that it'll happen anytime soon. Yes, you may dream, but some dreams have a realistic chance to come true, others do not.

Note also the size of the terrain in Spintires.

We need to be able to handle 100x100km², some of our customers would rather have 300x300, or why not have the entire globe available right away, while we're at it?

 

The problem is, people look at a number of isolated examples and then ask "why can't we have all of this combined". PC games, and in this context SB counts as a game, are examples of high performance computing. We're trying to squeeze as much juice from the lemon as we can doing what we already do. Loading more and more features on top of it all only works as long as the hardware is becoming more powerful at the same rate. When features outpace hardware growth you're beginning to see frame rates dropping. And guess what, people don't like low frame rates either. ;)

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1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

It's one thing to model a single vehicle or two like this.

Steel Beasts must be capable of moving entire battlegroups. To do it with that level of fidelity whenever a player teleports into any random vehicle requires a server farm to handle it. One day, maybe, but don't get your hopes too high that it'll happen anytime soon. Yes, you may dream, but some dreams have a realistic chance to come true, others do not.

Note also the size of the terrain in Spintires.

We need to be able to handle 100x100km², some of our customers would rather have 300x300, or why not have the entire globe available right away, while we're at it?

 

The problem is, people look at a number of isolated examples and then ask "why can't we have all of this combined". PC games, and in this context SB counts as a game, are examples of high performance computing. We're trying to squeeze as much juice from the lemon as we can doing what we already do. Loading more and more features on top of it all only works as long as the hardware is becoming more powerful at the same rate. When features outpace hardware growth you're beginning to see frame rates dropping. And guess what, people don't like low frame rates either. ;)

I fully realise were a long way away from such terrain in SB.

But i am intrigued by whats possible.

But i also realise that substantial amounts of time and money would need to be invested 

 

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Intrigued by "what's possible"?

I just explained why it's not possible:

 

Just because you see it in one game that has but a handful of vehicles in a small terrain doesn't mean that the technology scales to terrain a hundred times larger with a hundred times or more vehicles in it. In fact, it is pretty much guaranteed that it doesn't scale. I'm not going to rule out that, somehow, eventually, these problems can be solved. But I have not the slightest idea how that's supposed to happen within the next five years.

We've spoken to developers of just physics engines who specialize in vehicle suspension simulations. They boasted to be extremely performant (like "we can simulate dozens of vehicle suspensions"). When we confronted them with our requirement to have at least 1,000 vehicles simultaneously on the same PC driving off-road they went pale and stopped talking. And we need some AI, and render the 3D scene in addition to all that.

We're not magicians. We're engineers. There are limitations to what's possible.

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9 hours ago, Ssnake said:

Loading more and more features on top of it all only works as long as the hardware is becoming more powerful at the same rate. When features outpace hardware growth you're beginning to see frame rates dropping. And guess what, people don't like low frame rates either. ;)

The curse of modern PC gaming! xD

 

But seriously, IMHO there's a lot to like about present SB - not to mention the upcoming new terrain engine. I also agree with Ssnake that when it comes to the question of which feature to emphasize, eye candy or realism (rendering of entire battle groups, large maps etc.), I would go for realism any time.

 

Just my two cent.

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It's rather self-evident that the mud in Spintires is much more realistic than what Steel Beasts has to offer in the "mobility" part of its simulation. So, going by "realism" alone - even if it is just that of procedures and results, not photorealism - wouldn't help much as a guideline about our priorities. SB Pro first and foremost is a tactical combat simulation. So everything that helps there, helps the product. SB Pro als is about crew procedure and precision gunnery training. So that's another thing that we're doing.

 

What Steel Beasts never was, is a driving simulation. That's an entirely different domain with entirely different requirements. If we ever were to branch out a driving simulation from the current code, it would become a separate product simply because you then HAVE to throw away much of the tactical baggage, just as much as you can't load the felled tree of a detailed suspension and mud simulation on the back of a camel that is already laden with tactics, AI, and rendering.

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Fair enough.

 

Would anyone else like to see clods (lumps) of mud thrown up by tracked vehicles in SB when on muddy terrain? 

 

Currently the dust trails look accurate over dry ground, but the only way to see if vehicles are straying into boggy ground is to jump to them and examine their flotation performance from the outside view. Not always possible.

 

If the particle system code for dust generation could be extended to mud spray I for one would be very happy. This effect is present in the Spintires clip and in DCS Combined Arms, and probably others.  if implemented  in SB, it would have value as realtime feedback as to field conditions and suitability of wheeled versus tracked AI assets to push in a given direction.  Becoming something more than just 'eye candy'.

 

Looking forward to the new terrain engine, along with everyone else!

 

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30 minutes ago, Trackpin said:

 

 

Would anyone else like to see clods (lumps) of mud thrown up by tracked vehicles in SB when on muddy terrain? 

 

i would never argue against content unless there was some tradeoff with frame rate (in which case user side options via sliders works well). yes, i would go for that for a similar reason that i like wind effects and vehicle impacts on trees, grasses and so on like you see in the videos above- more graphics cues related to situational awareness. at the same time, the ground clutter details in steal beasts aren't necessarily 'real' or defined objects but phantoms, so rendering something like that may require a profound reworking of the code.

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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Colossus,

 

The softness of the ground (wet or dry) forms part of the underlying definition created in the Map Editor, so I don't see a connection with the "ground clutter" settings. In addition, the dust trail modelling can be seen well beyond the cut-off distances of ground clutter.

 

 I do not know to what extent areas of boggy ground have been manually placed, randomly generated or derived from geographical data sets. If this feature is the result of hours of pixel pushing by eSim's map-makers, then my sincerest thanks goes out to them. The fact that any section of the opposite bank of a river may be too soft to climb out of makes a detailed recce of crossing points worth carrying out. Even amphibious assets in the game can be defeated by combinations of bank inclination and softness.

 

This is just one of the little details that makes SB such an interesting simulation. The suggestion of mud spray would provide a visual cue to something that is already built in to the product.

 

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2 hours ago, Trackpin said:

Colossus,

 

The softness of the ground (wet or dry) forms part of the underlying definition created in the Map Editor, so I don't see a connection with the "ground clutter" settings. In addition, the dust trail modelling can be seen well beyond the cut-off distances of ground clutter.

 

 I do not know to what extent areas of boggy ground have been manually placed, randomly generated or derived from geographical data sets. If this feature is the result of hours of pixel pushing by eSim's map-makers, then my sincerest thanks goes out to them. The fact that any section of the opposite bank of a river may be too soft to climb out of makes a detailed recce of crossing points worth carrying out. Even amphibious assets in the game can be defeated by combinations of bank inclination and softness.

 

This is just one of the little details that makes SB such an interesting simulation. The suggestion of mud spray would provide a visual cue to something that is already built in to the product.

 

Trackpin

that's not what i was talking about. you're referring to settings which affect mobility- traction, drag, softness and hardness of the ground types.

 

i was explaining visually grasses and bushes and trees moving and being displaced by wind effects and vehicles passing through them, which has nothing to do with the above. the reason why i say this (aside from looking more realistic) is because vehicles moving through grasses and tree branches and bushes should give visual cues to movement- you can detect there's something going on behind those tall grasses or in that tree line, say, even if the vehicles themselves look concealed, you know there is something active doing that.

 

i mention the ground clutter because there are two types in steel beasts- the bushes and grasses and rocks which are hand drawn and placed in specific parts on the map by the user. and the second type, the ground clutter drawn automatically by the program as per the map theme settings. the second type is more customized, it can be drawn more dense, or lower or higher than the first type on the map. it's also not 'real', it phases out from view after a certain distance, and the computer sees through it altogether at any distance. this second type is what i mean which probably comes into conflict to having grasses and bushes physically impacted as i was proposing- since they aren't 'real' objects in the first place compared to the first type.

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Yes, I can see where you are coming from with the displaced vegetation idea, but I was trying to move the conversation on from effects that Nils views as impracticable with current computing power, to a smaller specific visual cue based on what is already in the game. Perhaps this belongs in the the "wishlist" thread as it is now more about SB than Spintires anyway.

Appreciate your comments.

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Just to clarify it was never my intention to compare Spintires with SB.

There two very different sims.

My intention to highlight a terrain type i would like to see in SB in the future 

If the boffins ever figure out how resolve the issues Ssnake highlighted.

I Guessed it would take some serious computing power to generate 

A terrain engine like spintires with a lot of AFVs Arty Etc but did not realise just how mamoth a task it would be.

May be i will start a similar thread in about ten years time. LoL

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