Aces High Default Tile sets.

[bustr]

Still need to see if Hitech responds, I'm not creating new tiles, just using his reshuffled for a purpose. Being able to shuffle existing tiles allows for changing the same old same old which gives the customer something new to look at. After all in the MA they get up and personal with the themes and eventually it leads to boredom. And it's a quick way to give them "new".

[bustr]

Here is an example of resorting and using the grass1 bitmap to make transitions less stark except in the most obvious if you are trying to mix from the lowest 508 against the highest. Otherwise keeping the tiles and environment by elevation in mind the real klunker is the pine tree 508 and where the brown rock is concerned, you plan to use the 1016 rock tiles to ease the transition and add visual nuance.

[bustr]

And a fjord and tile transition test to see how the mountain dark tile looks and transitions look on it. Here I'm keeping everything below 3,000ft.

[bustr]

Awww, man....

This gets addictive, I cleaned up the far side of the fjord and the mountain tile lines really lends itself to guiding mountain touch up shaping with the bulldozer tool. Touched up with the lighter stone near the water to make it less dark if you were sailing by it.

OK, from my last two years experience, this remix may make a reasonable terrset05 if the issue of all the extra grass1 is documented for why they are in place. As is I can do the Svalbard island inspired odd shaped terrain I'm thinking about.

[bustr]

After looking at some photos from Svalbard, this needed to be a little more aggressive in how water cut everything.





This island in real life looks like it's been cut with miles wide troughs which are lined with water cuts over dark granite and basalt formations several thousand feet high. You can see one of those huge troughs in this topo map.





You can kind of see why I resorted the 508 and 1016 tiles the way I did.

[bustr]

Now all I need is to know from Hitech if I can use my custom tile mix or if he wants to turn it into terrset05. Then I'll produce a RAW file and be on my way.


Blueprint map for fjordma, 10x10 \ 2048x2048.

[Ciaphas]

I hope it all works out Bustr 

[bustr]

In this chicken or the egg scenario, I've got to sit down and map the general water ways off the peaks to give myself an idea of laying out feilds. So it becomes similar to sketching leaf veins in art class, just one ginormous leaf with very tiny little veins rooting off the major backbone veins.  I can probably set the backbone veins to 5,000ft in the RAW file and wing the rest off that. On the real Svalbard island, the tallest peaks, and only a few, don't quite reach 5,000ft. So I can have some fun sculpting and not worry about blowing too much away. Setting the land blocks other than the mountain backbones to popup all 1,000ft will solve many shore line issues. Since on this kind of topography, it's majority cliffs and mountain side walls that slope right down into the water. Very little flat land in large areas other than in runoff basins and river mouths but, there are flat heights due to the nature of the lava and rock types and how they erode. And it's all black rock for the most part so I just elevation paint black rock from -1000 to 6000ft after I import the RAW file.


Below is my field layout dilemma which will require mapping mountain spines and runoff water ways. I'm planning two fleets per country and exposing the HQ\strat to gratuitous destruction in the red ring area. The blue ring is a 6 sector diameter which I've found with my last three terrains to be the effective combat area to keep players at each other. With two CV per country, aside form targeting the HQ and some strats, I can see salting the outer area defined by the red circle with bases for ship to shore field captures. Before I can even go there, I have to topographically profile the place. At least I have topographical profile maps of the real Svalbard island that detail everything so I can understand how to create the ridge lines that all the fjords tiny to huge are paired with. An interesting note, the center of Svalbard where several deep fjords meet like you see here, it's all flat runoff cut about 4 miles wide at each mouth gently sloping up to 100ft then inland as deep water cuts with small rivers off a glacier. I don't want to do the glaciers that cover the central inland of the east and west lobes. No one puts airfields on glaciers. I probably should make sure a task group can steam up near the ends of those central large fjords, I'll have to test what the minimum width is that a task group can turn around on it's own line in patrol mode. Don't need to get CV's stuck in there even though steaming up into one will make them sitting ducks to bombers. It may well not be possible thinking about the max range you can launch LVT. Meh, won't know until I reach that stage....


 

[bustr]

I've been angsting over how to start the topo profile for the core of the ridge systems. I realized looking at this topo map from Svalbard it looks like the canyon system I put in the back feilds of the three countries on riftval to fill space. Since most shores are in the 250-300m elevation range, I just do a general 1000ft base land mass while defining the mountain ridge lines with a 1 mile wide 5000ft ribbon defined by the runoff scallops that create the areas on the real Svalbard low enough to build towns and airfields with road systems. The terrain editor has a tool that will rapidly lift the land on the sides of the 5000ft ribbon the same way I created the canyons on riftval.

First I define where I want my water to run, then I run the main ridge ribbons for the runoff scallops to feed the low level miles wide river runs to the ocean. Then I place fields and adjust the waterways and 5000ft spine ribbons to make it all fit. Then I create a grayscale file to convert to RAW and import into the terrain editor. Then I 3D finger paint clay into canyons, mountains and table tops of ultra hard dark rock.

[bustr]

I've mapped all the high ridge lines and glacier melt water cut bottoms. The light gray ribbons are 5000ft while the blue water cuts are 100ft and the gray land mass will be 1000ft. From there after it is imported I carve the rest in between. Rocks like this have sharp cleavage as they weather so ridge lines are sharp while everything else is edges.


Now all I have to do is map feilds based on the blue water cut areas and knowing there are shores that can extend out about 2 miles from the cliff bases.

[bustr]

I finally gave up and added in an 8pixel = 1mile grid layer to help me locate feilds. The red grid is a 19x19mile grid. Irregular land masses don't lend themselves to easy field locating to avoid long time consuming flights. That's why I use a 19x19mile grid when locating feilds. But now I've thrown in random 5000ft ridge lines to stir the pot.





Six sector blue circle, 25 and 19 mile red circles in the center.





At least now I can see 19 miles better in relationship to all the glacier water cut low areas I can place a field object down flat on.

[bustr]

Was taking a look at a Svalbard tourist travel site at photos of the island. No trees, only grasses and arctic flowering plants. My island will be around the same latitude as Iceland so I can work in a few trees. But, the geo formations will be like Svalbard.


Another formation test after looking at tourism photos. The ridge line is 5000ft.

[bustr]

A random shape terrain does not lend itself to even field placements and at least one country will end up with more long flights than the others. The screen capture of a 2048x2048 blurred some of the field placement markers but, each country has 28 location markers with two ports per country. The band defined by the two blue rings will host most of the combat between 30 fields. You will be able to sneak CV's up close to HQ and there is no place to hide the strats. At least now I can generate the import file for the terrain editor to start this show on the road with all the feilds mapped.

[bustr]

Just noticed the import raw file has gone from rotate 90 to the right to flip vertical before saving as RAW.


Ready to start carving mountains and  fjords.

[bustr]

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.

The screen shots are a concept for a small tank town where the center is a 1x1mile village while the uplands ring is about 1.5mile out from the village center. I'm using a very sparse tree tile as the core of painting anywhere tank combat will take place. So on this terrain you will have to catch a tree yourself and force it to hang you up. The top gallery is a 4000yd shot in a panther to long range sniper to the other side. Right now the spawn placements and vbases are so I can drive the local offline and tweak it. I have to get on with building the mountain ranges, and how this is painted will will be redone when I use the global painting tool to define strata and growth elevation for different plants.


The object in the center of the AH2 craterma tank town was a 1x1mile like this village tile. Each vbase will have one spawn that will drop you in the edge of that village randomly. The rest of the time outside in the open. The rest of the spawns up near the edge of the top gallery 1.5mile out from the village center. At least you will have a few trees with hills and gully's to hide behind while the nearest airfield is 1.5 sectors away. I had a serious request to do a terrain with only grass for the tank combat areas recently by a very frustrated longtime player.