Opening the Adriatic

[pagsab]

My only reservation about the stunning Caporetto terrain is that, like other FE2 terrains, it uses dark, non-reflective water, making the sea look more like outer space than the sparkling ocean which I enjoy so much in SF2.  I saw from screenshots that some users had managed to awaken the dormant reflections, and I was delighted to find that simply replacing the entire WaterTextureMaterial section in the data.inis of FE2 terrains with that from one of my SF2 terrains did the trick in my own case, even without needing to supply the different shader file.  Seeing rivers shining in the sunlight adds greatly to the feeling of immersion even in land-locked terrains.  I also found that the 'wall' in FE2 is not hard coded as it is now in SF2, and that one can extract the FlightEngine file from the FlightData cat and push back the Border in the WorldSettings section from 25000 to 15000 without crashing the sim.  This gives useful extra elbow room for flights over the Adriatic, though sadly not enough to reach Venice itself.

Lightening the water required greater effort, but I bit the bullet and edited the many TGA tiles in the Caporetto terrain using my old copy of Photoshop Elements.  The Quick Selection Tool with its facility to add or subtract areas at the margins let me highlight the water, and then I used Enhance – Adjust Color – Color Variations to lighten it by 3 clicks.  This makes the tramlines of tile edges more apparent from altitude, but I consider this a worthwhile price to pay to see the sea churning and to be able to fly just above the surface by gauging the proximity of the waves.  I changed the rather lurid 'Isonzo' tiles to the same sky blue as other rivers, and darkened the 'Mesto' files significantly to make town buildings less jarringly bright.  Making the water lighter and bluer in my Western Front terrains will take even more effort because of all the different seasonal tiles, but eventually I hope to use my new abilities in HFD rescaling to add a less distorted and smaller scale model of south east England to the NW quadrant of the Flanders terrain, thereby allowing me to simulate the many missions flown across the North Sea by landplanes, seaplanes and airships.  I can then use my wingman trick to experience a marathon daylight round trip from Ghent to London and back with a flock of Gothas in summer 1917, braving flak and fighters along the way!

As discussed in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101404-spain-and-seaplanes/, Stephen1918's tantalising static models of biplane flying boats at Trieste and Lignano inspired me to convert them into flyable representations of the later Macchi M.18 and M.41 seaplanes for my Spanish Civil War project in SF2.  An obvious follow-up was to use the same techniques to make the original seaplanes flyable as well.  The picture below shows a Lohner L over its base north of Trieste, and a Macchi M.5 over the lagoon north of its own base, which is just visible in the distance.  I used the Vickers Gunbus and Pfalz D.IIIa as the basis for these visual conversions, with cockpits from the AEG GIV and SAML S2 respectively.  (See my Spain thread for more details of my techniques.)  I can now simply repaint the markings to create stand-ins for Austrian Brandenburg seaplane fighters and Italian copies of the Lohner, thereby obtaining everything I need to refight the Adriatic naval air war in miniature in the small and accessible bay between Trieste and Lignano.  My new planes and better-looking water make the Caporetto terrain an even more enticing venue for my FE2 gaming, and show what users can achieve by experimenting with similar modifications of their own.