homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Battle of Britain + Battle of Britain II NEW TERRAIN TEXTURES available (+pics) UPDATED

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[README]


SUMMERTERRAIN update MOD
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These textures are based heavily on the excellent work a little while ago by Marcel "Cellinsky" Aerni. Many thanks indeed to him for that work.

They have been tweaked further to overcome the most obvious patterning and also to reduce residual 'squareness' to the field systems. This is not a feature of Southern England (South of London) even today, and certainly wasn't in the 40s pre widespead mechanisation.

The textures are somewhat brighter than the stock BoBII ones and a lot brighter than Cellinsky's originals. Many people found it hard to see aircraft on the deck against those. Brighter terrain aids aircraft visibility (a very long term issue in sims).

So these textures might best be described as a 'SummerTerrain in sunlight'.

There is also a correction in this package for an item that was erroneously omitted from 2.06. namely Battle of Britain II \ObjectAdds\France_Calais.txt

Installation.
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These textures go into five sub-folders of \Battle of Britain II\ (\landmap2, \landscap, \imgmap16, \imagemap, \maskmap)
To preserve the original files, you can either backup (make a copy of) the individual files in this zip or the entire folders:
Battle of Britain II \landmap2
Battle of Britain II \landscap
Battle of Britain II \imgmap16
Battle of Britain II \imagemap
Battle of Britain II \maskmap
(Note that you will need 300M of temporary space to unzip this.)

To install, you can either
1) unzip these contents to a temporary location and copy the files over manually to their respective folder (overwriting the present files), or
2) simply unzip the entire thing into the Battle of Britain II folder (you should have the 'use folder names' option ticked (It usually is anyway) and select "Extract to Here").

[/README]
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DOWNLOAD: http://www.shockwaveproductions.com/bob_dev/PaulPics/SummerTerrain.zip
(updated download now 33M)












DOWNLOAD: http://www.shockwaveproductions.com/bob_dev/PaulPics/SummerTerrain.zip
(updated download now 33M)



So the intent of this is to have a public beta to find major issues (we have about 10 on the list right now before this would be an 'official' update).

The most visible ones are:-
1) Areas that to date have essentially been unmapped green (France away from the coast) have a repeating texture.
3) Some Bomber Command airfields need some texture reassignment.
..and some other stuff...

So feedback would be appreciated.

The download has now been updated to include a FARTILES.BIN file (and risen to 33M in size).

This matches the view in the distance (which were still based on the old terrain textures) to the new textures.

The link has been updated now, thanks

DOWNLOAD: http://www.shockwaveproductions.com/bob_dev/PaulPics/SummerTerrain.zip

(Note that you will need 300M of temporary space to unzip this.)

Looks very nice! Thanks very much. I'll give a try at the weekend.

I've been flying over this 'new' terrain for couple of hours now. Very, very nice!

A virtual pint to all involved!

I was hoping that this terrain fix would possibly fix the straight squared edges and flat look of the raised forests, but did not with my install. Am I wrong that it does not or did I not do something incorrectly when I installed this new terrain?
BadBud
http://www.simflite.com

From my experience BadBud, your not doing anything wrong.

I believe this version is compilation of "photo-realistice" terrain, meaning flat. The "raised" forrest concept was a legacy feature of Rowan (good thought at the time for terrain relief), but doesn't do much now. Of course I could be all wrong with my assumptions..

All in all, I like the color change, even though I've never been to Britain. What does it REALLY look like bader (we know you have pictures:-).

It is quite amazing though.

Because of the odd looking forest in the "Raised" mode, I have selected "No" to this and find the terrain looks better to me with this fix and it is a keeper.
Thanks,
BadBud
http://www.simflite.com

Yes, this terrain is best with the forest raises OFF, really..


The colouring is representative of direct sunlight, in early summer, I would say.

Man, I can't wait till I have enough free time to fire this up!

Yeahhh!

Nice to see old work is still used. Its been a while. Thanxxs for picking them up and taking it a step further! And far-tiles too. I was always to lazy doing them by myself. Good work Bader.

Marcel

Marcel, thanks for your work. I love the new Cellsky/Bader landscape.

Marcel and Bader, Thanks.

Looks splendid with Far Tiles and it helps seeing aircraft against the ground which was too hard for my liking before.

Thanks for the base textures, Marcel. Wonderful.
All I did was tweak and blend them.

Maybe I am biased, but they are lovely to fly over. I am distracted by both Jerry above and the landscape below now.
thanks
Paul

I've been flying all over England this past weekend (it seems) just in awe of this work-in-progress of yours!

And I was always one who thought the original terrain wasn't bad...

I'll say ot again. Great job!

I do not have this sim...yet...but I stop in here all the time to see what you guys are up to.
That's the nicest terrain screens I've seen yet!
With coop multi-player coming, it looks as though I might have to finally grab this!!

Pooch,

Give it a try - at just $20 the game is worth every cent. You can get the full download version or get it on CD HERE DIRECT FROM SHOCKWAVE.

I should make clear though that there are no definite plans for enabling Multiplayer coop at present. There is a group actively testing the currently mostly broken MP but it is a HUGE task to fix... Its been looked at HARD before by others who are very competent and not yet been able to be fixed. Nonetheless there is an effort to get it going. In the end it might take someone coming on board as a volunteer (like almost everyone else to date) who has very significant MP coding experience..... At this point its impossible to give any estimates on chances of success or time frame if so for multiplayer. Just don't wan't you to feel misled about the realistic chances for MP down the road and make a purchase decision based in large part counting on that.

With all that said, even without MP, many many people enjoy the game. BoB2's single player value and campaign are awesome. It is totally transformed now with the 2.06 patch from its original release. This summer terrain mod with a few more refinements will likely become the "official" terrain down the road. There are other good terrain mods out there as well.

There is more than enough room on most flight simmer's PCs for BoB2 and whatever else they fly. You won't regret buying it if you get it.

Thanks, SeaVee. I could have sworn I read somewhere that Coop Multiplay was on the way, soon. Still, it looks real good. Big improvement. It's nice to see those guys staying on top of it, too.