Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Terrain Editor => Topic started by: 715 on September 10, 2009, 02:11:59 PM
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I'm trying to understand the structure of AH terrains before attempting to learn the terrain editor. I've looked through the Terrain Wiki and the release notes for the new editor. There is no section, per se, that describes the terrain structure; information is buried in various sections. I tried to understand the underlying structure of terrains from this information, but I may have gotten some (or all) things wrong. Could you experts check these statements for accuracy please? I'll put question marks after each so no one thinks they are definitive.
The elevation grid is 1024 x 1024 so that there is 0.5 mile between elevations and the terrain is a tessellated collection of right triangles 0.5 mi x 0.5 mi x 0.702 mi?
Terrain textures are 1024 x 1024 pixels and cover a 2 mi x 2 mi square? So each texture is painted over a 4 x 4 elevation grid (i.e. 32 triangles) and each pixel of texture is 10 ft? There are only 13 textures allowed: 12 ground and 1 water?
However, the actual terrain texture resolution is 0.125 mi and defined by a 4096 x 4096 x 8 bit map which controls which texture gets painted on each 0.125 mi square of the terrain? In fact you can mix two terrain textures per each 0.125 mi square? (Are these features what are new with the new graphics?) Ground clutter (trees, barns, etc) go with the particular terrain textures and the designer does not have control over their placement?
Finally, the coastline is defined at even higher resolution: a 16K x 16K map defines water vs ground giving the coastline spatial resolution of 165 ft?
Did I get any part of that right?
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There are only 13 textures allowed: 12 ground and 1 water?
There are 12 underwater tiles as well, they are labeled wntt0001, wntt0002, wntt00... and so on
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For MA terrains you must use the default clutter for each terrain type. For SEA or personal maps, you can change the clutter. This would be done by creating a new ntXXXX.til file in the Object Editor and placing the .til file in your texsrc folder inside your terrainX folder. You must manually create the texsrc folder in your terrainX folder. The texsrc folder is used for anything custom you wish to do to your terrain, such as terrain textures, custom objects, custom skins, etc. Plus, your terrainX.bmp map to be used as your in-game clipboard map must be placed in your texsrc folder.
In short, put all the goodies in there.
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So I guess HTC won't accept a MA map where say, you use the default trees but make the foliage for forest tiles much, MUCH more densely packed?
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So for SEA or personal terrains you are still limited to 24 textures (12 land, 12 sea) overall, but you can design all of them custom yourself, including sticking as many clutter objects (pre-made or user designed?) wherever you want in each texture?
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You can customize the terrains tiles for all of them, including MA terrains.
Main arena terrains cannot change ground clutter, SEA or personal is fine.