hmmm. very interesting. so in an aircraft map, we get just aircraft, right? there should be some huge maps with small combat zones, such as unconnected islands that can only be captured with an arial drop-in. this allows aircraft to wizz too and fro, and players don't have to run equivilant distances. or perhaps a large mountain map, with proper mountain sized mountains, and one main base is on one, and the other on the other... yet somehow the only place infantry would ever need to actually walk around would be the villages in between or something? i'd also quite like gunships and stuff on the traditional maps, like canyon. it would still be fun.
if you look at the old screen shots from islands you can see that the water level was near up by the tops of the hills. im assuming this will be resumed once aircrafe are in.
One thing that has to be sorted is the combat areas, there should be destinct areas where infantry fight, and inbetween areas where aircraft and fight, and infantry can travel. I want to see a sort of "area denial" AA defence sort of method, so there would generally be the BE area where turrets prevent NF aircraft, vice verse, and a middleground where the battle rages.
One thing has me worried though... An effective method of disabling aircraft bombings of a base... is to build it near the "edge" where they skybox meets the playing field (Perticulary bad in duststorm; where tanks smash into the sides) So this got me worried... wouldn't aircraft smash into the "Boundaries" of the map and blow up?
there should be boundaries like there are in the BF-series... "Turn around in the next 5 sec or you WILL die! :D"
I think Airquake stuly sky boundaries would work. You just turn a bit and continue along the edge of the skybox, it might not be realistic but it works like charm.
An early warning system would work. Like "WARNING: Out of range". Then a 5 second countdown and the plane falls out of the sky.
How about the Starfox method, where it automatically turns you around? It's a non-lethal method, so you don't get pissed off when you end up dead while chasing someone, and it'll keep people from wasting res by flying stupidly out of bounds.
you will get used to it pretty fast and it looks real too.. also people will get the feeling they arent playing in a box
I was hoping to do a hacked method to get how BF2 does it. If you fly beyond the end of the map, the map actually repeats again all the while counting down and hurting you. However, that requires the mapper to make both sides of the map match up perfectly and actually repeat with the skybox. That's more difficult. To hurt people and destroy them before they reach the absolute edge will require us to start hurting them very early before they're close to the edge so that they can't actually reach it while alive. The Starfox method or pushing the aircraft so that it turns along the edge instead of against would be the safest method.
If all else fails, the mapper could put func_pushes along the edges of the skybox, increasing in intensity the closer you get to the edge. It would basically work as a quick and sloppy non-lethal method. Here's an idea if you do decide to go with the damage method, though; instead of having it damage the aircraft, have it deal drowning damage to the player, so that not only do you not explode if you nick some boundary with a heavily damaged aircraft, but you can recover from the damage over time.
Krenzo's proposed method is interesting because it maximizes flight area, and that's important (almost a must) for maps where ground vehicles and aircrafts meet. They are supposed to be smaller than aircraft only maps, and more detailed because of that. That's going to pay a price, because a 3dskybox will be needed, like duststorm or mvalley where terrain continues seamlessly outside the map. But this time will be non tilable, so it's a bit harder for mappers. Such 3dskybox can weight in vertex count almost like half of the main map. Fortunately, I guess Valve fixed a major issue related to this, because 3dskybox was rendered all the time, even the parts you couldn't see.
