[Black Wolf]

I seem to recall something along these lines before, but I'm not certain. Is it possible to have the AI take control of the players shipif he goes outside a certain radius (Achieveable with distance sexps and a waypoint at 0,0,0) and fly him back towards the centre (again, possible with giving the newly AI cotrolled player a waypoints goal). Then, a few seconds later, returning control to the player. This is the way it works in Rogue squadron, and I've never had any trouble accepting it. Agfain like Rogue squadron, the rest of the field could be flat, tile textured earth. Not beautiful I'd admit, but better than nothing.

Anyway, it'd mean the actual landscape model could be a lot smaller, and have therefor a higher pixel/polygon density, and you wouldn;t need to have the player ramming into some invisible shield if they went to far out of bounds.

It's obviously not an ideal solution, but its worked for other games in the past and in my view would be a better choice than not having atmosdpheric combat at all.

[Knight Templar]

Rogue Squadron and Star Fox.

Sounds reasonable to me.

[##UnknownPlayer##]

I have to say that it sounds to me that landscape/atmospheric FS2 combat would be best achieved after RandomTiger has done his DX8 HW TnL upgrade on the engine. Then it's probably be easier to manually write a full terrain engine then hack one in.

[Nico]

mmh, excuse me, but if it's a flat ground, two polygons are way enough for it, no? ( well, judjing FS2 can't correct maps alignement on large polys, 2 isn't enough, but still you don't need a ludicrous amount of them ).

[phreak]

not if you want to entrench an installation in the side of a mountain.

[Nico]

if you want a mountain, that's not what I call a flat landscape

[Rampage]

Just a thought:  What if you did something with the terrain like what Terminal Reality did in Hellbender?  I used to MOD Hellbender on Smartwellet before I came to FS2 MODding.  What they have is one mundo one-faced model with textures on every respective tile.  The editor was pretty powerful too.  It allowed you to edit every individual vertex of a tile to make it into virtually whatevery you wanted it to be (mountain, building, etc.)  Of course, TR created a big set of different textures to use in a variety of different situations.

If you think that my idea is great (which I hope you do), then contact TR and ask them to release the source code for Hellbender.

[TopAce]

There is a thread about something like this in the FS Modding section, too. I have doubts you could 'call' the player back when he/she goes outside the maximal distance of the center.
That thread is here