Hills and Gullys Oh My.

[bustr]

Vriacu your goal is revenge for feeling offended by me. So this what you have always done to people you feel slighted by since you have been a member of these forums. You try to trash their posts and see if you can get them Skuzzy banned by your antics. It sometimes makes me think you are allowing another individual to work with you in creating your attacks. Some of your syntactic constructs reminds me of skyyr but, who knows. That is those moments when the person behind your keyboard does not match up to your age like it does the rest of the time in these forums. Could just be you have issues when you try to transparently trash people to say look at me to this forum audience.

Other than players who have built terrains and especially those who have gotten a Melee arena terrain published into the queue, the majority of players don't know anything about terrains and particularly the behind the scenes of terrains. Players opinions and critiques of my work are meaningless becasue they have no way to see the total picture of what is going on to get any small snap shot of a few miles out of 625,000sq miles into my posts. What they want is to influence my outcomes without having to build a terrain themselves. That is the purpose of all of those "opinions" people are so angry over that I didn't take to heart and change what ever it was they wanted changed to make them happy. Why I tell you all to build your own terrain.

Regardless of all of your antics, I'm posting screen shots and explanations of what it takes to build terrains and how to build them. Even if you use L3DT or Artik's program, you still have to open that work in the AH3 terrain editor and get your hands dirty old school to get the terrain published for the Melee arena. It's not like I'm keeping any secrets about how to do any of this and trying to force players to do it my way. 700 screen shots later with this current terrain and everything is there for the taking if anyone had bothered to read my ongoing documentation posts in the terrain editor forum. The screen shots below are giving away how to create rivers with bridges and supply roads over them, and lakes. If I'm asked by someone working on it themselves, I tell them everything I know from my experimenting and terrains. Like visually raising the land around the lake 20-50 ft makes it easier for the eye to accept the 5ft shoulder that holds the 2D water object off the terrain to stop z-fighting.


Did you know you can create lakes with the river path tool at elevations other than sea level? I've got to post up an issue where spawning a PT boat onto a segment wider than 100ft makes the boat spawn under the 2D water object but, you can drive the boat down hill to the sea from a higher elevation. Big problem is if you miss your turn it fly's out of the river and trashes itself on the land to the side of the river.


The lower lake is at sea level while the upper lake is at 500ft made by expanding segments of a river. The ride down that river through the canyon has some hairy turns for a PT. Down at the lower lake you can just see the resupply convoy road I ran over a bridge to cross the river.

[bustr]

OK, figured out some of it and the rest is a Hitech thing.


When you want a lake at a higher elevation with a river running out of it, place the lake far enough away from the decline so you can run a bit of the river at the same elevation as the lake. That allows you to use part of a river to create your lake. Now the second thing is a Hitech thing.


If you place a PT spawn on the lake, this new one the width at the spawn is 3000ft, the PT spawns in and from an external view looks like a submarine that surfaced. The previous lake the spawn was at a 5000ft width and the PT spawned as a submerged PT. Testing I found that once the PT reaches a width less than 1000ft it begins coming up out of the water to ride normally. While the PT is semi submerged at the 3000ft width spawn point, from the captain's seat the PT looks like it is sitting normally on the water and while it is under way. At the 5000ft spawn it looks like the PT is sitting on the ground and when under way transiting along the ground. That is until it reaches the 3000ft width and starts slowly raising up unto past the 1000ft width and it's on the surface. If I turn the PT around and run back to the 3000ft width area, its slowly submerges the wider the shores get. Other than that the lakes look great and maybe Hitechdosen't want us driving a PT on the rivers and lakes. Who knows....


I did make it down the river into the canyon and ran into a rock in the river killing my engine. That is just some polygon house keeping I would have to to ensure a flat bed for the river path.


The new test lake which is now segments of the original river extended out along the high ground and widened.





Some house keeping I need to do so I won't have rocks in the river to break my PT on.











A PT submarine at the 3000ft width spawn.

[Vraciu]

 

Once again your attempt to ascribe motive fails SPECTACULARLY. 

I'll tell you what you do.  You try to skirt the line of a Skuzzy ban, getting a toe or two over it before scurrying back to your victim role.  Nobody is buying what you're selling.   

[bustr]

I decided to push this farther to see if the river could be broken. I stretched it to 10,000ft at that wide area and dropped in a town. Then narrowed the lake next to the town down to 200ft. Hitech provided a bridge type for 200ft spans. I ran a cosmetic road around the largest part of the lake starting and ending at the two ends of the bridge. Will any GVer in the game use a road, I doubt it. But, it looks good, and something your brain wants to see since in the real world most of the time bridges and towns have roads associated with them for transportation. On my current terrain I've broken two rivers into branches from a "Y" fork. There is a technique to blending two separate river paths into one at a "Y". I suspect that can be used to fork branches of the lake off like you see with reservoirs that have been damned up to fill canyons. Probably could create the illusion of earthen dams holding back a reservoir and a river at the base as the outflow.

Just had the idea of a canyon land filled with a reservoir while forcing tanks to run on the shores and putting in a few narrows for bridges. Just have to make the bottom of the canyon flat, create your lake to a 2D topo profile passed onto the terrain visa the CBM bitmap. Then raise sheer sides up with enough space buffer on every side of the reservoir edge to keep 660ft as flat ground. Then tweak it a little in the 660ft buffer zone after you pull up the canyon sides. Doing it in reverse, cutting the canyon land down through a monolithic block of terrain leaves you with tweaking the river into a reservoir while fighting the canyon walls like building a ship in a bottle. Any way you do it, you have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with the terrain editor. The land around the lake in the screen shot is raised to 700ft while the lake is at 500ft. Then I smoothed in a slope all around and it has the illusion of a basin. From a tank perspective that 200ft rise in the slope is quite profound while from an airplane perspective 1000ft starts to become visible. Probably why so many older terrains have out sized geo formations. From the air those slopes around the lake are featureless, from a tank on the ground they look like a real world setting. With this third terrain I'm building everything is scaled from a tank perspective the best I can achieve with the 660ft building block limitation and not an airplane perspective which is more realistic.


My test of pulling the river width to 10,000ft to see if it would break. There is a restriction to running the road or tracks onto an object like a town or field. That's why that small road segment stops short of logically running all the way up into that white road junction. The terrain editor even has a new function to test for that condition.


   

[Shuffler]

This looks cool........ even from here in Texas.


Working on these can take a lot of time. More so when you are pushing the envelope.

[Vraciu]

This looks cool........ even from here in Texas.


Working on these can take a lot of time. More so when you are pushing the envelope.

He does great work.  That's evident.   No doubt about it.   Considering the effort it takes to even learn the most basic aspects of map making, well...   

[bustr]

I'm still trying to break the river path tool and even with it's limitations, you can get some surprising results. There is a bit of visual bleed through from the ground under it as you can see with those green lines. Happens mostly at distance. You have to create the body of water on a flat area that the shore or shoulders of the river lay flat on. If not, where the shoulders are on a slightly higher elevation you will see bleed through or what looks like frozen z-fighting. That's why the reservoir doesn't butt up against the face of the dam. From the air you really won't notice that. But now you can create larger water bodies above sea level in the game. 


1200ft earthen dam holding back a reservoir. It can't be bombed into breaking and dumping water but, maybe run a resupply convoy road or train track across the top of one to tempt a GVer or pilot to get down and dirty. Pilot1: what happened?????  Pilot:2 the dam got me when I tried to pull up and fling bomb the train to avoid the ack...PERK THE DAMS Hitechhhhh... 

[bustr]

I couldn't leave well enough alone. Now all I got to do is stretch several river segments to fill up that reservoir and pull a river out of the next reservoir down up into the spillway. By game scale the dam is about a mile wide and 1000ft high. Those 660ft polygons put a lot of restrictions on things. It's a good illusion.

[Vraciu]

Looks pretty cool...

[JimmyC]

Dam Bustr !

[Greebo]

Interesting stuff Bustr, it never occurred to me the river would stretch wide enough to make a lake. I have spent the last couple of weeks playing with roads and rivers on my terrain but all my rivers just begin with a narrow section. I'll experiment with that when I get home tonight.

One thing I have noticed with bridges is to be very careful to avoid where the bridge land ends being higher than where it meets the land around it and so having a gap GVs might fall through. It is very hard to see this issue in the TE. So what I have been doing is setting my bridges to terrain height, positioning my viewpoint over the bridge and selecting wire frame mode. Then I rotate the bridge exactly NS or EW and move it into the centre of a square of four vertices on the map. To prevent the gap issue I set the vertices nearest the ends of the bridge land to 120 ft above those in the centre of the bridge. Then I adjust the river to run directly below the bridge.

In many places I am using a bridge across a river to create a choke point between the SP and the town. To help players locate the bridge I have a road running from the SP to the bridge and another from the bridge to the town or base. The bridges also look a lot better with a road running across them although as you said previously its a right fiddle to set this up. I think I am also going to paint the rivers and bridge positions on the clipboard map, otherwise players might start driving along the river away from the bridge trying to find somewhere to cross.

[Shuffler]

I couldn't leave well enough alone. Now all I got to do is stretch several river segments to fill up that reservoir and pull a river out of the next reservoir down up into the spillway. By game scale the dam is about a mile wide and 1000ft high. Those 660ft polygons put a lot of restrictions on things. It's a good illusion.


(Image removed from quote.)


(Image removed from quote.)

That is pretty slick.

[bustr]

At least on my current terrain becasue I scaled it for tanks upwards in profiling all the topography, my rivers are on the bottom of river valley's.

That means at any elevation the river is at where I'm putting in a bridge, the flat area is a minimum of 2x660ft wide. That is how close you can run an elevation brush set for 20-25ft higher next to the center line of an average 50ft wide river to cut micro hills dropping down to the river. Some river bottoms have small rises just back of the river side then a low area back of that due to regular flood periods. Makes for good tank hiding areas. Also, no one in a tank or flying over will be able to tell that the 3 mile segment of river running past a field with bridges over it is a flat section of land to create an illusion for the tank drivers. That is why I leave the Group Master 3mile circle on while I do the micro terrain around a field. I micro texture starting just outside of that because very few if any tank will ever drive outside of that 6mile diameter area. Saves me having to micro texture 625,000sq miles. The medium amd macro texture is all that's needed for the rest of the terrain becasue only planes will see that. Since topo features are scaled to tanks, on the ground the tank driver sees them as mostly distant elevations of land with no detailed features like in real life. It's the 3miles from the spawn that is detailed for them.

Read an interesting forum post from some terrain builders at ARMA. It takes a team of up to a dozen terrain builders to create terrains smaller or almost as large as ours over about 6 months or longer. Some of the terrain is flat and painted to look like a representation of a 3D world from the air that vehicles are not expected to drive around at. With all the 3D objects and functions they have to stuff into their terrains, one team of 9 couldn't complete a terrain about the size of our 1943 Europe terrain. I got the impression they have a toy box of 3D objects and functions that can be picked and choose'd from which have to be assembled into villages and other civilization artifacts. And then a more liberal policy on custom objects which may be due to most of their terrains are smaller than ours with less players. Still, look what we produce while still adding in all the toys Hitech allows us. And their terrain building tools are supposed to be more sophisticated than our old school terrain editor. Something like my lakes and reservoirs, once you know how to produce them, if you prep the space they go into properly, that earthen dam area 30 minutes. The foundation for that big dam area waiting for water, 40 minutes becasue I kept changing my mind on how the polygons looked in the dam itself. Something that small in a mega structure like a canyon reservoir stands out to the eye.     

When making lakes with branching arms, just like when "Y" branching a river. You will have to kink a tiny segment of one river then set it to not show so you can blend the end of another segment into it creating the "Y". In my reservoir screenshot, it may not work past something 100ft wide. And to get it to work, I may be running a bunch of short segments and blending them. There is a problem when you bring together two different segments. As they come closer together, one end segment or the other will tend to be the only segment that will respond to your mouse. Means you have to prep the meet face of one segment and prep the other's face a few miles away then pull that up to the other river's meet face. At least I hope I can make that work with segments 5000-10,000ft wide.

I turned in a DMP from a CTD working on this test terrain. We will have to wait for Hitech's results. I'm not unsure pulling river segments wide into lakes is not causing a CTD after say 30-40 minutes while the convoys and trains are running. But it may be more likely the CTD happened in response to while I was letting the trains and convoys run while testing, leaving the game minimized to the desktop was the source of the problem. I was testing that along with the trains and convoys because some number of players always minimize the game to go look at other things. A habit I picked up from the two years of AH3 alpha\beta testing.   

[bustr]

It's not as flexible as I thought but, right as I gave up fighting with the branching to build up the land around what I did create, I have an idea how to make the branching work. Working with interfaces of thousands of feet in width is a PITA. Probably should have created the "Y" at 100ft then expanded all the relevant segments after they were interfaced. This expanding the segments to make a lake works better in spaces with less demanding shapes. In the end I built this on a open area then pulled up those low mountains around it.


Lancaster bombing the Dam.