Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Terrain Editor => Topic started by: kanttori on May 10, 2007, 04:18:49 PM
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Some instructions to the new Terrain Editor update. I hope this is helpfull to the old and new map makers.
There are now ovly00XX.bmp and ovly00XX_a.bmp files that are almost the same as the plb000X.bmp and plb000X_a.bmp files were earlier.
Early there were six (plb0001_a.bmp - plb0006_a.bmp) black and white transition textures, now there are four more (but the new names) because of the new river/lakes textures.
There are also 10 totally new textures from where you pick the transitions. Before this update the transitions were taken from the first sub texture terrr000X.bmp.
THE OLD TRANSITION TEXTURES (BUT THE NEW NAMES)
(http://www.llv32.org/kartat/te/ovly0001.bmp)
(http://www.llv32.org/kartat/te/ovly0001_a.bmp)
GRASS transitions (look above):
ovly0001.bmp is the 256 -colour source texture which you use when you create transitions.
ovly0001_a.bmp is the b/w alpha texture. White is shown, black is not visible from the source texture.
SWAMP transitions:
ovly0002.bmp
ovly0002_a.bmp
FARM transitions:
ovly0003.bmp
ovly0003_a.bmp
ROCK transitions:
ovly0004.bmp
ovly0004_a.bmp
FOREST transitions:
ovly0005.bmp
ovly0005_a.bmp
SNOW transitions:
ovly0006.bmp
ovly0006_a.bmp
THE NEW TRANSITION TEXTURES:
RIVER1 transitions:
ovly0007.bmp
ovly0007_a.bmp
RIVER2 transitions:
ovly0008.bmp
ovly0008_a.bmp
RIVER3 transitions:
ovly0009.bmp
ovly0009_a.bmp
RIVER4 transitions:
ovly0010.bmp
ovly0010_a.bmp
THE NEW TERRAIN TEXTURES:
RIVER 1
(http://www.llv32.org/kartat/te/terr0007.bmp)
terr0007.bmp (river WE, look above)
terr0107.bmp (river NS)
terr0207.bmp (river SW-NE)
terr0307.bmp (river NW-SE)
RIVER 2
terr0008.bmp (river NW-E)
terr0108.bmp (river W NE)
terr0208.bmp (river W-SE)
terr0308.bmp (river SW-E)
RIVER 3
terr0009.bmp (river N-SE)
terr0109.bmp (river N-SW)
terr0209.bmp (river NW-S)
terr0309.bmp (river NE-S)
RIVER 1
terr0010.bmp (little lakes)
terr0110.bmp (little lakes)
terr0210.bmp (little lakes)
terr0310.bmp (little lakes)
THE NEW COASTLINES ARE:
terr0000.bmp (water, of course old one...)
(http://www.llv32.org/kartat/te/terr0100.bmp)
terr0100.bmp (coastlines N-S, look above)
(http://www.llv32.org/kartat/te/terr0200.bmp)
terr0200.bmp (coastlines W-E, look above)
(http://www.llv32.org/kartat/te/terr0300.bmp)
terr0300.bmp (coastlines "corners", look above)
Notice that the water and coatline textures are 512 x 512 pixels bmp files but they are covering 1 mile x 1 mile area. All the other textures are covering a quarter mile area!
In the water/land "corners" it seems that the TE use both those N-E / S-W (terr0100.bmp and terr0200.bmp) textures and "corner" textures (terr0300.bmp) together.
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Coastlines are build as shown in this picture:
(http://www.llv32.org/kartat/te/coastline_01.jpg)
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Thanx Kan. Some of these questions were already runnin' through my melon.
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I still wish the coastlines weren't so...repetitive. Or at least if you have adjacent tiles with a straight coast the beach didn't end up looking like a bunch of camels in a conga line.
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What about the ..well i guess they are swamp textures..but they look like farms. There are about 13 of those combined in the savedtex folder, but you can only pick one of each (farm and swamp).
How do you get those to show in the TE?
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I also thought there would be more forest textures to use in this TE, big square blobs are kind of ugly.
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Originally posted by MotleyCH
What about the ..well i guess they are swamp textures..but they look like farms. There are about 13 of those combined in the savedtex folder, but you can only pick one of each (farm and swamp).
How do you get those to show in the TE?
You came very close to figuring it out. Most of those textures are only 1/2 mile squares in game.
Try this, select a large area of grass or forest in your terrain while under the Terrain tab. Then hit the Randomize button and watch what happens, now you've got it.
So lets say you want to do a gully or ravine, (later you can edit those textures to photo realistic) use the Manual button and you can place individual 1/2 mile sections, more rocky looking textures in the 1/2 mile x 1/2 mile sections along the steep sides of the gully and more forested or grassy looking textures on the flatter slopes in the bottom. Having really nice looking valleys or gullys is nice but since you have better things to do with your time then setting as many as 2 million tiles, use the Randomize button instead.
I hope that helps.
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Thank you sir!
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Here are some repairs and additions to the text I earlier wrote very busy:
RIVER 1
terr0010.bmp (river corner)
terr0110.bmp (river corner)
terr0210.bmp (river corner)
terr0310.bmp (river corner)
Ity means that they are little waterways in the terrain tile corners where river is crossing over the corner from tile to another tile:
(http://www.llv32.org/kartat/te/river_corner.jpg)
Notice, that RIVER textures are 512 x 512 pixels bmp textures but they are covering one squaremile. Normal 512 x 512 terrain textures are covering one quarter mile. But the transitions are same as with the basic terrain textures: two half mile transitions (from 512 x 512 ovlyXXXX.bmp textures) to the each side of the square mile.
It means that the transitions are not matching as you can see when looking the default river textures with the Terrain Editor. That is because the 512 x 512 river texture is "stretched" over the one square mile Tile.
I have at least two solutions to the river textures:
1) You must make your 512 x 512 source terrain textures (For ex. all your four farm textures) smaller to 256 x 256 textures and use four of them to create one 512 x 512 river texture.
2) You can use also 1024 x 1024 river textures, it works. Then you must not make your 512 x 512 source textures smaller but you still need four of them to cover one mile river texture. It looks much more better, but the maps file size is coming very big with all those 16 x 1 Mb textures.
Notice: When you make these river textures using your custom terrain textures as source material, remember to make some variations to all of them adding and hiding fields, grass, forestes etc. to different places. Then the landscape has not so much repetition.
The biggest work (except for the custom coastlines placing) with the Karelia was the terrain tiles: They are matching ALL together and they have not very much repetition, but the editing and testing was a fool's work... ;)
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I was waiting for my new HD to get here before I DL'd the new TE. But now you have me curious. The river textures were in the last release of the TE, but now I have to see what's different. :)
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Originally posted by kanttori
It means that the transitions are not matching as you can see when looking the default river textures with the Terrain Editor. That is because the 512 x 512 river texture is "stretched" over the one square mile Tile.
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Ok, DL'd and checked textures....
You've got me confused on this statement. I checked River1 and River2 and they ARE still made up of 4 individual 1/2 mile textures. (which if you didn't know all terrain textures are now 512x512, and have been for a few versions of the TE)
Use "Manual" and you can change each quadrant.
The transitions don't match until you terminate the river either with River4, farm or into a body of water (which really needs to be edited to look more like a delta).
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NHawk,
interesting observation :aok
So the "subtype" selection above is just a quick way to select same number for every subtile, but one can actually go manual and select e.g. the river4 small water corner to every corner in that one mile square.
The problem seem to be, that this has not been intentional, since the river parts do not match in the middle if one messes with the manual settings. However, I think this can be used for making more variation to the rivers!
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I just did a quick test terrain and flew over it. The transitions aren't as clean as they look in the TE.
(http://www.brewsterbuffalos.com/htc/seams.jpg)
The seams are in the corner where I changed the textures manually in 4 1 mile square grids. So, the textures are manually assigned in 16 1/2 mile grids.
hehe...had to change the references to 1/4 mile to 1/2 mile since that's what they are. 1/4 mile grids would give us 4 across and 4 down not two. :)
Here's the view in the TW with grid lines removed. The seams show up there.
(http://www.brewsterbuffalos.com/htc/teseams.jpg)
The same general view with the grid in place...
(http://www.brewsterbuffalos.com/htc/tegrid.jpg)
The matching problem is only in the corner of the 1 mile grids. Everywhere else if you manually set the 1/2 mile textures it matches fine.
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After playing a little more (changing the textures to solid colors) it would seem Kanttori is correct. The rivers ARE one texture, not 4 like the rest of the terrain.
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In oe there is now an option to "stretch selected texture to cover whole tile".Meaning 1 x1 mile.
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Originally posted by croduh
In oe there is now an option to "stretch selected texture to cover whole tile".Meaning 1 x1 mile.
I may be wrong, but I think we're talking about in the TE not the OE here. :)
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Take it a step further NHawk, try this:
Set a river tile, any will do so go with River 1.
Then click the Manual button under the list of SubTypes.
Now in the upper left quadrant of the dialog window, click radio button 3.
Click OK.
Originally I thought the river textures were different from the Grass textures. After all, they're a different size and the SubType radio buttons become active when a River tile is selected. Wish I had the ability to make good tiles with better transitions but I'll have to wait for you guys.
Let's supposed you decided to go with the old way of doing rivers by setting water tiles at elvation 0. Now you have 16 river tiles counting SubTypes, plus the quarter sections, to play with for realistic beaches and river fronts, and you might still have some left over for other things. I think the limiting factor would be the ovly[_a]#### files.
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Just to clarify, you have 16 tiles x 4 quarter sections for 48 quarter sections of a square mile that you can lay down manually in your terrain.
Edit: Talking about River tiles only here since that was the latest topic under discussion.
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Originally posted by NHawk
I may be wrong, but I think we're talking about in the TE not the OE here. :)
I know that, just trying to explain why the texture is over the whole mile;)
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Originally posted by croduh
I know that, just trying to explain why the texture is over the whole mile;)
AHH HAA! You're right. The textures might be available in the TE, but they are an object. The river acts like a river, in other words you can't drive over it.
You're so smart! ;)
I'm not at all familiar with the OE, but I was able to figure out that the ctriv# objects are the rivers. :)
And YES you CAN spawn PT boats in the rivers. :aok
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Originally posted by Easyscor
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Originally I thought the river textures were different from the Grass textures. After all, they're a different size and the SubType radio buttons become active when a River tile is selected. Wish I had the ability to make good tiles with better transitions but I'll have to wait for you guys.
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I'm still trying to figure out where you guys have been. :)
Grass, forest, all of the terrain textures have been 512 x 512 for quite some time now. It just looks like somebody forgot that and dropped the ball on the river textures. They should be 1024 x 1024 to match the rest of the terrain. And this could be part of the seaming problem in the 1 mile grid corners.
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And that green cross in the river comes from a know problem with the texture edges getting blurred over to the opposite edge.
It could be solved by leaving a thin strip at the edges unused instead of using the whole texture.
Check the bottom of my 1st post in this thread (http://forums.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=203165).
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I dropped16 x 1024 x 1024 river textures to the Finrus's texsrc folder and then build the terrain. Finrus.res file's size was 24.1 Mb. There are are also all the other custom 24 terrain textures and 3 coastline textures. I have also edited fields and factories textures to match to the landscape.
Then I make smaller (512 x 512) all those 16 river textures and built the terrain. It size was then 14.3 Mb. So the difference is about 10 Mb.
I also checked what is the quality difference with 1024 and 512 textures. It is very small, so I am going to make all those river textures at first to size 1024 x 1024 and then make them smaller 512 x 512. I have then those larger ones in my pack pocket.
The eight delta shapes are not working. There appears only the 3D objects, but their textures are invisible. I tried to drop their default textures to the texsrc folder, but it doesn't helped. Have anybody any ideas with them?
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Originally posted by NHawk
...Grass, forest, all of the terrain textures have been 512 x 512 for quite some time now. It just looks like somebody forgot that and dropped the ball on the river textures....
Actually I got it wrong on that one, all the textures including the river textures are 512 x 512 but I see what you mean. A 512 river textures covers a full square mile while the regular textures are also 512 but it takes 4 of them for each square mile.
Speaking about the rivers, a PT boat can navigate these rivers, except for entering a water tile, unfortunately try crossing one with an LVT, it takes forever and isn't working right.
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Originally posted by kanttori
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The eight delta shapes are not working. There appears only the 3D objects, but their textures are invisible. I tried to drop their default textures to the texsrc folder, but it doesn't helped. Have anybody any ideas with them?
I haven't had any luck with them either, or for that matter, with a lot of things related to textures.
When you rebuilt finrus, were you able to change the way the coast lines work? In your second post above, you inserted this image:
(http://www.llv32.org/kartat/te/coastline_01.jpg)
I've found that when a PT boat crosses the white triangles, it crashes and when an LVT crosses it, it transitions between shore and water no matter what the alpa bitmap shows. I noticed you reshaped the shore and wondered if you were able to address this problem so the PT boats and LVTs work as they should with your shoreline, and if so, how?
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I think Kanttori changed only the textures. The shapes are somehow "hardcoded" into the editor/game. They seem to self-generate at the coasts when a terrain is (re)loaded into TE.
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I'm afraid that's the only answer I will get. The ovly_a bitmaps work ground to ground, but not ground to water from what I can tell, not even to affect the green grass bits that intrude on the beaches. [whine mode] It's very irritating to build better shorelines and have to give them up because the shore has to follow the saw tooth triangle shapes.[/whine] I hope there's a more useful answer in the future, one that also allows PT boats to transition from a water tile to a river tile.