Nevada redux

[Bird-FF]

hello, since this is the theaters forum!.. Wanted to let everyone know that I'm reviving the Nevada Theater Project!.. I have a couple of scrren shots, but I'll get more into what exactly I'm doing later, since it's late.. Here's the action..







There is alot more to what I have done then this, but you can see that I'm getting somewhere!.. I'll post more in the morning..

[ccc]

great job. why not move the thread to nevada section?

[ranger822]

You should contact Com-GP and get his Nevada satillite photos . . about 300MB . . you can make a ton of tiles from those . . .

Else make some yourself. We kicked around a few ideas on terrain tiles. . . I think you are kind of stuck though - - - Tomas ran into problems with phototiling everything - - - Falcon code couldn't handle the number of tiles needed or something. I would have to dig around but I seem to recall he found some upper limit for unique tiles. . . what we came up with was the idea of using a combination of hi-res photo tiles in blocks (the most efficient use is a perfect square block of tile. You an create large blocks of 20x20 tiles and transition around them. The idea is to reduce the appearance of Falcon like terrain - - - so the idea would be create a mountain range and then transition around with a standardized desert tile . . . and then throw in some random tiles for variety in the desert. This could work well for Nevada since a lot of the terrain is rather repetitious by nature. You could use phototiles for; Area 51, Tonopah AFB, Nellis AFB (and possibly Las Vegas if you want to use all your tiles in one place for the eye candy) McCarren International Airport (Vegas), Beatty AFNG Base, and selected mountain ranges in the gunnery range complex.

[Bird-FF]

Well.. I was thinking sort of the same thing, but simpler.. Like for vegas.. There will about 4 city main tiles, transitions, roads, and a couple of sat's for the strip. The only area of the terrain that I want to liven up is around the range.. The rest of the map can look as falcon does.. I would consider doing sat's for the airbases, but at the moment, I lack the talent to model the airbases..

So I'm stuck with what we got..

Although, it would not be impossible to make as close as I could.. Then edit the sat's to try to create tiles around the current models..


Google earth has great images, and the resolution is sharper.. The key is to figure out how far away from the ground you need to be to have correct scaling with falcon's world..

[ccc]

imo airbase modeling is not the top priority. just let the campaign rolling..and let us know if it work - can blue or red side achieve their win/lose/draw condition?

[ranger822]

I agree with CCC - - - the first priority for a theater after basic terrain is built is to get a campaign that works - - then you can really build around that with more entities, better terrain etc. . . else all the eye-candy isn't worth much.

Regarding the question of scaling for satillite imagery - - my own thought on tiles is that it doesn't matter . . . Falcon can't support a total satillite tiled theater any - - so you have to "create" something that looks realistic. Falcon designers had the right idea by creating a series of seemless photo-like tiles. What they didn't do is increase the variation in terrain transitions and apply a more sophisticated method for the placement of random tiles.

For desert good desert tiles you need a very non-descript tile that looks good at various altitudes. What I want for Israeli theater is two or three generic desert tiles which can transition to each other and then use blocks of random terrain. If you consider viewing elevation (say 5000-25000 feet) as your target for optimizing viewing you really nead to have about 25-35 square kilometers or tiles which don't repeat before you begin to lose detail in the fartiles. . . so if you can build your terrain with that in mind you can tile your entire theater in two or three desert tiles and them place your random terrain blocks to fit. For my work on Falklands I created an elevation template - - so that for mountains I used mountain blocks, for flat lands you use a dry-lake bed terrain block. Then you have to work in the roads, rivers, etc. . . If you go with the conventional CATE configs you are going to get Falcon terrain . . . that is a good starting point but if you want something more realistic you are going to have to "paint" the terrain by hand.