Flanders Seaonal Coastal Tiles?

[Mike Dora 171]

I've been having fun copying Stary's recent stock terrains visual upgrade mod, including the seasonal variations, into Gepard's Vosges terrain and Edward's Flanders terrain. I now seem to have everything running fine, apart from a couple of mismatches on the Flanders coast.

 

These mismatches fall into 2 categories. For most of the seasons, there are 5 *.TGA tiles for which the "sea" shade does not match the rest of the sea, see attached "summer coastline" screenshot. For the winter seasons I've had a bit more success, by borrowing the relevant *.TGA files from Max188's "Deep Snow" mod (by way of B Bandy's Rhine River seasonal tiles for Vogesen - we are nothing if not an eclectic bunch). This at least gives me a common sea colour, but at the expense of excessively bright snow tiles at the coastline, see "winter coastline" screenshot.

 

What I'm looking for now, is some method or utility for adjusting the brightness of the sea part of the first lot of *.TGA files, and for adjusting the brightness of the land (ie snow) part of the second lot of *.TGA files. I've been trying to do this using the Ultimate Paint utility, without success. I can adjust the brightness OK, but can't seem to save the results in a format which works with FE.

 

So, ideas/advice/suggestions anyone?

 

Thanks

 

Mike

Edited October 5, 2009 by Mike Dora

[Bandy 3]

Mike,

 

From our PMs it sounds like adjusting the alpha channel is just not working because it affects all of the tile.

 

Perhaps what needs to be done is to adjust just the painted layer, i.e. darken or brighten the land only and leave the sea alone if you managed to match it between tiles (no mean feat, I tried and gave up). It'll be a potentially painful process of trial and error to get the butting land tiles to match, but the results will be worth it.

 

Not sure of the capabilities of the image adjusting program you are using, but your results look d@mn fine, so you should be able to do it. You might have to re-create the land layers within each of the tiles, but it looks/sounds like you already have made layered tiles so the battle is well over half done.

 

best of luck, best regards!

Edited October 7, 2009 by B Bandy RFC

[Mike Dora 171]

Mike,

 

From our PMs it sounds like adjusting the alpha channel is just not working because it affects all of the tile.

 

Perhaps what needs to be done is to adjust just the painted layer, i.e. darken or brighten the land only and leave the sea alone if you managed to match it between tiles (no mean feat, I tried and gave up). It'll be a potentially painful process of trial and error to get the butting land tiles to match, but the results will be worth it.

 

Not sure of the capabilities of the image adjusting program you are using, but your results look d@mn fine, so you should be able to do it. You might have to re-create the land layers within each of the tiles, but it looks/sounds like you already have made layered tiles so the battle is well over half done.

 

best of luck, best regards!

 

 

Thanks Bart,

 

In fact I can take no credit for any of the editing, all of the tiles you see were produced by others, such as Stary, Gepard and Max188. All that I've done is mix'n'match (or not match, as the case may be). I certainly haven't figured out how to create layers within tiles!

 

Right now my root problem is that I can't save my work in Ultimate Paint in a format that is recognised by FE. What editing program do you use, and in what format do you save your *.TGA files (32-bit, 24-bit, interlaced, etc etc?)?

 

Mike

[Bandy 3]

I have an old version of Photoshop CS2, picked up at an educational price while taking some web courses at a local community college. It was still pricey, but a good deal considering the savings.

 

Yes, need to save the tga's I believe at 24 bit. Interlaced is for web-based graphics, not for games.

 

See your PM, I'll send my email...

[NathanKell 0]

I too use CS2. But there's also GIMPshop--it has (most of) the features but none of the price (free open source). GIMPShop is a PS-like frontend on top of GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

 

I'm not sure TGAs do need to be 24bit--16bit may work (8+8alpha). I know Max uses 8bit bmps, and I think possibly TGAs as well. But I at school and don't have PS on this machine to check.

 

Mike, if you'd like, I'd be happy to send you the PSD sources I used to make those extra tiles for Flanders, and you can just drop in Stary versions.* After all, each of those "new" tiles are just splices of stock tiles (with the exception of SeaRiver! But we can use the Edward/Sopwith Snipe source for that). Should work much better than color matching (I too started that way and found it easier to just splice). Wish I had time to do them myself. Heck, wish I had time to fly myself. :)

 

*I.e. for each layer, make a mask for its transparency (so only the proper elements show) and then "paste into" with the appropriate Stary tile. IIRC I only had to do hand retouching on one of the Sea Coast Town2Farm (or whatever) ones. Well, on the SeaRiver too, but it only had to be done once (after that you can splice and recolor). :)

[Bandy 3]

Actually water TGA's need to be saved as 32 bit versions.

 

After futsing about trying to get the Vogesen Rhein tiles to be rendered at all (from other thread -- summer Rhein tiles need to be in Vogesen folder itself, not the summer seasonal folder in Cambrai. Other seasonal Rhein tiles need to be in their respective Cambrai seasons, of course ), I went back to my psd files and regenerated the Rhein tga's to discover that 24 bit does not mask the water effect, only 32 bit did.