Jungle Fire

[tatne]

Looks like we are having a nice jungle map!

[PFunk]

can i ask you about your gamerig ?
i have 4GB DDR3, AMD Phenom-II x64, Windows7 64Bit, Nvidia GTX 295
and if i play on high settings i have small lags on the map, that means on a dedicated server there will be huge lag !
thats why its not that easy to get the jungle more dense

as you may have mentioned there are also some bridges on this map which will also be CPs included in the different routes

Undergrowth: you cant see the undergrowth because the most screens are taken from far distances to the ground, there wont be undergrowth as high as an soldier because of the known problems !

I have an E-8400 OC'd to 3.6 w/ 4G Ram and a 512 nVidia 8800GT. That said I have played OGT since before this build some crappy tower that had nothing spectacular and might have been able to max our Commander Keen, Heretic 1, and if I was lucky Diablo and nothing more. OGT was never a problem and always a favourite with no real lag issues.

Honestly the question I think is what are the map's priorities and how realistic is it given limitations and given all of that considered, is it really worth it?

What i mean by that is we want: 1. A believable jungle map (imo that means OGT or Tad Sae, not Barracuda which is a bamboo forest) 2. a combined arms map with MBTs and Helos, 3. a playable frame rate or server lag given known limitations based on map design.

As far as I can tell getting what I see as an acceptable #1 to function with a already laid out #2 makes #3 unobtainable, according to your suggestion. So by that I would say, is it possible within the framwork of a BF2 engine to create a 4km asset friendly map that does not smack of unacceptably obvious terrain compromize or conversely high lag expectation?

Really this is both excitement and unhappiness in one for me. I was wanting a jungle map so bad since OGT was removed. Now I see that we cannot get apparently a combined arms map that does exactly what OGT did for basic infantry fighting. My question is, what was wrong with a small 2km or 1km map with OGT style terrain? I can see why it would make assets utterly useless or overpowered, but in the context of a jungle environment most air or armor assets were perfunctory to the infantry's duty, the only real exception being the occasional Huey insert/exfil usually on a level equally pre/post PR size battle (meaning mid PR battle is less possible given terrain and how hot the LZ would be), and the only exception was the attack chopper which operated almost entirely based on ground directed missions which actually had hard info on target positioning therefore short view distance and BVR would be fairly acceptable and realistic.

My point is that the current PR Dev interest in promoting the notion of the 4km combined arms transition doesn't really mesh with jungle combat which tends to be one of the few exceptions to the future forward modern western army ideal of combined arms. Look at vietnam, the US had to develop defoliant chemicals in order to allow for air and satellite units to be of ANY use without explicit vectoring from ground units.

Give me a 2km map with nothing but Landies/Humvees and some trucks and my SA-80 with irons and it'll be a romping good fight. Jungles aren't meant to be fought over by jets and tanks and choppers. Its meant to be good boots ont he ground crawling through and clearing every individual spider hole, not calling in some pretty air strike that historically seemed to not really kill off that many VC anyway (somehow they managed to live long enough to drag off their dead making for those lovely skewed 'guesstimated' body counts). Proper jungle cover means AT is just in heaven and crawling up your butt. Depriving them of that cover is just making for a forest map with a jungle feel.

OGT plus another square KM of terrain. Thats what i want. MBTs are just a pipe dream that any Chindit could tell you is utter nonsense anyway.

Not trying to be a jerk, or rain on great hard work, just being realistic about my time in playing jungle maps in PR.

[ChiefRyza]

OGT had lots of bamboo, a short view distance and some heavy undergrowth. It was not a thick jungle map. Look around the community maps section and you might find a few It isn't impossible, just an entire map covered in dense jungle won't be happening on PR until we get a new engine that can utilize hardware fully.

Just a side note, you *seem* awfully sour about jungle maps because of a few very, very early WIP screenies. What your asking for, as in, vegetation like in your screenshot, would take hundreds of thousands of overgrowth objects. BF2 was never designed for that kind of vegetation in game.





That is an old screenshot, but I would expect Amokandy to reach that or further in the future. It is a little hard to find the right colour balance with the trees, so I wouldn't be too harsh on him at this point. Now, it is possible to have areas full of jungle with others with very little cover, but you give infantry some real advantage in these areas. Compare it to OGT below, and you can see it was never really that dense.

[Rudd]

re the 'its not a good enough jungle comments'

I agree to an extent, but it does work pretty well ingame and there are ideas around to improve the visibility jungle thing.

the worst case scenaro is that it gets renamed back to its 1st name 'Forest Fire' China isn't always jungle

silver lining, the old name has alliteration. XD

don't worry about the objectives dtacs, I put Points of interest at around equal distances all over the place
theres tonnes of objectives that I've tried to 'make sense' rather than random spaces, and I've tried to make each important location interesting. only a couple are basically forest areas with an 'excuse item' to fight over, like the beached ship. but the point of a couple of them is for the team with the best amphibious ability to asymmertically face the side with teh best air ability, the picture with the white circles has missed a few of the control points

you'll see when you eventually go on the map that there are places that you can use insider knowledge to get in to (you figure it out with a walk around )

you'll be suprised just how varied the map is

and btw guys look at a picture of a real bamboo forest, and then look at vbf2 bamboo, it looks awful and that is why its only used in one place afaik right now on this map; to surround the temple as buddhism sometimes features bamboo barriers to keep evil spirits from sacred places.

performance wise chaps, do not fear. The lightmapatlas for this map is pretty small compared to others due to the small number of objects, the variation of OG is quite low to keep the OGaltlas small (big = crashes, especially for ATI users) and the team have gained greater knowlege of the OG settings, R-DEV Rhino in particular was very helpful in describing those settings, they will allow us to balance performance etc more. Andy is doing a great job working on this to ensure its optimised as well as good

[VapoMan]

:0 Rudd is back from the grave!

From my experience in mapping, jungle maps and 4km are the two hardest things to make. You have to remember guys that a 4km map isnt just 4 times as big as 1km, its actually 16 times as big, 16km squared.

Not only do you have to have a reasonable viewdistance because of the large map size, you also need enough trees to give cover. Its hard to get the balance right between viewdistance, tree cover and performance. To many trees creates horrible server lag and low FPS.

I think the jungle looks pretty good. If The only thing I would change would be more medium sized trees. From the screenshots Ive seen, its mostly really tall jungle trees and small bushes.


BTW, I am very interested to find out more about those OG settings

[Amok@ndy]

BTW, I am very interested to find out more about those OG settings

they are the best keeped secret

[VapoMan]

they are the best keeped secret

Well it wont really be a secret when a map using it is released hehehe

[Amok@ndy]

Well it wont really be a secret when a map using it is released hehehe

that was irony

[usmcguy]

Looks great Andy and Rudd! Looking forward to some sneaky stuff..

[centralhigh76]

Looks Good Andy!! Rudd also nice job

[Arc_Shielder]

Yeah river boats will make for a great Apocalypse Now: Redux mentality.

Exactly my thoughts. Good to see some upcoming variety.

[Ts4EVER]

Nice, but I think you should do some fine tuning in the lighting department. The trees look very out of place considering the rather reddish lighting of the terrain and the sky texture.

[dunem666]

nicehighlights

is the jungle trees a bit bright?

its like they are almost glow in the dark :/

[The_MDexs]

a jungle map Hmm the killer for your graphic card

but nice map

[G.Kibler[3|AIU]]

This would look nice as a veitnam map

[Megagoth1702]

I guess this is still WIP. I just took a look at the screenshots at the first page and I absolutely love the minimap, looks great, friggin jungle.

The ingame view itself though is weird as hell, the trees look like they are made of bubble gum. The tree texture is too bright and there is no "muddy" feel and look like on the mini map.

I guess this will be changed too,I can not imagine any map maker to have such color imbalance in his map, lol.

Looking forward to this map.

[Rudd]

The ingame view itself though is weird as hell, the trees look like they are made of bubble gum. The tree texture is too bright and there is no "muddy" feel and look like on the mini map.

its being played with atm, its a light setting which are very easy to change, unlike a texture change

[-=shootmeplz=-]

the map name needs a subtitle: Jungle Fire - the bridge wars. I count 5 bridges - imagine them blown up, the team with vehicle superiority is pretty much screwed! the combat engineer kit will be the most important one.

[Hauteclocque]

Who said there won't be amphibious vehicles ?

Choppers can drop crates, and both French Forces and PLA Forces have amphibious vehicles

[Amok@ndy]

+ Supplytrucks that can repair bridges + fords