British Isles Terrain Beta 0.4

[+Baltika 85]

View File

British Isles Terrain Beta 0.4

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UK Terrain and Campaign

 

by Baltika

 

Beta v 0.4

 

 

For Wings over Europe Oct '08 patch

 

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Credits:

 

Thanks to gepard for his terrain tutorials, without which this mod would not exist.

 

Thanks to Deuces for his Enhanced WoE tileset.

I have included this in terms of the CombatAce Fair Use agreement, as I understand Deuces has granted his permission for his older mods to be used in this way.

 

Thanks to Wrench for leading the way in terrain target placement.

 

 

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Unzip the zip and copy the "UK" folder in to your terrain folder.

 

The "RedBritain68" folder goes into your campaign folder.

 

I have included two sets of terrain .ini files. You will find them in the UK/Soviet Invasion and UK/Celtic Wars folders. The default is the Soviet Invasion set, which has England defined as "ENEMY" and is required for the Red Britain 68 campaign to work.

 

The Celtic Wars set has England defined as FRIENDLY, with the Celtic Nations as ENEMY. This is for use with ndicki's upcoming Celtic Wars mod, and should be regarded as a WIP. use at your own risk. In particular, you will require to add the various nations listed in this thread to your NATIONS.INI or you will likely get a CTD:

 

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showt...38449&st=40

 

This terrain is a beta, so you will see some strangeness. You can report any particularly freaky stuff to me at CombatAce.

 

It is set up for use with WoE, but you can use SFP1 and WoV if you change the CAT pointer line in the terrain .ini file.

 

 

 

 

Slainte!

 

Baltika

 

March 2009

 

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For the campaign to work, you will require to add the following mods:

 

 

Files required for Red Britain '68: Soviet Invasion UK

 

F-111K by FastCargo & team (@ C5)

Lightning F.6 by Russ (@C5)

 

Sea Vixen FAW 2 by P. Chandler

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...mp;showfile=885

 

Lightning Fmk6 by Russo

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...mp;showfile=736

 

Lightning skins by Sundowner

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=5959

 

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...mp;showfile=992

 

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...mp;showfile=985

 

Gloster Javelin by Veltro2k

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=8164

 

RAF Thunderchief FGA 1 by Spinners

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=7986

 

RAF Corsair GR.2 by Spinners

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=7049

 

RN Skyraider by Wrench

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=1938

 

Skyhawk FG2 by Guest

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...mp;showfile=554

 

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• Submitter
  Baltika
• Submitted
  03/30/2009
• Category
  Terrains

 

[scouserlad13 0]

Been waiting for a long time for a British isles terrain to come out. Well done mate!

[ndicki 22]

Brilliant! Thanks! Now I can try to figure out how campaigns work...

[Canadair 16]

I really love it, thanks

If I may say this would really benefit from seasoned WOE tiles and terrain enhancement, what do you think?

[+christian59 8]

a new area and a new campaing

 

GOOD NEW :fans:

 

Christian

[+Baltika 85]

Glad you all like it, cheers

 

Thanks for the kind words.

 

As I say in the Read me, it is a beta, so there are issues to be ironed out. But if you spot any very weird stuff, let me know as this will be improved over time (maybe a long time, but hey )

 

Canadair, I agree, CA_stary's seasoned WoE tileset would go great with this. The UK terrain is based on the stock WoE tilset, so you can use any WoE tileset repaint. However, I have made a couple of custom transition tiles from Deuce's repaint, so any other WoE set would be missing those, which may look a bit odd. The stock WoE tileset has the bare minimum of transition tiles to make the stock Germany_CE work, which is fair enough, but for a terrain like the UK which is very hilly, mountainous, and with rugged coastlines, TE struggles to texture the thing properly without those additional transition tiles. Frankly, I would like more transition tiles, but after what has happened to my Iceland project I am not starting another full-blown tiling mod in a hurry.

 

Also, as this is a beta (albeit much more advanced than my Iceland beta) I wanted to keep the d/l size to a minimum.

 

Cheers all,

 

Baltika

[Vader2 1]

:yes:

Good stuff!

Like it a lot,

thank,s!

[Derk 265]

Funny thing to streak through the glens of Scotland..... Been there in the autumn with just the first snow on the mountains, some parts really have the feeling ! And nice litlle castles every now and then ......

 

Thanks a lot,

 

Derk

[+Sundowner 4,818]

Excellent work mate....

[Canadair 16]

Canadair, I agree, CA_stary's seasoned WoE tileset would go great with this. The UK terrain is based on the stock WoE tilset, so you can use any WoE tileset repaint. However, I have made a couple of custom transition tiles from Deuce's repaint, so any other WoE set would be missing those, which may look a bit odd. The stock WoE tileset has the bare minimum of transition tiles to make the stock Germany_CE work, which is fair enough, but for a terrain like the UK which is very hilly, mountainous, and with rugged coastlines, TE struggles to texture the thing properly without those additional transition tiles. Frankly, I would like more transition tiles, but after what has happened to my Iceland project I am not starting another full-blown tiling mod in a hurry.

 

 

Yes I noticed your custom tiles in the texture list, yet can you please post the texture names? I installed seasoned woe, and theretically I should have NOT overwritten those. I will continue runnnig experiments and report. So far so good. On the other hand the atmosphere has somethign "wrong". Perhaps it is just me, used to see those textures in germany, I have to see more. This is not a critic to you and CA stary of course. The Battle of Britain did a great job in giving that "brit " atmoshpere, I loved that terrain and campaign. As a note I updated the install to the new patches,, but the FM of the prop planes are SCREWED.

As a final request is it possible to have a no- enemy version of the terrain for the fun of training over the english isles? It is just renaming alll the "enemy" with "friendly" right? and deleting the frontline entry?

[+Baltika 85]

Hi Canadair,

 

The custom tiles are a straightforward blend of some of Deuce's existing tiles. The texture names are as follows:

 

Filename124=GERMANYRA25A.bmp

Filename125=GERMANYRA50A.bmp

Filename126=GERMANYRA75A.bmp

Filename127=GERMANYA-JR.bmp

Filename128=GERMANYA-RJ.bmp

Filename129=GERMANYJ-AR.bmp

Filename130=GERMANYJ-RA.bmp

Filename131=GERMANYR-AJ.bmp

Filename132=GERMANYR-JA.bmp

 

This is lifted straight from my custom texturelist for UK terrain (based on the stock WoE texturelist) and the new tiles follow the naming convention of the existing WoE tileset. I did mean to include the custom texturelist as part of the download (as it is essential for modders to run the UK terrain through the TE) but I guess I forgot to include it. I also meant to include my custom tiles in a separate folder for ease of reference, sorry.

 

Here's the texturelist I used to create UK terrain v0.4:

UK_TextureList.txt

 

D/L that file, and re-name it "UK_TextureList.ini" without the quotation marks. Drop it into the Terrain/UK/Tileset folder and you will be good to go in TE. Note that the Tileset folder is NOT included as part of the d/l, read Gepard's terrain tutorials on how to set this up properly - basically you just copy the terrain .bmp files, and the terrain .tga tiles converted to .bmp format, in 256x256 size for use in TE, into the Tileset folder.

 

As to the question of the feel of the terrain, well, that is a matter of personal taste. I too am a big fan of Gepard's BoB terrain. It uses a relatively limited number of tiles (based on the original SFP1 desert terrain naming convention) to achieve the desired effect. In setting up UK terrain, I wanted to use one of the stock tilesets, as those texturelists are provided with TE. The choice between desert, Vietnam_SEA, Germany_CE and Isreal (WOI) made selecting the Germany tileset the obvious choice. It would be relatively simple to copy & rename Gepard's BoB tiles to match the WoE tileset naming convention, and drop them into the UK terrain folder, but I leave that to the individual to do if they so wish.

 

As I said above, I am working on a completely new tileset for Iceland, from scratch, and that is pretty well advanced, but it has taken a long time already and has a while to go, so I am not starting any new tiling projects for now.

 

 

As to a practice range style UK terrain, I'm not entirely sure how to go about this but what you suggest seems like a good start. If you look at the "range" terrains available here by Wrench (from MajorLee's work, or is it Deuces?) you should be able to set up a friendly-only UK terrain without too much trouble.

 

What I can promise for UK terrain is periodic terrain targeting upgrades (I am working through London and the major English cities to give them a facelift, with many more landmarks, target zones and so on), fixes for the more glaring "sea mountains" and coastal tile issues as I come across them, and at least one more RAF vs Soviets campaign - probably late 90's, to use bobrock's superlative Tornado F3 and Harrier mods, and of course the Mirage Factory's excellent Mig-29. And yes, that campaign will be Red-flyable as stock.

 

So watch this space.

 

Slainte,

 

Baltika

[xjboy550 0]

Great terrain well done ! just love flying round wales at about 50ft in a hawk !!lol

[Arkansascharlatan 0]

I love the terrain, guys! It's a dream to fly! I'm only facing one issue with it, and that is that whenever I begin on a runway, my aircraft appear in the middle, and facing the wrong direction. Anything I should do?

[+Baltika 85]

I love the terrain, guys! It's a dream to fly! I'm only facing one issue with it, and that is that whenever I begin on a runway, my aircraft appear in the middle, and facing the wrong direction. Anything I should do?

 

Hi there,

 

Glad you like the terrain. As to the issue you describe, this is a known problem if you are running this terrain on SFP1/SFG.

 

The UK terrain is set up to use airfield_data.ini files which are found in the Germany_CE.CAT and do not appear in the desert.CAT. As I set this up to run on WoE, and did not test this terrain on other platforms, I was not aware of it until after release.

 

There will be updates to this terrain which will fix this issue, but there is no ETA as yet. Meantime, select start "in air" as a workaround. To fix it yourself, look in the UK_targets.ini and compare the airfield_data.ini= entry with entries for each type of runway with the corresponding entries in your desert_targets.ini, and swap the entries over.

 

To explain:

 

In UK_targets.ini you will see this:

 

[TargetArea118]

Name=RAF Waddington

Position=1100000.000000,486000.000000

Radius=11313.708984

ActiveYear=0

Location=12

Alignment=ENEMY

AirfieldDataFile=german_airbase3.ini <----- This line causes the problem in SFP1/SFG

NumSquadrons=12

Target[001].Type=Runway4

Target[001].Offset=0.00,0.00

Target[001].Heading=20.0

 

etc, etc, for each runway.

 

Look in desert_targets.ini and find an entry for Runway4, eg:

 

[TargetArea053]

Name=D2 Airfield

Position=251000.00,761000.00

Radius=6000

ActiveYear=0

Location=1

Alignment=FRIENDLY

AirfieldDataFile=desert_airfield4.ini <---- See the difference?

NumSquadrons=6

Target[001].Type=Runway4

Target[001].Offset=0.00,0.00

Target[001].Heading=30

 

So, when Runway4 is called out in the UK_targets.ini, replace

 

AirfieldDataFile=german_airbase3.ini

 

with this:

 

AirfieldDataFile=desert_airfield4.ini

 

Each runway type has a different airfield data file, so you will need to check each one individually.

 

Any questions, fire away.

 

Cheers,

 

Baltika

[Spinners 15,986]

Holy Thread resurrection Batman!

 

Fantastic work!

[+Baltika 85]

Thanks very much, glad you like it

 

This is a fairly early beta build, you may see some misalignment of runways and tsunamis creeping up the shoreline.

 

I am working on tidying all of that up and improving terrain targetisation (which is truly beta, except a few target areas round Edinburgh etc).

 

If you spot any strangeness, give me a shout & I'll fix it for the next release.

 

Cheers,

 

Baltika