Aces High Default Tile sets.

[bustr]

This weekend I killed several birds with one stone.

After working on the pit to remove trees enough to see the drones, I got involved with a question about the T34\85 and it's effectiveness related to being used by the majority of players in the MA. Ranges past 2500 are problematic for most tank guns in the game but, repeated pounding with an 88mm like in a Tiger will eventual kill tanks. We saw this in the AH2 crater TT. Much of the fighting took place 1000-3000 as players scrambled all over Greebo's crater back then.

So to pull data on the AH3 tank cannons 1000-2000 in response to the usage of the T34\85, I also helped myself understand how combat based on the effectiveness of the different rounds may play out in my pit on fjordma. I also wanted to drive on a certain tile to see how it looked and felt which is what I used on my tank gunnery range I put together on Sunday for the gunnery testing data.

In these screen captures the tiger tank is at 2000yds, I came close on my measurements fro the spawn which I set the random radius to zero. It's about 2025yds so I had to creep up with the target set to 2000yds. Minute futzing around in the TT is not worth it.


Using the small vbase object you can setup a gunnery range with drone tanks to shoot at.

[bustr]

When you say mountain for many it brings up a image of something tall and pointy covering many miles of area with rock slopes and a snow covered top. OK, even I have that default image in my head. Mountains are shaped by weathering, a few by glacier grinding and the underlying matrix and strata can respond in many ways. One is a very hard slab of granite or basalt may weather from the edges that then spall off in slabs leaving a talus slope angled up to a sheer vertical face at the top of the hard cap of rock. After a glacier melts away it will leave faces that then weather this way becasue they cut the sides of the slab in a similar shape.

Here are some examples from two spots on the terrain. Some times when I throw in the fast foundation shaping I cannot see a traditional wedge shaped mountain cross section in a spot where a glacier was in my mind cutting through for a long time. A useful technique to check your elevation gradients is the global paint tool based on elevations. The bottoms of these glacier cuts are being run from high to low on this terrain so gradient painting quickly shows me where I have to raise or lower the ground.

[bustr]

You gota love this stuff sometimes.....

[Devil 505]

These mountains look fantastic.

Have you considered trying to make an actual glacier with this terrain? Is it even possible to make it look right?

[bustr]

Look around on Oceania to the north by the HQ, I did one up there. Yes I could have done the glaciers, then when the sun was up everyone would be blinded by the reflection over most of the terrain. This one is after the glaciers melted and it's July with no mountains at the snow level. Nothing above about 5500ft becasue it kills your eyes to work with large areas of snow. The light gray level on the mountains is just a light gray rock tile for contrast. The dark gray rock tile needs some contrast or it is blech fhooy blah humdrum.

[bustr]

That is all the mountains I can stand for one day.

[bustr]

Speaking of glaciers, I put these on Oceania as a joke since New Guinea has a few glaciers. I had to set the arena time to reduce the sun glare enough so the glaciers could bee seen. When the sun is higher, you cannot really see the glaciers becasue of the glare off the snow tile used for snow. Now imagine a whole terrain of that snow as all encompassing top areas of several glaciers as a sheet across my new terrain. You would have to turn down your gamma to play on my new terrain at 12 noon to kill the glare. Those tiny ones were more trouble than they were worth since first you create the finished glacier cut path, then you come back and carefully fill the path back up short of the top. Then you have to blend the edges and not destroy the walls. When I started out to put them there I thought it would take a few minutes. Ended up being about an hour. Those vertical faces were their own POS to make look nice like that.

[bustr]

Got carried away with how a new idea was panning out for a glacier cut valley. Then as always I ran the global paint tools to get a look at it and I always merge a base layout layer from the blue print png file on top of the map file. Oh, My, I need about 3-4 miles of level ground around that tan colored base marker 1x1 square. If you look around on the map window you will see the yellow dot mapped to that spot.

[Devil 505]

Speaking of glaciers, I put these on Oceania as a joke since New Guinea has a few glaciers. I had to set the arena time to reduce the sun glare enough so the glaciers could bee seen. When the sun is higher, you cannot really see the glaciers becasue of the glare off the snow tile used for snow. Now imagine a whole terrain of that snow as all encompassing top areas of several glaciers as a sheet across my new terrain. You would have to turn down your gamma to play on my new terrain at 12 noon to kill the glare. Those tiny ones were more trouble than they were worth since first you create the finished glacier cut path, then you come back and carefully fill the path back up short of the top. Then you have to blend the edges and not destroy the walls. When I started out to put them there I thought it would take a few minutes. Ended up being about an hour. Those vertical faces were their own POS to make look nice like that.


(Image removed from quote.)

Yeah, I run into the same problem with whites and yellows when skinning. Those shades reflect the "sun" way too much. I have resorted to using colors which look way too dark in GIMP to get colors that look right in the game.

[bustr]

Had to get all old school on this along with having to cascade those changes to effected mountain ranges. Never a dull moment creating mountain ranges when you have to keep fixed based locations.


The original problem.





Got all old school and and to do the spine and bulldozer side pulls to the side to flesh out the changes to the original paths.

[bustr]

There are times I hate the 4x4 city object, becasue planning for it more often makes it act like you are still shoe horning it into the landscape.

[bustr]

At least that spot fits nicer now. I'll have to remember how I painted the rock strata on that upthrust mesa since I keep repainting with the global elevation to see how the work looks as I progress through different mountain ranges.

[bustr]

That's a lot better and on the real Svalbard island all the streams are grayish full of glacier slag and fist sized rocks. I'm not sure I want to lay down river objects on this terrain since I would probably have to get into bridges and much more road construction than I want to bother with. Still laying them over that gray rock would give them a grayish look if I lightened the alpha on the river object.

Most players will only fly over this location and given the polygon limitations and brush limitations this is a good illusion. No tank combat will take place here, only the HQ, city and three uncapturable feilds will be on this island. So I don't have to micro terrain the areas around the feilds for GV combat. I doubt anyone will park a CV offshore just to launch an LVT4 and try to take down an uncapturable airfield with 75mm HE or drive all the way to the city. Hmmmm, I think you could drive up that south water cut canyon......

[bustr]

Just keep grinding away and eventually there won't be anymore mountains to create.

The more mountain ranges and glacier cuts I create, the more I can see a need to tweek the 5k ribbons that define the remaining range spine lines. Shore batteries and PT spawns are going to be murderous on this map.




And how do you keep those 6 rubber duckies inside that 10x10 tub so everyone can find them?

[bustr]

There are days, then you just keep on nibbling at it.