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#2480560 - 03/27/08 11:10 PM What is in a realistic terrain?
Col. Gibbon Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 06/04/01
Loc: Fleet, Hampshire, England.
Hi Guys.

We have a large variety of different EAW terrains, gleaned from various sources, and mixed with the default terrain. But how does it match up to reality? I've posted a link from a local website, but if you look at the different elements which are listed, it starts to become obvious, the terrain we fly over, which is supposed to represent Europe 39/45, is wholly inadequate.

http://www.hants.gov.uk/landscape/detaileddefinitions.html

Now, on the other hand, we can't go satellite imaging, because there are no satellite images available of course, and hand painting a set from current images would be a lifetimes work.

One of the things which should be in for 1.3, is a new terrain system, with how many tiles? That is the question. How many tiles do we need to make a reasonable facsimile of Europe during WWII?

\:\)
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#2480635 - 03/28/08 12:54 AM Re: What is in a realistic terrain? [Re: Col. Gibbon]
Weird_Crapolla Offline
Member

Registered: 12/11/06
Loc: St Barth
Hi,

 Quote:
there are no satellite images available of course


Col Gibbon .. you will find many good satellites photos of the terrain(s) you need on Google Earth \:\)

Very good definitions and resolutions photos and possible to use in games (some modders use them for terrains FS2004-FSX as photorealisic terrains )

Of course those photos are not from the WW2 era \:\) but the terrains are not so differents view today ... just more human constructions are filling the ground ...

It's only a smaaaaallll problem.....
Those photos are copyrighted to Google ...so you have to ask (and maybe paid) for use them in a public release \:D

OFF
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#2480667 - 03/28/08 01:35 AM Re: What is in a realistic terrain? [Re: Weird_Crapolla]
Col. Gibbon Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 06/04/01
Loc: Fleet, Hampshire, England.
Hi WC.

Yes, I know about those, but as I said it would be a lifetimes work to repaint them to represent Europe in 1939.

What needs to be done, is to develop a new terrain set which will represent Europe in 1939, and give a better feel, that your over France, England or the low countries. Each area has it's own terrain mix, which can be represented with a "local" tile set.

When the code for the TM is changed we could have a tile set of 1000's of tiles, but tell me, who is going to set that lot out?

Clearly, the current tile set is too small, to do a decent job, but how many do we realistically need? 100, 200, 300? More?

And before you all jump in and say, how do we test this terrain? Simply, we design a set as we have it now, and create a small area for testing France, or Germany, and later load the whole lot into a new TM editor to produce the final TM.

It's a monmouth job, which needs to start now, or it would be ready a year after the next exe!
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At home, with my loving wife Kasia and children, Thomas, Jessica & little Nicola. \:\)

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#2480736 - 03/28/08 03:04 AM Re: What is in a realistic terrain? [Re: Col. Gibbon]
VonBeerhofen Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 10/16/02
Loc: Zandvoort, N-H, Netherlands
I once did a 640*320 tilemap of Italy for Shockwave's Scott Elson, to demonstrate a new way of tiling. A true map was used and I believe I only used about 15 types of natures. This to limmit the ammount of necessary tiles, the process could have handled 100ds of natures though but it would have resulted in 1000ds of transitions.
I tried to convert the map to 8 bit and found that 256 tiles wasn't even close to what was needed. A count of the 16 bit values came closer to about 1000 tiles (I believe rotational copies where not included, because I used the same method as EAW does).

VonBeerhofen


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#2480834 - 03/28/08 04:50 AM Re: What is in a realistic terrain? [Re: VonBeerhofen]
RAF_Roy Offline
Member

Registered: 08/04/02
Loc: So. California - U.S.A.
The best is satellite photos , but retouched for towns, cities, formerly the best were Ikonos of a certain high definition the size resolutions and alt the satellit at with the proper lens matters the most; the too close ones no good for EAW and too far also.

But if I were you I would plan on not 256 color since we should be able to get true color into EAW.
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#2480840 - 03/28/08 04:54 AM Re: What is in a realistic terrain? [Re: RAF_Roy]
RAF_Roy Offline
Member

Registered: 08/04/02
Loc: So. California - U.S.A.
... well at least High Color ;\)
-S!
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#2480957 - 03/28/08 11:46 AM Re: What is in a realistic terrain? [Re: RAF_Roy]
Col. Gibbon Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 06/04/01
Loc: Fleet, Hampshire, England.
Please forget about photo realistic tiles.

Representation of different terrains is the best we can do, without going completely mad.

Lets think about just the coast for a moment. We have chalk cliffs on both sides of the Channel. There are a lot of beaches, marshlands, and rocky cliffs, and estuaries. Then there are coastal cities, towns, villages, and ports. For each type of coast, we could allocate 6 tiles as is the case currently, but then you have to start thinking about transition tiles, from lets say chalk cliff to beach, or town to marshland, etc, etc. The number of tiles grows, and grows, even with a simple thing like a coast, but it's manageable.

Inland, we need things like big rivers and small rivers, after all the Rhine, cannot be the same as the Avon, and so the problems go on. Lakes don't have beaches, so inland water tiles are needed, but you get the idea. What's needed is to develop a new tile set, which broadly covers the different areas of Europe, so we get the lose the feeling of flying over samesville.
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#2481214 - 03/28/08 05:56 PM Re: What is in a realistic terrain? [Re: Col. Gibbon]
Skylark Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 02/14/01
Loc: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Holy Smokes Batman!

John, this sounds like a massive project.

In your categorizings of terrain images and issues, which are many, you didn't mention
about the intricate maze of the European Canel System.
Then you have to consider that there are four seasons too.

It would seem that you need to create typical base tiles for the four basic (maybe there are more)
areas plus their unique coastlines.
Which you mentioned earlier ie: England, France, Netherlands, Germany and the Alps.
Then you'll have to have intermediate zones that blend these primary areas together.
This could be done with pasture lands and forests I suppose.
Over these, for each area, should be overlapping layers for lakes, rivers, villages, towns and cities.
Along with these would be bridges, railways and canel systems unique to these areas.


Seems you'll need a team specifically devoted to this project?

Google Earth could be used as a reference guide of what these items look like
when veiwed from overhead....

and before you ask....I've got my hands full with skinning British and USAAF aircraft...

Got to get ready for my day job now....

Cheers mate
David


Edited by Skylark (03/28/08 06:01 PM)
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#2481253 - 03/28/08 06:56 PM Re: What is in a realistic terrain? [Re: Skylark]
Wudpecker Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 02/14/04
Loc: Santa Cruz, CA
The solution is to make some room for the extra tiles the Colonel is talking about.
Modders can take advantage of the tile space as they wish.
Or...more importantly...as they have the time to uncover and develop WWII era views.
David (Skylark) points this out keenly.

Gibbon is right about the "sameness" look of terrains. It's almost a trademark of EAW.
Every flight sim has this problem.
Some have very extensive terrains developed by the makers or their modders (many of whom formerly worked on EAW terrains).
Since we have only a few (VERY few) terrain modders still with us, we can't ask them to take on this massive job all at once.
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#2481274 - 03/28/08 07:32 PM Re: What is in a realistic terrain? [Re: Wudpecker]
Col. Gibbon Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 06/04/01
Loc: Fleet, Hampshire, England.
Hi Guys.

That is exactly why I thought of starting this topic now. It would be useless to first mod the exe to take 200 tiles, and not have a set ready to use. These projects have to be done side by side.

I find myself repeating my words time after time, but as jobs go, a new terrain set, and 3dz's are the longest jobs to complete, and take far many more man hours to complete than re doing all the flight files {Sorry Ralf}.

Maybe the way to go, would be design a set of tiles, based on each country in Europe, using the Default tiles as a pattern, so joints are not a problem to copy across. This would make it easy for even people who have never made a terrain. I did it this way when I made the tile set Moggy is using for Iraq.

There are 69 default tiles [All of them were not used in EAW] in the EAW map editor zip, which should be enough to make a fairly decent specific country set, with border tiles thrown in later perhaps. You can use the editor to produce a TM file so you can test an area in the current game, to see how it looks.

A year goes very quickly, but if we split the job up among all of us, we should be able to have a cracking terrain set done, easily within that time span. ;\)

I can see, using Google Earth would be good as a resource, to get the feel of the country, but copying directly from there to a tile would be pointless, so that's where the artistic part of the job comes in.
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At home, with my loving wife Kasia and children, Thomas, Jessica & little Nicola. \:\)

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