homepage Forums Read Only Forums Read Only Forums Jane's Longbow Series (Read Only) Tiles or no tiles in LB2 terrain?

Most of the terrain engine uses tiled system to cover it. This is done to save on graphic memory and size of terrain files.
However that pesky repetition problems sooner or later shows its ugly head no matter how many viarious tiles one tries to introduce.

In LB2 things seem little different. Here there is hardly any repetition, even if you look at the terrain from much highter altitude. And the roads look unique everywhere. It is perhaps too early to state that, but it looks that some kind of streaming process has been used perhaps similar to what was Jane's USAF famous for. (USAF was after LB2 was it not?)

It was very interesting process, however, very priopriatory and little is known about it. Does anyone know about?

And of course, providing that above mentioned process is really what it is present in LB2.

Jane's F15 maybe closer to this than USAF. F15 was launched shortly after LB2. There's even an end-game advert for it when you exit LB2.

There's even an LB2 ad on the back of the F-15 manual. Go figure

Yes, proudly proclaiming, Longbow2, 1997's Flight Sim of the Year!

plus janes usaf was not made by ea's skunkworks
it was pixel multimedia an israeli company

As reported by Keith, colors are nowhere to be found on the large slices of terrain textures.

I am convinced that they ARE terrain textures as hight maps are only those x-ray like maps.

So here is one possiblity how it could have been done. At this point just the assumption, but by playing with the palettes we may nail down this hopefully too.
web page

Yes, I had an old program called VistaPro that used that technique, and it generated terrain that looked a LOT like LB2. It was from the same time period, too. I think you're on the right track.

Good find Polack.
I think the files in the palette folder are used to colour the terrain, maybe just by height or maybe the 'type' data describes the type of landscape in each tile.
Will look at the flipcode site and see if its possible to attempt a colouring of the maps in LBMap.

Cheers,
Keith

Thanks guys, but here I try to oppose myself. Because, and again this is just a guess, I am hoping that here we have something very special in techniques of terrain creation for simulations. Or at least some kind of hybrid of that technique.

Here is minute information about it and I must admit that despite Internet being a mine for informations this is very hush stuff.
Here is the link:

web page

CONVERSTATION WITH YET ANOTHER
EX-PIXEL GUY CONCERNING TERRAIN AND OTHER MYSTERIES WITH ARIEL CANCIO -

As you can even the title sounds enigmatic. It is about USAF sim , but there are similarities. Anyway the process is most probable pattented and maybe even reserved and used exclusively by military on their simulators.

I may be here off, or we may get stuck to find out how it is working. Whatever the end result its worth to explore and see if we can learn here something new.

Polack,
to be honest I think the Longbow terrain is a lot simpler than that used for USAF, and the previous flipcode link is more likely to be significant.

Cheers,
Keith