Soldiers,
I heard your voice in the latest playtest about your concerns about the visual quality of Army Ops. Unfortunatly, this was not the intended focus of the Alpha (Server stability and netcode where the focus). But non the less you are right, the current Army Ops visuals are only bad placeholders.So i took the time to start reworking several elements. But please be aware that all of them are still work in progress and are just a the beginning of a long and growing list of future improvements. Some of them are Parallax occluded mapping, Tesselation and blended Textures.
Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM)
Parallax occluded mapping is a rendering method which uses concepts from ray tracing to produce virtually displaced textures. The end result is that textures such as stone walls have the appearance of depth which may make walls and floors feel less flat.POM will be used by several key objects in the game, to give it a more detailed look. This allows me to build extremly low poly assets, enhance them with more details and scale it to the performance and visuals I like and need.
Tesselation
Landscape Materials now rely heavily on Tesselation to add more geometry and detail to the Landscape. Rock surfaces are utelizing Tesselation to extreme amounts, giving the otherwise flat surface a real rocky geometry.
Reworking Geometry
Besides all those Shader improvements, I started to rework the entire geometry with more details and cleaner topology. In the hope to create visually pleasing Maps which serve the tactical gameplay.
