Due to the interest in jungle maps in recent polls, I thought it might be handy if we had a thread where we could discuss techniques to help overcome the issues involved with maps of this type - namely the amount of foliage. Some quick tests show that, with a decent density of trees, a vis distance of 2500-3000 is reasonable. This includes a minor amount of ground foliage. A shot of what this looks like is attatched. More ground foliage would be required for a more realistic look, but I do not have the appropriate props to do this. I have allowed a small performance buffer to account for this. This was acheived by setting a fade distance on every prop equivalent to the fog fade distance. This means that only trees up to the edge of the fog will get drawn. The obvious drawback of this method is that visibility is greatly reduced, and so the possibility of open areas within the same map is limited. If anyone has any tips on how to make good-looking (and well performing) jungles, please share.
Well you wont have a problem with low visibility if you design the paths so that there not open keep small trails with windey paths so that the visibility is always blocked by a foregn object like a rock or mass trees rather then fog, and misty atmosphere. Design the paths so firefights, and squad objectives can be pulled out without haveing too see across half the map
You can use PVS and leaves to your advantage. Surround the area with hills and open areas around it will not draw the jungle area obscured by the hills.
Emp_tropical, a map project started by me and Hellion, will be jungle themed. It'll have hills that prevent you from rendering too much at once... However the map is on ice because at the moment, I don't have time. But I think I'm going to return to the project soon.
well i made a jungle test map for another mod and it turned out quite well. I used rocks to brake up the map and help with vis, fog, and prop fade distances and as you can see my fps was fine.
It's just a matter of optimized LODs for the jungle trees and bushes. I suppose you played Far Cry, there trees have multiple LODs, the simplest one it's just a 2D 2-triangle mesh. A jungle or forest map needs good looking and optimized trees, no more. To bypass the prop limit in a map I suppose there should be needed clusters with several trees and bushes in each one. To prevent rendering too much at once the best method is z-clip distance, it should be used even if you want to use other methods like block vis brushes.
Massive jungles could perhaps be possible if one could turn the tree models into sprites outside a certain radius.
Gabe Newell was actually pretty enthusiastic about that technique (Image-Based Rendering), JJ. Considering that Episode 2 will offer huge forest environments, they might have implemented it. Not that it really helps us right now.
There is nothing that prevent us doing that now, as I said, it's up to modeler to make tree models with the amount of detail and LODs required, including a 2D farthest LOD. Tree models also should be made like clusters of several trees and bushes, then a map with thousand of tress would be possible (not rendered at once, of course). I have some experience making trees, hope some other modeler have time to make the empire's jungles I'm also planning a second kind of trees for aircrafts maps (1/16 scale), purely as 2d sprites. Due to large distances, I think we could use the detail on materials technique to create 2d trees forests.
