Transitioning & clutter

[NUTTZ]

Sofar I see that the shore line tile (I think it is terr0300) Doesn't transition with all the main tiles. I found this out making new tiles. Sofar I got a few more tiles to make before i can post a pic. I know I can also change the alpha tiles to change HOW it transitions. Does the Alpha tile work hand in hand with clutter placement?
Or is this another tile or hard coded into each tile type?

NUTTZ

[Easyscor]

The tiles have hierarchy, Grass covers Water, Swamp covers Water and Grass, Farm covers Swamp... I suspect what you see is the result of an alpha you've played with. The textures, including the alpha, cover a square, 1/2 mile on a side while the tiles cover a full mile. The textures are copied whole into the quadrant specified in Subtile while the clutter will be nothing alike from quadrant to quadrant. This has both advantages and disadvantages but it usually means there's no way to paint shadows for trees on your textures, trees etc. tend to pop into view fully formed at 3k.

The shoreline textures shouldn't be giving you any trouble. The shoreline tiles on the other hand are hard to make work for boats and LVTs.

If all else fails, paint some textures in solid colors, I like red yellow blue, and try some alphas in solid black, solid white to see what's happening. Be careful with size and color depths as you'll be seeing things that will only confuse you.

[NUTTZ]

Thanks,
Hierarchy THATS the word,, I keep calling it dominant, and passive. I didn't play with the alpha textures at all, and really don't want to get into changing them at this point, Maybe later for a custom map. What are the ovlyterr Tiles for? I'm assuming the transitions. 
 About the 1/2 mile thing, The old TE each tile was 1 mile square, I thought i noticed in the new TE it does place 4 tiles within a 1 mile square. I also assume it rotates 4 same tiles within a 1 mile square to break up the Moire ( checker board pattern) when alot of the same tiles are placed together.

NUTTZ

The tiles have hierarchy, Grass covers Water, Swamp covers Water and Grass, Farm covers Swamp... I suspect what you see is the result of an alpha you've played with. The textures, including the alpha, cover a square, 1/2 mile on a side while the tiles cover a full mile. The textures are copied whole into the quadrant specified in Subtile while the clutter will be nothing alike from quadrant to quadrant. This has both advantages and disadvantages but it usually means there's no way to paint shadows for trees on your textures, trees etc. tend to pop into view fully formed at 3k.

The shoreline textures shouldn't be giving you any trouble. The shoreline tiles on the other hand are hard to make work for boats and LVTs.

If all else fails, paint some textures in solid colors, I like red yellow blue, and try some alphas in solid black, solid white to see what's happening. Be careful with size and color depths as you'll be seeing things that will only confuse you.

[Easyscor]

Sort of.

This isn't your old TE anymore, and the alpha doesn't do the same thing. Now a one mile square tile is built in the OE using standard or imported clutter shapes from ac3d where unlike your old alpha,  polyIDs determine behavior.

There are 4 tile objects per set and they're referred to as subtiles; four for water, four for grass etc. The Water and River tile sets are special. The confusion is that the main four textures for each set are tied to the subtiles yet they map to quadrants instead of a full mile. The overlay texture literally overlays the adjoining tile in a pattern set by the alpha texture and this is how the transitions are rendered, and where the hierarchy comes into play.

The textures don't rotate but I think you have the idea. When you Randomize a farm tile, for each quadrant of the tile, the TE 'installs' the corresponding quadrant from a random choice of the sets' subtiles which have the clutter shapes, along with the corresponding texture. Since you'll build your tile textures to show some variation, it will break up the appearance when your randomize the tile. A subtiles' SE quadrant along with it's associated texture will always map to the tiles' SE quadrant, this applies to the other quadrants as well of course. Note that the same texture would be used regardless of the quadrant when all 4 quadrants use that subtile, so the texture must smoothly join with itself on all 4 sides but now, the texture must also join smoothly with the other 3 textures in the set. I see a lot of little errors due to that last part and I'm color blind.

If you were to redo your texture tutorial today, you'd need to go one step further. The first rendition of the texture would become your base texture. The first copy would become your overlay texture. The rest of the textures in the set would all be built from copies of the base texture being careful not to contaminate the edges. If this isn't enough to worry about, start thinking about what happens when you need a custom airfield ground texture made from the base texture (it'll be smeared to cover the whole tile) so it'll blend in naturally but you want to paint in some grey runways. As soon as you add the gray, especially using 24 bit color, you've corrupted the 256 color index table the program will output and the colors won't match, which is the whole purpose of using the original base tile. You will get an ugly airfield ground texture but I think you already knew where I was going with that.

[NHawk]

Here's a diagram of the transitions I did back when the terrains changed from AH1 format to AHII . The way the trasitions themselves appear are based on the corresponding alphas and overlays. The guide in the upper right represents TERR000X.bmp



Note the possibilities.

However, also note that an old friend came back with the introduction of the river tiles....

The seams are back.

Quite a while back I did some experimenting with removing the alphas and overlays, basically returning the terrain tile system to the AH1 version and had some pretty impressive results. But, if I'm not mistaken we were told that would not be accepted for MA use and I abandoned my efforts.

I did have very good results with the current system and texturing the white cliffs of Dover. It just takes painfully carefull planning of texture placement.

[Ghastly]

Thanks for the graphic NHawk.  It has cleared up a misconception I held as to where what came from with respect to the triangular areas where two tile types join.

<S>

Grue

[Easyscor]

First, make a distinction between textures and subtiles. Textures are owned by subtiles, not the other way around.

That drawing is exactly right as far as the overlay/alpha transitions, however the interior designations are misleading in that it implies subtile 0000 goes in the upper left with 030X in the lower right ect. I would have preferred the lable designations 0s0x where 's' is the subtile number and 'x' is the tile family number. What that drawing is really showing is the quadrant numbers, zero to 3, and the 4 character labels are a problem.

The quadrants are filled with the corresponding quadrant from any subtile within the family set, along with that subtile's corresponding texture.

For instance in the Farm set, quadrants in a clockwise direction from quadrant 0, could have subtile 0303, 0003, 0303 and 0003. In other words, quadrant 0 would map quadrant 0 of subtile Farm 0303, and notice quadrant 2 is also from subtile Farm 0303 but using quadrant 2 instead while quadrants 1 and 3 would be mapped from the corresponding quadrants of the designated subtiles. The strongest visual thing you see in the TE is the texture but much more is going on.

Take a look at road0 in the OE and you'll understand that they really are mapped this way, and the geometry of the cell requires it as shown by the fold lines aka slice lines when you turn them on for building terrain tiles.

If you stay with the default ETO set in the TE, you can do some great work with textures alone, but if you want a jungle terrain or desert terrain, you really aren't going to be happy with a fir tree, let alone a spinning windmill on your beautiful desert texture.

Fortunately the OE made modifying subtiles pretty painless and Skuzzy has posted the full source set of .til files for the default ETO set at the top of this forum.

I'm looking forward to what you come up with, and I know you won't stop with textures.

[NHawk]

You are correct. I should have mentioned that any sub-tile can be in any quadrant.

And this is where I really wish we could refer to sub-tiles as items created in the OE and terrain textures (not tiles) as those that I think this topic is referring to.

[NHawk]

And to add another twist....

Unless something has changed, you can simply re-texture trees to what you want. In the past I've been able to change trees from one type to another simply by re-texturing them. The alphas for trees use to determine the collision points, so any tree could be substituted for any other tree just by changing the texture.

The only possible way I could see this not working is if the texture is a fixed part of items created in the OE.

[Easyscor]

This might belong in a different thread but I guess it's continuing the textures subject. I don't have time to refer to my notes so this is from memory.

That's the old AH1 method. I don't think alpha textures exist for objects like trees any more. You can still change the texture, to add snow for instance, but the OE/ac3d shape won't change.
Now you have a *_a.txt file which determines the color index to use for the alpha color. The alpha color is used in the texture to determines what is transparent like the space between the tree limbs or the windows in the tower.

Trees and most anything else in the current default object set are a problem to retexture because they share so many of the textures among many object shapes. In some cases a tiny portion of an unrelated texture is smeared over a large area simply to give it color. Even the buildings use the same textures over and over again. str6 I think it is has brick walls and some windows and doors with a warehouse style door in one end. Want to change it to fit into a desert terrain and loose the big door, guess what, you just changed half the buildings in the set and the smoke stacks at the factories look awful. You can still fix it but your original building isn't going to look the way you thought it would because of the compromises you'll need to make. Still, retexturing a default shape is much more economical then building from scratch and it's what I always try to do first.

[NHawk]

Sometimes I know what I mean but it gets put into words differently.

You are correct, there are no separate alpha textures for trees. When I said alphas, I meant the alpha area on the tree texture.

It still works that way...pretty blue trees as a test.

[Easyscor]

  Tell me about it, it only gets worse as you get older!

[croduh]

Problem when trying to retexture alphas on new trees:

[Easyscor]

You have it figured out Croduh, you tried to remove all the green parts and got exactly what I was talking about above. Or was that a whole new tree you built? I've noticed that HTC will build a single version of a branch and use it over and over again at different sizes and angles to build a single tree, but only for the closeup view. The shapes at higher LODs are built similar to the old AH1 flat panels.

[croduh]

Yup, just tried to re texture the new trees.