Aces High Default Tile sets.

[bustr]

Moved the spawns 2.5 from the village center and I like it. Everyone is equally screwed but, the sniper gallery has to be driven to instead of being dropped down in your lazy boy to single finger salute the village.

All of those large ravines will be micro terrained much more before I release this. The village bowl is micro terrain finished so I could get the sniper gallery's right. If I left those huge ravines as is, the spawns would be death traps that no one would want to play in those areas. You can see the problems with 500 vertical feet and spawn camping. The land here is 600ft with the ravine bottoms at 100ft. That is a lot of vertical material to work with micro terraining for tanks.

[Easyscor]

See if you can guess how I made this quick example look like this. I captured the image in the TE to show the height of the cliff at 400 ft.



From closer to the top edge


I've been doing some objects and new texture work lately. The example was done entirely in the TE, and when in a terrain for release, I'd change the textures and make the cliffs much more interesting, all in the TE of course.

[bustr]

I do the same thing with the elevation then bulldozer tool running on the N\S axis and the smallest dia brush. The diagonals like SW or NE will give you teeth that don't respond well becasue of the polygon size. Mostly it ends up looking like concrete embankments or the hoover dam, so you micro terrain them to look like gully's which allows adjustment of the relative elevation over distance for GV's. The Smooth Catmul tool helps immensely at that acting as weathering.  Until you reach 660ft your walls have a slight angle so it's still how you present it near where tanks will be playing.

I like your very clean clutter line demarcation, are you doing something for D-Day or, a custom port design?

[bustr]

Some time in the future I have to do the finish micro terrain on this wonderland of channels for tanks to furball in while keeping the base elevation in the channels. I'll have to do a logical visual extension up the glacier cut valley. Once I do the finishing work here, I'll leave place holder dots and blow out the objects so I can lay down objects in the number order I establish across the three countries. Even the rock tile I illuminated the channels with will be replaced with grass and trees in favor of the tanks.

[Easyscor]

I like your very clean clutter line demarcation,

The whole point of my post right there. Keep guessing. 

[bustr]

Pick a fight with someone else. I like what I'm doing and having fun doing it. I'm not interested in this game out of you, I have this to finish.

[bustr]

I know how much a portion of players dislike the low light and nighttime in the MA these days. Still the shadows look good on these mountain ranges in low light. Even with the angle and elevation global paint tools, I will still have to touch up ridges that slip in between. They get about 95% of what I want done.

[Easyscor]

Pick a fight with someone else. I like what I'm doing and having fun doing it. I'm not interested in this game out of you, I have this to finish.

ROFL
There's a little of that, but it's on topic with the first two pages of this thread. I'm sure there are others who appreciate the significance of the images and will be attempting to solve the riddle. I've explained to my granddaughters that knowing something is possible is sometimes all you need to know to figure it out. It seems to work for us.

 

[CptTrips]

ROFL
There's a little of that, but it's on topic with the first two pages of this thread. I'm sure there are others who appreciate the significance of the images and will be attempting to solve the riddle. I've explained to my granddaughters that knowing something is possible is sometimes all you need to know to figure it out. It seems to work for us.

 

I’m confused at what we’re guessing it.
How you made the sharp drop off, or are you got the sharp clutter demarcation line?

I’ve seen in the past posts where someone stated that the clutter will not populate on surfaces at greater than 45° angle.

[Easyscor]

Sorry. As you know, the tiles/textures bleed into each other and the further up in the shader list, the worse it is unless you merge with the other atlas. The problem is that there is only so much you can do to affect the bleed using the default Atlas. Separately, the clutter is always present unless the terrain slopes more then 45 degrees.

Take the case of any cliff dropping into the sea. Dover and the Seven Sisters come to mind but it applies to any condition were there SHOULD be a sharp break at the cliff edge. It's a cliff for crying out loud. Having any 'green', 'farm', etc. texture sliding over the edge from the 'flat'; or the opposite, the rock face extending 'horizontal' beyond the edge, isn't good, at least imo.
It kills the clutter back of the edge and shows the cliff face rock instead of the 'green' you'd expect from the undisturbed soil on the ground's surface above. The clutter should also come right out to the edge.

I really thought bustr was on to it with his clutter comment, just needed a little more thought to work it out. Apparently not.

Anyway, what's your guess as to how to achieve it?

 

[bustr]

I'm not interested in having a grasshopper yoda moment  with you when you can just tell me what you think is a better way to mix tiles. Find another grasshopper, I don't do that myself to people, I just tell them what I know and let the chips fall where they will.

I already have another tile rearrangement I'm testing since I'm using very few tiles in the palette for this terrain. That's why I keep blowing away the global paint with every new mountain range and reapply it so I can keep watching how it blends in each new range. I already have a problem with the lower elevation meeting lines with the pine forest that shows up above 10,000ft looking down at it. It disappears as you get closer but, there are enough high alt players, they will see it. It  probably dosen't matter in the long run, I saw it becasue I'm looking for it and things like it which are fixed with a tile reshuffle.

If your goal was not to start a fight or shut down my posting about my terrain by jamming it with your position, like I said, find another grasshopper to yoda over.

[bustr]

I'm not feeling motivated today to whack out some long mountain range. But, you have to do something every day to keep things moving forward. So I'm working out more of the tank town pit in terms of less or more cover and seeing if I can drop in a few village houses in convenient places. In the screen shots you will see how I used grass to remove trees from those water cuts and other areas. Even with no grass these trees no longer trap tanks instead give great ambush spots if you don't look ahead and around frequently.

Places me in the no win position of one group complaining it's too open and you can't get near the center village area becasue the lazyboy single finger salute players long range anything that moves from safety. While if I put back in a few trees the lazyboy players will complain that I'm giving the tank aces too many advantages to ambush them. Derp......


Here is the bowl with trees removed in the low areas which turns them into kill boxes from the high gallery.





Here are the trees back and the target is at 4000yds which is an easy sniper shot. It's a small amount of trees but, when you drive it, what looks like small open grass lanes between clumps is actually a long time for a tank to be exposed to a sniper with elevation.





Village center is about 2500yds and tanks disappear in there and become reverse snipers up to the gallery. If they can make it to the village.





Just not feeling the rock building after doing this over the weekend.

[bustr]

Most of the time creating mountains is a peta not for making them the finished items but, laying them out to start from. I use a 1mile wide ribbon to draw in the spines from which I'll pull everything down from with several methods to remove excess media and work the over all shape into a mountain. Unless you are going for mountains above 6000ft, your spine system can be done with 5000ft and 3500ft tall ribbons. The problem is visualizing the watershed and erosion runs while keeping everything as random as possible. Half way through many times I blow parts out and run a totally different spine system to get away from some repeating pattern.

It helps to plot out the field locations or you will create some masterpiece just to blow chunks of it away to allow planes to maneuver easily in the surrounding area. At least I remember why I only 1\2 finished an area that I just blew chinks out of.


Today's mountain spine ribbons setting up the foundation for turning it all into glacier erosion and water cut mountains. I'm using two colors of rock so I can see contrast between 3500 and 5000+.   





You can only work an area so far and then you need the next full region of spines defined to that area or, you can end up cutting away previous work to fit a field. On the left side of the glacier cut the work is actually 50% finished waiting on the right side to be laid down. I use the global paint tools to rapidly show me what finished areas look like. That has the draw back of covering up half finished work and making me scratch my head over why it looks so crappy....

[bustr]

I've been experimenting with the question of how to place random houses and buildings all over an area without a tile setup that way or, having to accept a tile that fills a 1x1 with a village. I want to drop a few houses down as a hamlet or even less in the appearance of randomness all over an area of sparse trees. In the AH2 CraterMA crater TT the rim had random barns and small buildings. The real problem is two fold, buildings won't show on very steep slopes, and I'm stuck with a minimum or maximum after I use another tile to paint out the whole village just to use a few houses.

I have to think Waffle probably expected us to do this based on the total area on the 2x2 tile covered with 4 villages. At first look you would think this is a matter of using the percentage setting for the brush to act like an airbrush splattering drops. In practice, I had to brush into likely looking areas with a small solid brush then work with what showed up. In some cases it took using a second tile to brush out too many houses and trees. In others I reshaped that spot of the terrain becasue a few houses made a good hide for tanks. The best starting procedure was painting down a 6mile dia solid dot of village tile. The reducing the brush by 1\8-1\4 mile and painting a tree dot. Then another reduction painting a village dot until the brush was 1mile diameter for the central village. After that, clean up with a tree tile and adjustments to the terrain in micro increments to get buildings to show up.

Here is what I came up with, after flying it to get screen captures in a storch, storches won't last long over all that open area. This is about how open AH2 was for tank terrain and I'm placing the spawns close together around this depression and down in that single village.

[bustr]

Well Hush my Mouth and call me a corn dog, did I have an interesting testing session.

One of the biggest complaints about AH3 is by tank players over how much trees hide everything and the game has turned into who can hide the best. It's true due to the nature of the speedtree trees and clutter and the light engine of the new AH3 graphics. I did not believe this until today.

With this new terrain I'm using a tree tile with the trees set very sparse,,,,,,I thought.

My test was by using a super small vbase that I moved around the TT pit, in the center and around the rim to test the spawns ability to let me see tank drones. I wanted to have tank drones in random places so I could see them and shoot at them to test the overall view for seeing tanks. Well, no matter what I did I couldn't see more than a single tank maybe two sometimes from across the rim of the pit, even if I drove across the pit to be inside of 2000-2500. If I spawned in and drove up to the tiny vbase, eventually I would run into a tank at about the point if it was a player shut down listening for me, he would blow me away just when I would first see him 1500-2000.

What I discovered is if a tank is sitting still behind or partially under a few trees, even one in some cases, I could not see the tank even on zoom with German optics. The tank and the tree(s) became a single object visually. To make it worse, just a few feet of elevation on my part caused the tree(s) to cover more of the tank making it just about invisible. If a tank is in the open with only grass around it past 2000 out to 4000, you can see it because there is a visual contrast for the shape. Add a tree(s) and almost any tree branch will look like part of a tank. Not much fun if all you want is some fast tank action and not a lesson in how to out hide other tanks in the trees. The village in the center has three spawns on top of each other but, I left the houses and trees alone. My testing with the drones, pretty much they disappear behind the trees and houses. Get inside of there and you are safe from the sniper gallery while shooting back until you want to get out and run far enough to land your kills...


Here is the sparse tree tile I thought would give away tanks by all that space between trees. NOPE, still too many trees.





With today's testing here is how much I had to remove trees so this TT would be a good tank furball area and not a hide all night boring place as usual.