PMC Tactical forums

Taking a shot at creating some custom terrain tiles; concentrating on the ports of the Persian Gulf first with Bandar Abbas and Kuwait number 1 and number 2 respectively. Here's the first one I've gotten done:




For you tile gurus out there, is there anything you notice wrong with this that I need to correct in the future? These are 512x512 tiles....creating them in a montage order.

Edit: This post has been updated with the additional tiles I have finished.

Photorealistic theater?

Snake Man wrote:Photorealistic theater?

Just parts (2-3 ports and, maybe, a few Nuke/bio/chem sites). Don't know. Depends on how much energy I have.

I think it's excellent, some oil installation type of harbour would also be cool. Maybe CCC could come up with an offshore oil rig of some type, too ?

As a general note on coastal tiles, it's smart to make a set with roads on them, cause if you get hilly terrain and need to place first a coastal tile, then a road inside, the roads look strange since they are placed on a hillside.

87th_striker wrote:I think it's excellent, some oil installation type of harbour would also be cool. Maybe CCC could come up with an offshore oil rig of some type, too ?

As a general note on coastal tiles, it's smart to make a set with roads on them, cause if you get hilly terrain and need to place first a coastal tile, then a road inside, the roads look strange since they are placed on a hillside.

@ 87th_Striker (or anyone else who might know):

I am basing these tiles on Google images taken at a scale of 1,000 meters because of Falcons 1,000 m tile size restriction (this equates to roughly about 3.6-3.8 km height above the surface). Is this about right or is this going to look weird / crappy in sim? Anybody know? Would sure like to know if these will look good before I make a whole set and find out they look lousy in sim.

thanks.

87th_striker wrote:I think it's excellent, some oil installation type of harbour would also be cool. Maybe CCC could come up with an offshore oil rig of some type, too ?

As a general note on coastal tiles, it's smart to make a set with roads on them, cause if you get hilly terrain and need to place first a coastal tile, then a road inside, the roads look strange since they are placed on a hillside.

BTW, 87th_Striker,
there are already off-shore oil rigs in the database in case you didn't know already...

Also, since these tiles already have roads on the images can't they be setup in-sim with pathmaker to define a road to follow along the image road(s)?

Here's a single shot showing the montage I have completed so far for Bandar Abbas port. It's coming along!

Sherlock,

Incredible work!! That is gonna make a huge difference in the theaters.. Too bad we could not tile a whole theater that way!

Jody

marvin157th wrote:Sherlock,

Incredible work!! That is gonna make a huge difference in the theaters.. Too bad we could not tile a whole theater that way!

Jody

Thx Jody.
Yeh, it's too bad we couldn't do but, otoh, I wouldn't want to be the one that has to make all the tiles!

Yes true.. However we could do a 12X12 theater... Wow, that would be a fun theater..

Jody

Well, for now I am done on what can be accomplished with the current Google satellite imagery. Most of eastern Bandar Abbas (including Bandar Abbass International Airport) is poor quality imagery. Here is the final list of tiles:



I've edited in the existing ODS/IRAN modern city tiles at the eastern end so that the city can be made to approximate its true size and so that transition tiles can be used on the eastern end as well.

@SM,
I've emailed the custom tiles I've done for Bandar Abbas to you for inclusion in the next release.

I divided the tiles into two (2) "groups". One group has 13 tiles (these are the tiles that interface with the rough grazing interface tiles or they interface with other Modern City tiles). The second group has 15 tiles (these are the tiles that border the sea and/or have ocean portions in them).

The two groups use different palettes but within each group I kept the same palette (i.e., group 1 has the same palette across all 13 tiles).

I attempted to name the tiles and I did convert them to pcx, 256 color, indexed and applied the same palette across the entire set. If the names won't work, then feel free to rename them. I do believe the tile names are unique within the Iran/ODS texture.zip.

Let me know if you have any questions. I sent them to pmc at pmctactical dot org.

Group1\HCITYD1B.pcx
Group1\HCITYD1D.pcx

Those river tiles arent working, the river is not aligning center. I believe the road and river going in/out in a tile is dead center coordinates(?). At least I'm sure its not off that much. Or am I wrong?

Group2\HCOST00A.pcx
Group2\HCOST00C.pcx
Group2\HCOST00D.pcx
Group2\HCOST00E.pcx

Has some graphics anomaly on the bottom right hand corner.

Other than that, they look very nice, good work!

Snake Man wrote: Group1\HCITYD1B.pcx
Group1\HCITYD1D.pcx

Those river tiles arent working, the river is not aligning center. I believe the road and river going in/out in a tile is dead center coordinates(?). At least I'm sure its not off that much. Or am I wrong?

Those two tiles go together as a set of 2. HCITYD1D goes on the right and HCITYD1B goes on the left. HCITYD1B will line up with the normal river tiles when they are positioned above it. HCITYD1D is the outlet tile going through Bandar Abbas city to the sea.

Snake Man wrote: Group2\HCOST00A.pcx
Group2\HCOST00C.pcx
Group2\HCOST00D.pcx
Group2\HCOST00E.pcx

Has some graphics anomaly on the bottom right hand corner.

Other than that, they look very nice, good work!

What are the problems so I know next time what NOT to do?
I can see the problem on HCOST00A and HCOST00C. Not sure about the others....?

Can you fix them or do I need to? Just let me know.

Thanks for the kind words. This was a big job. Don't know if I am going to do Kuwait or not. Still thinking about it while I try to get the airbase tiles in better order.

The graphics anomaly the few pixels of light color in the ocean. Yes please fix them and resend just the fixed ones, that'll be good.

Snake Man wrote:The graphics anomaly the few pixels of light color in the ocean. Yes please fix them and resend just the fixed ones, that'll be good.

I've got the fixes done and will email them to you this evening (I can't get to my web based email from work; they are blocking any uploads/ downloads ***the bastards!*** ).

So look for my email later tonight.

Sherlock wrote:

Snake Man wrote:The graphics anomaly the few pixels of light color in the ocean. Yes please fix them and resend just the fixed ones, that'll be good.

I've got the fixes done and will email them to you this evening (I can't get to my web based email from work; they are blocking any uploads/ downloads ***the bastards!*** ).

So look for my email later tonight.

Email sent.

Thanks I got them. There still is tiny few pixels in HCOST00D.pcx upper right hand corner (ocean) and HCOST00E.pcx bottom center (ocean). But they are so small I'm not sure if they can be seen ingame.

I was wondering about practicality of "life like" and "in scale" renderings of the major cities or urban areas. They could be procured but the size and number of tiles would be perhaps too big.

I just made some trials with major cities and size of one is no less than 1000 tiles for some large capital cities. Perhaps changing (cheating) on zoom level would minimize this to 1/4 but then it would not really look that great.

I repeat though that they could be procured whenever they available on MSVE. My grabber from some reason refuses to work with Google Earth

my .02c, use generic, better, phototrealistic tiles for cities/towns. for specific areas of interest- such as major harbors, navy bases, islands or sight-seeing spots/bay area, use dedicated photorealistic tiles.

Thanks to ccc for his input.

Still, I would like to return here ask: how possible, or impossible is to use larger swaths of photo real tiles in the terrain.

The accessibility of some sweet photo material has been secured and it just itches me to try this subject question again. I would definitely agree with ccc that the best and the smartest would be to tile that way just some small areas of specific targets ( and airbases - as I perhaps showed in the other thread) but could we consider really larger areas like major capital cities of the 2 major opponents of the given theater ... or even if it is only possible even more.

It boils down to how much editing work tat would pose, do not worry about making tiles.

Imagine that if such would be of some possibility then perhaps even smaller TE terrains could be maybe created just for some serious exercises of the target recognition and ground pounding.

You can use 4096 photo tiles in a theater if I recall correctly, dunno how large area that makes when 1 tile is 1km.

However in PMC theaters you can forget about photo realistic tiles, it won't happen. So many people have had the dreams of them and yes sure they look good but they aren't practical for F4 terrain. I've tried them myself, I did the Baghdad, but it was just and experiment.

terrainview baghdad photo tiles

Its just not practical to do large areas with photo tiles. We can do 6 tiles in a group for airbases or small cities with extremely important landscapes, but that's it. Just let it go man, its been tried and deemed not practical.

Snake Man wrote: Just let it go man, its been tried and deemed not practical.