Vehicles Feel too "Floaty" Missing Details

3D simulated water would be VERY difficult to implement on a sphere.

Though the trails and such could be a simple, and really nice change.

@bgolus

Could we get some trails for ships, air units, as well as ground units? There are already mods for all three and it really makes the game look much more polished.

The string emitter type isn't really a texture per se

You could also make the strings look like tracks with some simple opacity key arrays

Also, string particles are not performance hogs and will not lag your game unless you run it on a coffee maker; it's just a single particle after all.

PS. Emitter Z doesn't work because the strings are already 2D (I think that's why). If the big man gets here he might be able to explain with pin-point accuracy.

If you like visual effects try Company of Heroes 2. No rts this far has came close to looking as good.

The lack of trails on vehicles and planes are a style decision. The lack of trails on boats is because of that missing "Emitter Z" functionality. It was a feature that existed in the original particle system, but was removed when the particle system was rewritten to be much faster. Unfortunately I didn't realize that feature had been broken until too late, mainly because the trails I had done for the vehicles and planes had been removed.

That's odd, there's a mod for ship trails right now? Are you sure it wasn't reimplemented at some point not to your knowledge? =o

I liked Company of Heroes. Then I played Men Of War, and realised what Company of Heroes should have been.

My guess is its to do with the facing - as all strings appear to only be able to face camera, this makes them unsuitable for things like vehicle trails. Boat trails still work as they are more dynamic and so its less noticeable that they aren't flat to the ground/sea, where as it looks decidedly strange if you get too close to the trails I did above!

If you're being really picky, boat trails should be flat to the sea too but I suppose its less critical in that situation.

Oh, also, with regards to water - I would have thought that in this instance they could get away with using something like height maps instead of full blown fluid simulation, as that gives the detail you want with a lot less calculation. It's not like the water has to actually move, so to speak - it's all just surface deformation.

That being said, it certainly would look cool to see water flood into the crater from crashing a moon on someone's head, however impractical

Water does flood craters? =P

I was meaning more like, the sea rushing in and filling the hole as opposed to 'oh hey guys I was here already'

Just be careful. I don't know the exact implementation of the particle system in PA, but particles are usually vertices and do count against a) the memory bandwidth of the GPU and the b) shader throughput. If you use it excessively it will show up in the fps.

TA had suspension for cannon-fire. But it was just more ray-traced animations, there wasn't a physical object being represented in a simulation. Keep in mind, TA wasn't running any kind of physics engine, its ballistics were all calculated and animated based on terrain 'height' and distance, rather than shell velocity/angle and gravity. It was all 2d, much unlike PA.

edit: impacts too. and they'll show how its not quite right, it'll only rock on its suspension in two ways, regardless of how many impacts and from what direction they're coming.

I might be wrong, but I feel pretty certain that's how it worked.

@Diaboy : Can you share that mod? I really like how it looks.

I disapprove of that style decision. :<

If you give me a couple days, I can add trails for the other vehicles as well

I would appreciate it.

Strings (and beams) are the most expensive particles to use in terms of both memory bandwidth and vertex shader complexity, ignoring some of the mesh particle shaders. They use 2x the memory bandwidth of a "normal" particle. That being said the game can run a lot of particles before it starts to slow down noticeably, so dividing that number in half is still a lot of particles. Also vertex shader performance is rarely a limiting factor, generally it's the pixel shaders that are expensive, though the memory bandwidth used to send the particle locations and color data can become an issue for some hardware before the rendering costs show.

Then why did you buy it? Its nearest predecessors were basically played at icon distance at all times except for taking screen shots. If you don't like the style (cartoonish) thats kinda your problem too because they were completely upfront and honest about how it would look. As for effects: was there tank trails in the trailer, I can't remember back that far. Someone might make a mod though, but honestly tank trails coming out of icons isn't going to be all quite as pretty as you think. Perhaps if vehicles in particular were more animated (suspension, dust(?) it would look better when a player zooms in to take a break from the icon-wars.

Recoil and unit impact "rocking" were script-based (the "RockUnit(anglex, anglez)" function, in ROCKUNIT.h), and simply done by rotating the base of the whole unit in the opposite direction to to the shot/impact, then back again. Units could rock in any arbitrary direction. All rocking was identical, in terms of how fast the unit rocked. It wasn't particularly complicated, and probably only works because of the fixed camera angle - doing it this way in a fully 3D game would look weird.

TA Ballistics were based on shell velocity, angle and gravity. Maps with lower gravity had shots firing further (artillery was fun on moon maps). Ballistic weapons had velocities and max firing arcs, and firing solutions were found from that (although it had a hard-coded limit of 45 degrees in pitch for turrets, probably to avoid the issue of having multiple solutions for some shots).

So are there still plans for vanilla naval trails? The mod we currently have is awesome and something like this should definitely be in vanilla.

I dont know why trails are bad for PA style, because they look good and would add to venicle personality.

About "expansion", I would rather get it free, but Uber would make "dotation pack" with extra two commanders or one for 10$ or so, just to help them. I would buy it. I dont want to split up community for expansion and vanilla.

Yeah the "no trails" policy seems like a rather poor design decision.