Hello everybody,

 

While engineer and artist teams work on Battle of Kuban aircraft, our dedicated map department is making the landscape of the new theater of war. As we mentioned earlier, we use Rise of Flight tech as a start, but we spent a lot of resources to make it up to the task. We improved the mountains rendering in the first place, since mountains and foothills occupy 22 thousands square km of the total 120 thousands square km and the mountain coast is 350 km long. Theoretically we could create this landscape using existing technologies, but it would take unrealistic amount of time and we didn't have so many resources to do it the old-fashioned way. Therefore, we spent some time creating the procedural texturing system for mountaneous terrain. Surely, the modern tech requires not only applying the textures, but also choosing correct materials to make the landscape as natural looking as possible, getting rid of unnaturaly straight lines and borders. Here are several screenshots of our first attempts at this tech, which show promising results:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main data source for this landscape is the height map. Its analysis and processing gives us the slope steepness data that can be used to determine the surface type at any given coordinates - is this a rocky slope, or a patch of soil covered with low grass, or a forested area. The orientation of a slope relative to cardinal directions and a bit of randomness are also taken into account. The snow line (above which snow covers the ground) is also determined using the height map data, but of course it is not a simple height slice - it depends on slope steepness, its orientation (which affects insolation), etc.

 

We almost finished creating special objects for sea ports. This task wasn't trivial either - their layout changed since 1943 very much and it took a full blown historical research to determine how they looked back then. Kuban towns will include the famous landmarks, they are already modeled as well.

 

Our map department is progressing according to schedule and soon we'll be able to show you the early screenshots of Battle of Kuban landscapes and towns that will be close to their final look.