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planes flying higher

Started by Fabio, November 05, 2011, 04:36:34 PM

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Fabio

Presently planes fly one (or 2?) tiles above ground. This means that if cities have highrises planes fly among their roofs or straight through them.

Could planes have a cruise height of 4 tiles above ground? Or even better to set it in dats? (older planes will fly lower, newer higher)

and could they be forbidden to fly over buildings higher than 1 tile less of current height (also for take off and landing)?

prissi

Planes fly 3+ and +6 tiles above ground. More will lead to drawing errors (or a severe drop in performance for each additional height level.)

Fabio

Could they consider bridges' and buildings' height together with land's?

prissi

No, planes do no routing whatsoever for the moment. The just fly the shortest way, and also go over the highest mountains.

Spacethingy

Quote from: Fabio on November 05, 2011, 04:36:34 PM
Presently planes fly one (or 2?) tiles above ground. This means that if cities have highrises planes fly among their roofs or straight through them.

Could planes have a cruise height of 4 tiles above ground? Or even better to set it in dats? (older planes will fly lower, newer higher)

and could they be forbidden to fly over buildings higher than 1 tile less of current height (also for take off and landing)?

I wanted to make this very request myself, therefore I bump! (I appreciate Prissi's reply, but this was some time ago now...)
Planes do often look rather silly at their current height when they plough through buildings, especially when building close to cities.
Life is like a Simutrans transformer:

You only get one of them, and you can't have it on a slope.

Ters

Unfortunately, planes actually fly slightly too high for the graphics system as it is. We'll have to wait until someone figures out another way to render the world and actually rewrites it.

Fabio

but iirc the graphics engine handles up to 4 tiles high, hence planes could fly 3 tiles from the ground.
also adding buildings as no fly zones for takeoff and landing.

Ters

The current problem (or one of them) with planes isn't from the ground up, but from the plane down.

Fabio

sorry, could you explain me that?

IgorEliezer

#9
The thing that annoys me is not the flight height, it is the flight offset that is fixed all the way long: the plane keeps bouncing up and down if it flies over a rough terrain.

That's the way that would look better: before the highest level, the plane only flies straight and up; after that, it only flies straight and down. But this would require routing.


Sarlock

It would have to take a whole different drawing strategy to make planes work that way, I suppose.  The advantage to them flying fairly low is that you can see the shadows right now: the higher they go, the farther down the screen the shadow will be from the actual airplane, until at some point the shadow is off screen.  Unless we do away with the idea of shadows altogether and just draw the plane as one of the final objects on the screen, placing it over top of whatever happens to be behind it.  But I imagine this would require rewriting a section of the graphics draw routines... with many complications, no doubt.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

Ters

Quote from: Fabio on July 17, 2013, 09:31:38 PM
sorry, could you explain me that?

When following a plane, you want to center on the plane not the ground directly below it. This apparently confuses the rendering logic so that the world isn't clipped right at the edges of the viewport, at least in the small view in the vehicle's window. I don't know why, and it is in a part of the code that scares me.

For the plane's shadow, I imagine sorting it relative to the objects on the ground is a problem.

Quote from: IgorEliezer on July 18, 2013, 01:19:56 AM
The thing that annoys me is not the flight height, it is the flight offset that is fixed all the way long: the plane keeps bouncing up and down if it flies over a rough terrain.

That's the way that would look better: before the highest level, the plane only flies straight and up; after that, it only flies straight and down. But this would require routing.



Is it just me, or did planes in Simutrans fly like that a few years ago?

IgorEliezer

Quote from: Ters on July 18, 2013, 04:42:08 AM
Is it just me, or did planes in Simutrans fly like that a few years ago?
Is it just me who barely plays with airplanes...

Well, now I notice that happens only if "Follow me". This explains all. ^^'