Simulate A Distant Horizon. How?

Graphics
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Hey guys,

I hope this is an appropriate place for this question.

I’ve been working on a skydiving game and have moved to the level design. It’s an interested problem and I’m sure there could be some great solutions out there. So here it goes.

I need to simulate the visual experience of skydiving. The player will “Jump” from a height of 10k-13k feet. At that height, on a completely clear day, the visible horizon is about 122 miles away. A 1-1 map would be around 50,000 sq. miles. Obviously a map that big would be horrendous.

So how can i simulate a distance like that, without the map being that large.

Some things that come to mind are:

  • Flight Simulators
  • Other skydiving games (Just Cause 2, Wii Sports Skydiving)

The interesting thing about other skydiving games is they all seem to revolve around water…hmmm. In that case I would just have some water and a skybox that blends into it. But instead I would like the scenery to be around large spans of open land.

Any ideas on how to simulate the appearance of 50,000 square miles of land and sky?
Its been a fun thought process and what games are all about. Illusion. But how to do it…

Thanks for reading!

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This might be helpful.

–Eric

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Hey,

I know you dont really want to use a large map, but honestly that might be your best bet, if you want the ground to appear closer and closer as you fall. Will the player actually be touching down on the ground in the game? What you could do, is just create a huge plane (or create everything else really tiny) and then just add a material to it, and use a top down arial land texture. This shouldnt slow performance at all, since its just one plane and one texture. If the player will actually be getting close to the ground or actually landing, since the plane is so big and the texture wouls be just as big, they’ed basically be landing on a huge pixelated, blurry area, so what you could do, is designate one specific area for them to land, and on that area, create a terrain or plane or whatever you want and decorate that accordingly, so you can have a more detailed ground texture and surroundings. As far as a skybox, any one should do, as long as the plane is big enough. It’s not a very elegant solution, but it will work, I’ve done something similar in a game where I needed a huge far off horizon while standing at the top of a massive mountain.

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@Eric
Thanks! The two cameras approach is something thats just not on my mind. That post will be very helpful.

@HK
Looks like I’ll be mixing that with some other techniques. As long as a massive plane doesn’t overload the CPU with just the numbers involved it will solve the very far off horizon problem. Still, the active area for the player could be pretty big.

The maximum glide ratio (parachute open) is 3 - 1. So at 13k feet the player could potentially travel 7.3 miles under canopy… and still land anywhere. So that at least limits it to a 171 square mile map :P.

There its the option of a “No Fly Zone” and i think that will be in there to a point no matter what.

The main thing i’ve gathered from the two responses is there will be two cameras and two “Scenes”. The close and the distant.

So, my goal now will be:

  • A low detail, far off environment. Carried by a separate camera to maintain perspective.
  • A high detail “Landing Zone”
  • Some sort of LOD system for general terrain outside the designated landing zone

Hmm… the brain is ticking now.

Thanks for the response guys! Any more ideas are greatly welcomed.

I’ll post some updates and share with the community as I try some of this stuff :slight_smile: