Suggestion - make Ground Unit Positions Look More Natural with Damaged Grass and Soil

[Husar]

One small feature could make ground unit positions look much more believable and immersive.

At the moment, when vehicles, artillery, tents, heavy machine guns, or other ground objects are placed in grassy fields or under trees, the terrain remains completely untouched. As a result, many positions look artificial, as if the equipment had simply been dropped there by a know newsletter Korean UFO 😅.

It would be great if the terrain underneath these objects could automatically change to damaged grass, exposed soil, mud, or flattened vegetation. Even subtle changes would make a huge difference and help ground positions blend naturally into the environment.

This feature could work in two ways:

• Automatic terrain decals/textures for all missions generated by the game, so every battlefield would immediately look more natural without any additional work.
• Manual terrain painting tools in the Mission Editor, allowing mission creators to paint damaged grass, dirt, mud, or worn ground wherever they want around camps, artillery positions, vehicle parks, trenches, supply areas, and defensive positions.

This would benefit both:

dynamically generated missions created by the game,

and custom missions created by the community.

The technology already exists in many modern game engines and doesn't need to be overdone. Even relatively small patches of flattened grass and exposed soil around heavy equipment would greatly improve immersion.

I think this would be a fantastic addition to the new Korea Mission Editor and would make every battlefield feel more authentic without affecting gameplay.

Besides improving immersion, this feature would also provide better ground unit visibility without zoom, as disturbed terrain naturally attracts the pilot's attention, just like it does in real life.

Below is a quick visual example of what I mean.

 

Current Situation

Suggested Improvement in an approximation

Current Situation

 

Suggested Improvement in an approximation

Current Situation

Suggested Improvement in an approximation

Edited July 18 by Husar

[Juri_JS]

21 hours ago, Husar said:

• Manual terrain painting tools in the Mission Editor, allowing mission creators to paint damaged grass, dirt, mud, or worn ground wherever they want around camps, artillery positions, vehicle parks, trenches, supply areas, and defensive positions.

Already possible with the surface editor, but a little inconvinient to use and we also need more appropriate ground textures. When you are sharing your missions you need to upload your edited surface.dat file too and also manually edit the mission-dat file to add the correct path to your edited surface file. 

A nice feature is, that you can use "Export selection" in your editor to save the placed textures and reuse them as often as you like, similar to a saved Group files. Maybe in the future this could allow automatic placement of textures?

 

Edited July 19 by Juri_JS