A More Flexible Manual Tileset

[pagsab]

I described in my previous thread my experiments in creating a manual terrain for the northern half of the WW2 Eastern Front, to avoid the distortions caused in most published terrains by cartographic asymmetries in the DEM data at these high latitudes.   It became increasingly evident that standard SF2 tilesets are a very blunt instrument for modelling real landscapes, and that ditching automatic terrain generation gave me the freedom to create a much more compact and flexible tile layout.  I decided to do just this for my spin-off project of a truly reduced scale NW Europe terrain which would avoid the distortions and long E-W flight times of the classic EuroWW2 terrain and of Gepard’s more detailed Battle of Britain tileset.  Since my terrain was designed to reduce flight times in my wingman experience missions by eventually squeezing the whole span from Brest to Berlin into a smaller playable area than Gepard used for the span from Brest to Dunkirk, it was vital to have tiles allowing higher resolution modelling than standard tilesets with their gentle stereotypical curves.

After careful consideration, I decided to use Gepard’s lovely high res artwork as the basis for my redesigned tileset for my own private use.  I confined my interventions to relatively simple graphical adjustments such as lightening water, forest and urban areas, creating my own shorelines, and cutting and pasting Gepard’s elements to construct my own preferred tile mix.  I ended up with a compact set of just 54 tiles as shown below.  The top row includes my standard single tile airfield and Gepard’s 8 farmland tiles including copses and small villages, which are randomly mixed and rotated using Gerwin’s invaluable TFD editor to form the default background of my terrain.  Tiles 10 to 31 add water to these 9 basic tiles, with the key twist that my coastlines now run to the middle of each edge.  This allows me to create narrow channels and isthmuses and to complement the standard coasts with ‘bays’ and ‘points’ which touch the middle of other edges, giving greater flexibility in mirroring real coastlines and allowing optional junctions with lakes and rivers or with small island tiles to create larger islands or peninsulas.  Tiles 32 to 45 add woods and built-up areas to the basic tiles, with the key refinement that every edge retains the same mix of fields and copses as on Gepard’s farmland tiles, so they may be placed individually or in fully flexible clumps with the edges representing forest clearings or city parks.  The bottom row adds a couple of tiles for the chalk cliffs on both sides of the Channel, and a selection of uncultivated tiles adapted from the high res Grass Base tile in Sundowner’s Photo Real UK Terrain, so that hills and moors need not be shown by unbroken woodland.

Instead of starting with peripheral islands as in my Eastern Front project, I decided to leap straight to the heart of the WW2 action as shown below by modelling the ‘front line county’ of Kent.  My approach of scrolling and zooming Google Maps to complement my Google-based reference map worked well, and my reshaped tileset came into its own in mirroring the intricacies of the north Kent coast and letting woods and towns appear correctly despite the much reduced scale of my terrain.  I have included the 3 forward airfields of Manston, Hawkinge and Lympne, as well as the Coastal Command fields at Eastchurch and Detling.  Although Kent is only a tiny percentage of the entire playable area, the ease of modelling the Channel itself means that it is already possible for me to fly intercept sorties from Manston.  Filling out East Sussex and the Pas de Calais in similar fashion will allow me to model plenty of short range Axis or Allied missions from 1940 to 1944, as I seek to recapture with updated graphics some of the fun I had with European Air War nearly 3 decades ago.

As Gepard said in my previous thread, it would be impossibly tedious to adjust 16 elevation points per tile manually, even if the data were to hand.  However, as shown below I have now refined my more practical approach of raising entire tiles using Gerwin’s editor, by first copying and pasting generic ‘noise’ into all tiles not representing flat marshland.  I add 2 raised points for rolling farmland, or 4 raised points for hills.  I use unusually large height steps of 39 metres each, so in the low northern European plains to which my manual approach is most suited, I need only to select one of a few different underlying heights for each tile, based on the zoomable elevation maps available at https://en-us.topographic-map.com/. After careful experimentation, I now understand the intriguingly asymmetric procedures which SF2 uses to generate slopes, so I can make selective interventions around coasts, rivers or airfields or to smooth the course of steep slopes like the North Downs escarpment below.    My generic noise masks the orthogonal nature of my smaller height variations, and makes treetop flights over my terrain a truly immersive and exhilarating affair.

I still do not fully understand the tangled nuances of TOD objects, but after an extensive search I found a compatible set of tree and building TODs in ShrikeHawk’s Continuation War conversion which I could adapt for my purposes.  I halved the height of the tree clumps to give a more realistic sense of speed, and I darkened the buildings to blend with Gepard’s tiles and reflect soot-blackened 1940s Europe.  I employ only a tiny variety of these small TOD objects, but through assiduous use of Moe’s TOD editor I have keyed them fully to Gepard’s lovely tile artwork in such large numbers that I often reach the 10,000 vertex limit per tile (for instance when combining the low square blocks to represent warehouses and the like).  I have already logged many hours in my trusty Hurricane to check and simply enjoy my evolving terrain, and the picture below shows me overflying the iconic Dover cliffs with the rolling Kent hills in the distance.  I do not even try to match the huge variety of unique tiles and objects created by Gepard and others.  My focus lies instead on combining the best basic elements from their work to create a simple, immersive and graphically striking generic terrain system which fits with my own idiosyncratic preferences and which I may extend gradually to cover other areas of NW Europe as time allows.