Aces High Default Tile sets.

[CptTrips]

My goal here is for a sparsity of trees for the tank combat players. I cannot control the numbers of trees on objects like vbases and air feilds. Nor can I control the number on the village tile if I don't want to remove houses.

I think you might could if you want to edit the corresponding swa file.   Do you have the download for all the standard swa?

[Edit] Nevermind.  I forgot this was for MA.  Rules, rules, rules.

[Shuffler]

Where will the bar be?

[bustr]

That's why you spawn into the edge of the village and fight everyone else to find it. The Swedish bikini team agreed to hide in it and reward the winner with beer and Swedish bikini charm. Can't help it if Waffle didn't hang a sign outside the tavern like he did for Roy's in the 4x4 tank town object. You will just have to visit every single house in the village to find them.

The rockgrass.bmp tile has just enough trees so I don't hear whines about no place to hide from spawn campers wile leaving room to see for miles. And I've over painted the village with it as much as I can to eliminate some of the heavy trees on that tile while keeping all the buildings. Otherwise that village will be a kill box no one will want to spawn into. Greebo accomplished the same kind of safe cover from the highland sniper spots with the numbers and size of the factory buildings he placed on his 1x1 in the center of the AH2 tank combat crater on craterma.

Now won't this be worth inspecting every single building to find the tavern?

[hitech]

It's all or nothing, but I need to know what texture names are ending up in stdshape folder. Only atlas0 ,atlas0_nep, atlas1_hdr, atlas1_nep should end up at textures in the folder.

Each atlas component should NOT end up in the stdshape folder.

HiTech

[CptTrips]

It's all or nothing, but I need to know what texture names are ending up in stdshape folder. Only atlas0 ,atlas0_nep, atlas1_hdr, atlas1_nep should end up at textures in the folder.

Each atlas component should NOT end up in the stdshape folder.

HiTech

No, on my terrain they are NOT ending up in the stdshape folder.  Infact, I don't see atlas0 atlas1 stuff in the stdshape folder.  At least not with that name. I do see the atlas  _nep.htx and htx under:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Aces High III\ah3terr\myterr\terrset02

but not in stdshape.

My terrain works and I see my custom texture.  It jsut adds 80mb. 

[bustr]

This is why I'm only shuffling Hitech's bitmap files to create my palette. The two unused rock texture bitmaps are all I ever wanted.

By the way, even when I placed in the terrset00\texsrc folder only the bitmaps referenced by the atlas files. The first time I did a build, ALL of the bitmaps were placed in the terrset00\texsrc folder from the 508 and 1016 folders automatically.

I didn't want to do anything that made my work questionable for MA use. Now I've got rock tiles made by Waffle that work for my Svalbard style theme. And there is no sand on Svalbard, beaches made of rocks the size of your fist and the same for all the talus slopes and erosion skirts around the base of all the mountains and canyons. The real island is in the arctic circle so only has grass. Mine is down offshore from Norway about midway down the country so it can have trees while looking like Svalbard.

Just realized I have to place a few islands in that fjord that runs up to the tank town so some genius dosen't park a task group on top of it and kill all the GVing fun. When I mapped out the feilds, I drew a 1.5 sector diameter ring around the tank town and didn't place any feilds inside of that. Not much but many players won't fly 1.5 sectors to try and find GV's to harass.

[bustr]

Being sloppy and random while knowing mountains are cut by water and have common main runoff channels helps speed up throwing down mountains quickly. No right way, while random is truly hard to achieve since we like order and patterns when we look at things. Unconsciously if we are not careful we will inject those things.


An hours work, have to constantly, globally, set at least three colors down for contrast to actually see the mountains becasue they are that dark gray color. Blew away all the painting for tank town, but, that will be a finishing task right after I define the illusion of water runoffs in the bottom of all the glacier runways after laying doing all the feilds and doing the micro terrain around them. Those tallest peaks are 5,000ft, but, the overall impression in perspective makes them look much lower.

[bustr]

You've seen one mountain you have seen them all........

[bustr]

When my brain can't take mountain building and detailing anymore, I play with the paint scheme for the terrain. I'm going to rely on the global angle paint and elevation paint tools on this one. I'm creating topographical elevations that will show off those tools quite well and save me weeks of hand detail work.


Also. forgot, after you cut in your canyons and valleys, run the erosion tool against it all and clean it up. If you are creating exposed rock mountains versus grass or tree covered, you have to visit every ridge line and pull them up to a sharp spine. Even then some vegetation will grow right up the slopes below 7,000ft. I want contrast with color so I have pine forests up to about 2500ft.





I think I've got the trees sparse enough for tank combat furballing across that tiny depression with the single village. Especially If I place a spawn for each country with the random spawn circles converging in the center of the village tile. Then drop in two more up at this level close to each other so no one has to drive very far to fight.

[bustr]

I've got about 3 hours of creativity then, I'm just pushing mush around that the next day I'll look at and have to redo it. So at the end I'll keep playing with the global painting tools becasue in seconds I can blow away what I don't like and try again. And If I need to just over paint all the rock formation areas in gray while I'm building them, it's fun later running the global paint and seeing what appears in the new work.

I've got the global elevations worked out but to fully reveal the rock slopes you have to run a global angle paint. If I run in grass to 3800 and pine trees 680 to 3500. I can uncover rock slopes setting the global angle tool for slopes 22-90 degrees. Looks good and I can touch up around feilds instead of hand paint which was a bite with riftval. I've still got about 90% of the terrain left to build glacier cut mountain ranges on. Doing this at the start helps adjust the overall look of the mountains so I can settle on a standard finishing technique globally to all mountain ranges. These sharp spine ranges work well with the gray rock tile.

Since you can set percentages of fill for the paint brush and it works with the global paint function. I need to experiment with that low elevation for the pine tree band at 680 and see if I can 25-50% a transition band onto it to make it look more natural.


Here are the results of 22-90 degrees.

[bustr]

Now I'm testing a sparser tree layout and placing spawns directly on that 1x1mile village. What looks sparse from inside the terrain editor can actually be very crowded when you test it by driving a tank through it.


Hmmmm.....need to put out some tank drones offline to see how the GVDAR looks from the air. This setup should make it useless so tankers can furball with their map location simply covered in red.








Much more open tree space across that bowl and up in the galleries.





Becasue of the spawn randomizer inside of that spawn ring in the first two screen captures, you drop in the village safe or, the snipers in the gallery have some fun at your expense. Once in the village, those are all the old trees tankers hate because you can shut down and disappear in them. And I watch all the time in those villages players drive past each other lost one road over. A storch will get eaten alive flying down in there.

[Shuffler]

Looking good............

[bustr]

Mountains, the gift that keeps on giving and giving and giving.


Today's 4 hours of work.





You can see from yesterday how much I can do in 4 hours.

[bustr]

By now from the second map screen shot in the last post you have noticed the arena has 2 CV task groups per country. What is to keep players from being gamey and driving task groups outside of the arena to hide them or get around behind where the HQ's will be?


A 5ft high, 1.5mile wide curb just outside the 10x10 arena boarder area. Oh, because uneven shaped terrain are always unfair in some way to each country, one country, yes, you can park a task group behind the HQ.


Mabel, how do you keep all the rubber duckies in the pond......

[bustr]

Morning tank town testing, what a difference the scale of range makes in a tank versus an airplane. For planes you just plop down some big high blobs and call them mountains. Slap on some paint, and you can't tell how big or the details from the air. With tanks, .25, .75 and 1.0 mile is a lot of ground and detail.

I had to drop a tiny vbase in place of the central village so the terrain editor would give me the measurement ring and offline allow me to see the GVDAR when I populated all 6 drone slots with tanks. I thought 1.75 miles out from the center would make a good spawn distance for quick action. From the screen shots you can see it places you on top of the sniper gallery ready to go. I need to pull the spawn out to about 2.25mile so the possibility of a spawn battle has a buffer away from the sniper gallery. When this thing goes live the village will be back in the center. Today is just testing and I needed a way to measure miles from the center of the village.