Make plane flight height static

[MadRat]

Wouldn't you need to make one of those gaussian blurs for each aircraft type?

[Kloot]

Yes, faster planes would have to use a wider smoothing kernel to deal
with steep height changes well (which is why blurring the entire map is
a waste of memory, you'd still require runtime filtering which is not any
less expensive on a pre-blurred heightmap for the same kernel width).

[Pxtl]

Yes, faster planes would have to use a wider smoothing kernel to deal
with steep height changes well (which is why blurring the entire map is
a waste of memory, you'd still require runtime filtering which is not any
less expensive on a pre-blurred heightmap for the same kernel width).

It would be turning circle, not speed that would determine the smoothing anyways, wouldn't it?

[AF]

Polling the blurred heightmap rather than the actual heightmap would still be a vast improvement over what we currently have.

[Tribulexrenamed]

Speed would be the determining factor for blur radius because a faster plane would have want of more smoothing. You may want the path of a slow moving plane to conform to the terrain height a little bit. When you have a faster aircraft bobbing up and down over the same smoothing mask like a bouncy onion sack, it will look ridiculous.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for me to make a patch for Spring. My suggestion is that blur radius be unit defined, so that a modder could decrease load time by having the same blur radius used for multiple units. Spring would calculate the blurred heightmaps during loading, and combining the maps for several units would significantly decrease load time.

As an aside, the solution is quite simple to the static plane height problem. I think that a static minimum height defined by a map, which would then be added to a unit-specific value to determine actual absolute cruise height, could account for this desired behavior.

@masure:
Unfortunately you've skipped situation 3 which would be the immediate result of a higher cruise alt which also let's you hit targets on hills:

SENSE
This picture makes none, unfortunately.

[[Krogoth86]]

SENSE
This picture makes none, unfortunately.

Well it in fact does...

If your only approach to make hill targets bombardable is more flight height you'll get a problem: Your plane now flies higher and so can even hit things on hills but the point when the bombs are released is calculated by its speed, height and the gravity on the map. So as long as you won't rework all the weapons your bombers now will drop the bombs waaay sooner and depending on the map and some other factors you in fact could have the situation I described and that is the bombs get ejected damn soon and you have enough time to drop them outside of the enemie's AA-range...

[yuritch]

...which is up to the mod maker to decide if he wants that (higher cruiseAlt) or not. If he does, then he'd probably make some adjustements to AA ranges as well. No one is forcing high-alt bombers on all the mods.

[[Krogoth86]]

Well I thought of using manualBombSettings=1 ...
This also would be the better idea as with a high AA-range you'll fuck up all your gunships...

[Tribulexrenamed]

I understand what you are saying Krogoth. Altitude is important for a bomber to be able to drop bombs before it gets shot down, or the opposite if this effect is undesirable. However, I think that a more consistent and extensible tag name and system should be adopted. With the mess of tags that do nothing already in existence, we should make a more general tag such as flightMode=n. I think a good convention would be to have n=0 be the default (current) behavior, and n=1 be a static height. Then a blur radius tag (blurRadius or heightBlurRadius) could be defined, that when equal to 0 would not effect plane height at all.

On second thought, flightMode is not a good name for the tag, it should be cruiseMode or altMode or heightMode.

[MadRat]

Any time an aircraft in the real world interacts with the ground it is generally considered low level flight. There could be a couple of modes for low level flight; nap-of-the-earth and contour. The first mode, nap-of-the-earth, is a highly aggressive hugging of the ground and any objects in the way. In nap-of-the-earth flight you would go around objects rather than over. The second mode, contour, is less aggressive and involves flying over obstacles whenever possible.