Bettering No Man's Land through shaders (DVD tech?)

[Justicier]

For the most part, graphical fidelity in IL2GB is quite good. An unfortunate exception to this rule is No Man's Land. The current way of rendering NML looks very out of place with a different level of quality than the rest of IL2GB terrain, and is very noticeable particularly at low level. It has an overall negative effect on immersion when the terrain that should be a battered mess of craters of various elevations, pooled water, debris scatter, and trenches, instead looks flat and very obviously "painted on."

 

Now, Great Battles has tech under the hood that could possibly help improve this, using the shaders that go along with the Dynamic Visual Damage. The DVD tech has a texture applied when local damage is taken, and due to the shader, it appears to have three dimensional depth to it. This is of course an illusion, and enables better performance than rendering an actual 3d model for the damage.

 

Ideally, the best looking way (with decent performance) to accomplish a better looking and more dynamic terrain would be a combination of PBR, Tesselation, and Triplanar shaders, but I'm not sure if the GB engine is capable of all of these.

 

An example of this sort of shading in use would be the mod "Parallax" for the original Kerbal Space Program, which utilizes the aforementioned shaders to great effect.

Video example of how the shading tech can look even on an old version of Unity:

 

KSP Parallax

 

While this effect will not provide as good fidelity as actual 3d model rendering for craters and uneven terrain in no man's land, at the very least it would improve the immersion of even low altitude flights over it. Where this will fall apart is when a forced landing is attempted in no mans land, as the terrain will appear rougher than it actually is, unless a collision model is tacked onto the terrain shader.

 

I suppose the ultimate question is, would this refinement be worth implementing?

Edited May 15, 2023 by Justicier