Updated graphics

[185-drummer]

Hi,

The area looks overal great, however, I feel it could do with some improvements in the area of objects, city-tiles, etc.

One thing which could be considered is reusing some of the detailed tiles (based on landsat imagery) that an older Viper game already used: "Back to Baghdad". Does anyone have access to the Basra refinery tiles, or the tiles for Kuwait City, or the island just before the cost of Kuwait (with loads of SAMs).

If need be I can provide you with some tiles in the right format, although I do ot know which size and which level they will nedd to have. Anyone from the tilers team interested?

[Snake Man]

We aren't too happy to use back to baghdad textures...

If you have some another source images like sat images and such, then we are definitely interested.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[185-drummer]

quote:Originally posted by Snake Man:
We aren't too happy to use back to baghdad textures...

If you have some another source images like sat images and such, then we are definitely interested.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

Why's that? I got some textures out in GIF format (like Basra harbor) and it really looks great, comparable or better than compared to some textures in Korea. What is the criterion?

Kind regards,
Drummer

[T_Rex]

I don't know if this is the "real" reason, but there are certain legal ramifications to using other people's products without their permission. I don't have Back to Baghdad, though, so I don't know how good they are.

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by Drummer:
Why's that?

Well the legal issue can be one option, but I don't know maybe its just me but it feels somehow lame to use back to baghdad textures - at least directly using them.

Of course we can steal bits from them and ideas etc

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[185-drummer]

I understand the feeling. Well the other we can try is redo the work they did on the major cities, using sat images (which someone has to pay for; at least I have access) and color them in. Photoshop wizards would be required... I am not one of them.

Is there a place where I could show you some detailed 2m resolution pics of downtown Baghdad, Basra or Kuwait? JPG's are about 72k (small) to 200k (all of Baghdad). Just to get ideas going?

Drummer

[Snake Man]

Drummer thanks for your help. If you cant find any web place to host the images, email them to me nospam and I'll put them up to our server for everybody to see.

Thanks

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[185-drummer]

Snake,

email is on its way.

Drummer

[185-drummer]

Hi,

Somewhere on the forum there is a reference to the tiles that are made for Baghdad and other cities were in the making. I just loved these Baghdad tiles; seems to me that they are made using sat images. If I can be of anyassistance to create tiles for other cities or areas using sat images and GIMP, let me know. Although I'm not an expert I am more than willing to learn the tricks.

HOwever, coming back to the Baghdad tiles, I cannot seem to find them in the game? Also the big broad river flowing through the are is not in the theater. Is that due to the autotiling and does it need ot be hand adjusted?

Drummer.

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by Drummer:
I just loved these Baghdad tiles; seems to me that they are made using sat images.

Yes Zaggy created the Baghdad using black and white huge sat image and then he colored it by hand.

quote:If I can be of anyassistance to create tiles for other cities or areas using sat images and GIMP, let me know.

Of course. We could start by creating 512 res generic city tiles.

Since you must have ODS downloaded by now, check out the terrdata\DesStorm\texture directory, unzip the texture.zip (you only need the H*.pcx files).

Generic desert city tiles are HCITY801.pcx up to HCITY80F.pcx files. The 1 -> E is the transition from city to desert and F is the basic city tile.

If you could remake these in 512 res using some satellite image reference it would be great!

quote:Baghdad tiles, I cannot seem to find them in the game?

Yes, unfortunately Zaggy never finished the baghdad... there is only two segments made.

quote:the big broad river flowing through the are is not in the theater.

Yes this is part of the autotiling. I can autotile the tigris and euphoririskdfkjdf(whatever) rivers but they are like 2 kilometers wide

1 pixel == 1 tile. so CATE currently does them automatically as:

Coast - River - Coast

Which means at the narrowest place its about:

0.5km - 1km - 0.5km

I need to work on it, but they are indeed planned to be implemented in the terrain.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[185-drummer]

Hi Snakeman,

Maybe it is a start if I could have a look at the tiles Zaggy started and if he has information on how to segment the tiles and color them. I saw some reference to that he had some basic instructions available for people to help him.

Could you forward some stuff to me?

Drummer.

[Snake Man]

Contact me and I'll arrange you those tiles. But I warn you that they are not CATE compatible and are not finished.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[Zaggy]

Zaggy's graphics rig expired... And since he is an unemployed snr systems engineer/technical services consultant (thanks to the arse end falling out of IT), he has yet to get a decent rig together again of his own, that can be used for F4...

The bagdad images started life as about 800 200x200 pixel black and white images at 8m, that were put together like the worlds most insanely frustrating jigsaw (of course the bits werent numerically ordered or anything!!!)... Once pasted together, were scaled to F4's 7.7m resolution... i balanced the colours to give the over all image a slightly sand appearence....

Then the scaled images was aligned to what we would find in the game... I tried to match it up to the tigris and the airbases you find in bagdad... I used a massive matrix drawn with guides over the image, set to mark out 128x128 pixels, then nudged the image to fit the tiles as best we could...

The i cut the image into blocks measuring 18x18 tiles (so i had a one tile border round each segment), and started colouring...

the green comes thru by erasing area's of the B&W images so the green layers shows thru... From memory, working slowly with a %12-20% eraser in photoshop... Colour is added but spraying buff/sand/brown colours over wide area's, then slowly working down to the details...

Oh yeah, rivers and irrigation are also picked out in applicable colours too (irrigation is a F@#$en nightmare BTW)...

then i cut a copy of the finished 16x16 tiles from the center (using the 1 tile boreder to help me merge colours, details etc into the next segment), paste them into a new file, convert to 256 colours and grab the palette... Chop the image up into 256 tiles, making sure to maintain the same paletter thruout, name the files, zip them, send them to SM...

Phew!!!

Questions young padwan??

[T_Rex]

Man, I'm exhausted just reading it.

Any way to maybe split the job up?

[185-drummer]

Zaggy,

WOW... sounds like a lot of work. I got 8m resolution images from the TErraserver and was thinking of making one big BMP image, and starting to work on that. Then not worrying about the difference in resolution of 8 vs 7.7m in F4, position the Tigris on the MAP where it belongs, smoothing off the city boundaries into farm lands (standards to be determined by Snake Man and you) and only then start cutting down the image in smaller 128x128 pieces, numbering them while we go.

Would that work?

Furthermore I was thinking of not doing the coloring by hand but using image processing to do it for me, i.e. select color ranges in ceratin areas of the sat image and replace them by color patterns corresponding to vegatation, sand, roads, etc. I guess from your pics you didn't change the houses or buildings at all did you? The black and white of the sat-im seems good enough for me.

As the previous guys said; is it worth while continuing with the set and distribute the work over several people to finish this so important area of the Theater?

Drummer

[Zaggy]

Well someone can always continue the work... not sure if i could be split up easily...

Problem with someone continuing the work is, keeping the style the same (not a BIG issue) but the size of all the images, pallettes, etc.... From memory, were looking at close to 350Mb of data... and over my little 33.6 modem, well lets just agree were looking at the best part of a day and a half of bandwidth...