Merry Christmas from North Pole

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

I'm working on a supersize Ring Of Fire map but Sag over at Thudwire got me thinking some of ya'll might work on a major North Pole campaign. You need some terrain.

 

I found 3DEM which can use GTOPO30 data to make sinusoidal projection and output a BMP file which Terrain Editor() can read. With some nudging from TK I was able to make 3DEM work with TE.

 

 

3DEM Website Is Gone, But 3DEM Still Available Here

~> http://freegeographytools.com/2009/3dem-website-is-gone-but-3dem-still-available-here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bmp's are 36 degree sections, and with a photopaint program I fit the resulting pie shaped bmp's into a large North Pizza. There are photopaint procedures that can either minimize and/or fill in the gaps for a reasonable appearance.

 

The original 3DEM output BMP image this JPEG was made from is 10,000 pixels or 10,000km in TE: Full size fellas. I fit it into TE window using 12km tile size. I have tiled this with normal 2km tile size. It works, just takes a few minutes. The result is real, and spectacular.

 

I constructed the map so the prime meridian is at bottom. You can rotate the square image by 90 degrees to taste, and I believe bmp's can be rotated 90 degrees without loss of detail.

 

This is accurate, I think. How? On each pie BMP, I drew a small vertical line at the center top and when placing the pies, mated each top most pixel of the pies at the center of the big 10,000 pixel BMP. This point of intersection of all the pie lines is the pole. You can see the "gunsight" pattern at the coordinates (5000,5000) on the big BMP file. I will leave that there for you to check. Paint blue over it later. I have to upload the BMP first of course.

 

If 10,000km is too large, a good crop would be 7,000km but that leaves out the Aleutians, Kamchatka, and England. A strictly North Pole campaign might could maybe still done without these lands. A further reduction to say 4,000km could be made if you want an SF-style undersized terrain. That might be an idea given the long flying times involved.

 

 

After tiling in TE with 2km tile size, and 1km height resolution,...

 

The 3dem .BMP is 95.3MB

The terrain .HFD is 190MB

The terrain .TFD is 286MB

 

This loads fast and runs fine but I'm using a good recent system with 4GB memory and Windows-7. Don't try using TE on this 10,000km map with 2km tile size on less than 4GB memory.

 

I can 7zip this up to CA for Christmas along with the pies. One of the procedures for minimizing the gaps is to merge the pies at their most northern land surface. Doing this would create a single large gap somewhere else, preferably in a pure ocean area like between Greenland and Iceland. The remaining gapping farther from the pole will still need filling -- my current method for my RoF map is copy the gap to new image, rotate vertical, copy some strips next to the gap, and flip to match one side of terrain, and un-rotate and place in position. The flipping lets one gap side be seamless, but the other is not.

 

Another procedure could be to slide the pie slices toward the pole so they mostly merge, but this would reduce the Arctic Ocean size. I myself would rather merge most northern lands and fill the remaining gapping, as the gaps here are not nearly as large as the huge gaps on the southern areas of my 10000km RoF map.

 

I once saw a discussion with TK and the BoB campaign modders at Thudwire about SF campaigns not requiring ground combat. I think a campaign line could be drawn through Bering Straight to the pole, past Greenland past Norway and down into Europe.

 

If some of you want to do something different for the SF series, give an oversize North Pole campaign a thought. I can help with the BMP map but otherwrise I'm in the deep end with my RoF map now.

 

 

Merry Christmas!

Edited December 24, 2009 by Lexx_Luthor

[TerceraEscuadrilla 181]

Merry Christmas to you all I hope that the good time with loved ones

 

Greetings from Argentina

 

Adrian

Edited December 24, 2009 by TerceraEscuadrilla

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Thanks south pole (Argentina) !!

 

 

The gaps can be fixed. Here is my working RoF map, 10,000km, with gaps filled as described above with some compromises. Far from the pole, there were HUGE gaps that needed filling.

 

I call this image "false colour" and it brings out the detail visually so I can see what I'm doing while cutting and pasting terrain. However, this false colour won't copy high terrain properly and TE maxes out at maybe 3km height. I just switch between TE Green and this false colour to make terrain cuts, pastes, and fills -- I filled and hand drew maybe 50 low level, but not sea level, lakes that TE won't pick up as 0m height.

 

Lake Baikal at 455m can be tiled with its own "baikal" tile set, with min and max height both 455 and using 0 slope, and doubling up the exclusion region using both the primary and .bmp definitions. I wish TE had an InclusionRegion.

 

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

* bumpit *

 

Man I'll sticky this thread (bumpit to the armpits) next time somebody says SF is getting "old." Everybody now knows that SF hasn't even begun to fly.

 

I am able to TE the game up to 15,000km map (full scale) with 4km tile size. That would allow extending the RoF map to Florida: India at the bottom, Florida upside down at the top.

 

However, I much prefer 2km tile size to better map water borders like sea coastlines and lakes. The best I could do with 2km tile size is 11,000km for now. I may need more memory, or there is some TE limitation. Since I'm bumping into my 4GB memory, I'm hoping its just a memory thing.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Ouch. I forgot, I guess TE is a 32bit program, so more than 4GB memory may not help TE create larger terrain tiles -- larger map kilometerage and/or smaller tiles.

[+streakeagle 867]

Impressive work. It is a shame that TK doesn't use an accurrate shape for the globe instead of forcing you to deal with the same problems cartographers have always had converting a curved surface into a flat one. While there are a few other game engine design choices that annoy me, the flat maps with miles scaled down to kilometers is a big limitation keeping this lite sim from being turned into a great hard core sim. But, TK only intends for this sim to remain lite and fun, so who am I to complain about the world being flat and badly distorted?

[+Dave 2,322]

We are going to invade Santa? What about the kids?

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Well, TK is right to keep things simple while leaving the terrain modding open for business. Most of the world can be mapped well using the rectangular method. As for non-scale mapping, I suggest re-scaling the polar region for playability if desired. If theres a big oversight, its that GTOPO30 has a south pole section in polar coordinates, but not for north pole. On the other hand, now that I think again, another big hole is TE not having an Inclusion Region which would include the current Exclusion Region's use as a subset. An Inclusion Region function would allow special tiles to be restricted to tiny regions on large maps, and so greatly minimize 3-way transitions...ie...say dozens of high altitude lakes could be tiled and restricted to the location of the lakes themselves, each lake requiring a different tile.

 

3dem helps to fix that blank spot over the north.

 

 

 

We are going to invade Santa? What about the kids?

 

Reindeer meat is great for kids too ~> http://ed-thelen.org/NikeSimulation.html

Edited January 7, 2010 by Lexx_Luthor

[+Dave 2,322]

 

Reindeer meat is great for kids too ~> http://ed-thelen.org...Simulation.html

 

Well then we have to do this, for the kids sake.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

You're right that might work, implement Terrain Editor lessons for all schools. Not one tile left behind.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Accidentally hit my *thump* thread key again. I have sticky keys.

 

If a Terrain And Tile team, or campaign modding team wants a polar map, I'll adjust and fill in the blue gaps.

 

Remember: No tile left behind.

[+Dave 2,322]

Remember: No tile left behind.

 

it is our creed!

 

No tile left behind!

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

And no thread left behind. Its that time again.

 

Its NOT my fault. My IBM Model M has a bump key.

[+Baltika 84]

Very impressive terrain work, I have been tearing my hair out over a Northern European map using the standard method, and there is some great info for terrain builders here.

 

S!

 

Baltika

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Baltika, what areas of north Euro?

 

The gaps can be chosen to be anywhere and come from the max 36 degree size blocks in 3DEM. For my experiments, I choose the gaps to start at the prime meridian by default. Notice in my first pic, south-east England is cut by a gap.

 

If your map is small enough, it may be possible to either avoid gaps or have the gaps restricted to the east and west map edges, where any gap fixing won't be seen much.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

* thumpsies *

 

Forgot to thump this. I just got an old copy of US Electronic Warfare, 1946 - 1964, by Alfred Price. Interesting story. Yea you fellas/fellattes want a polar campaign for back then, and tweak the sim's AI for it. I'm still back in SF 2006. But I do know that SF 2008, and I suppose SF2, have the AI "radar" feature which allows AI radar homing missile engagement independent of visible distance to the target. Now, this might could be hacked with a "fake" RHM missile with weird range paramaters to allow this distant RHM engagement to get the AI within visible range of the target where the fake RHM missile is expended and the AI goes to "visible" range engagement. All this would allow a way to simulate night or bad weather IRM/guns-only radar guided interception from a long distance.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

lol

 

 

 

Forgot about this. Sag sent emil wanting info and I remembered. This is the place to be.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

ack@#$&* I'm starting this thing over. Somehow the first time I lost mountain detail in the Himalayas. I want it back.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

I've learned more about TE and 3dem since then, so its not so bad starting over. And Gimp (thanks Wrench and others for turning me onto that) has a feature that will make cutting terrain maps much easier than last time, and a warping feature that *might* make filling in between the pie slices a whole world easier. We shall see.

 

 

I'm going for a max altitude in the 3dem colour mapping of 7800m which in game (after TE) seems to give max peaks around 8100m or so. Only the Himalayas have this kind of heights and nowhere else on this map -- List of highest mountains. The issue with allowing higher peaks in TE is that it reduces elevation detail (or, increases the difference in altitude levels). So a good compromise may be to cut the few highest peaks. However, in my 3dem colour file, there is a small reserve of colours from 249 to 255 left over that can manually be painted on the bitmap and in game give heights up to 8500m (for the 255 level). This is close enough for the highest peaks, provided I can locate them.

 

Using 3dem at 7800m I can use a TE HeightScale=32.5 to get the 455m height for Lake Baikal which is my basic measuring rule. However, 33.33334 gives a nice easy to see range of heights in both TE and in game of...

 

0

33

66

100

133

166

200

:

:

4400

4433

4466

4500

4533

4566

4600

:

:

etc...

 

Although Baikal then comes out to be 466m elevation. That's close enough.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

 

Gimps a bit not working out. The "perspective" (kinda) tools is not helpful -- messes up positions. I need a simple horizontal/vertical stretch tool, but I'm gonna do this manually by hand hopefully better this time.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Okay, starting all over, I got the first step here. This is overall nicely accurate in areas most needed, especially northern Siberia, but at the cost of distortion in places not so needed. I rotated the main Siberian topped pie slices by 33 degrees instead of 36 to greatly minimize the gaps opening up nearer to the equator. To compensate, I enlarged the gaps at France and northwest Canada. I formally apologize to Canada and France. Luckily these gaps should be easy to fill.

 

The Nunavut islands (Canada) look so nice on the map, I didn't want to distort them so I made that western Canada gap larger while preserving the Canada/Alaska border in full accuracy. I wanted the basic GUIK gap accurate, so I didn't want to introduce an enlarged gap in the blue ocean in that area. If flying mid-way between Greenland and Iceland at high level on a clear day, you should see both at the same time. This area is good. England I may move back closer to Europe but its not that critical. I really wanted the GUIK gap to be right.

 

Its 12000 kilometers. The Azores and Guam and succeeding islands up to Japan are all there, in fairly near correct location. Some of these islands may just be visible on this small pic. The tiny 100km circle in maximum height terrain colour at the north pole is, the north pole, here for development purpose.

 

 

 

Next is to fill in the rest of the gaps using various manual methods. That is a tricky job to make it look fairly seamless in game.

 

I am very, VERY sorry for Canada (and France)...

and I'm taking steps so a geek map like this never happens again.

Edited March 11, 2011 by Lexx_Luthor

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Second step is done! I am okay with this, 12,000 kilometers, full scale. Its mostly seamless where I had to copy-paste and rotate or stretch terrain to fill the gaps. The only real problems are some good distortion in north west India, and some touching up may be needed in northern China.

 

To get a great seamless copy-paste, Lake Baikal is about 60km too far north. I can handle that. Recall from the above pic, a gap cut right through the giant lake. It will have to be textured manually which is a snap since its all at 466m level and a quick colour fill in the texture.bmp file can fill the lake perfectly with 0-meter sea level ocean tile -- I think SF can only use one (1) terrain type having specular water sun/moon reflection.

 

Next step: On the height map bmp, fill in dozens of near sea level lakes with zero altitude blue colour -- the Aral sea for a large example which TE sees as 33 meter high land in my height field scale.

 

KMD mission editor:

 

One way of looking at this, all the world's oceans are here -- Atlantic, Pacific, Indian oceans, as well as some of The Meds, and of course the complete Arctic ocean which is the important one here. I used a darker blue for water in the TE heightfield view which I use for Planningmap in KMD, and the darker blue brings out the small islands better.

 

Hawaii was added in case its useful: IRBMs can't reach it, and any ICBM (or submarine) development will almost surely be discovered by SAC recon. Although Hawaii should be off this small map( ), I moved it on stage. Its too close to Alaska but that's not the point. Hawaii is the correct distance from Lake Baikal (in USSR) which I use as a standard measuring point.

[Icarus999 70]

This looks like it could be absolutely Epic if it were done right. It seems like a huge project that would be best tackled by a team of our terrain gurus, with region specific tiles, trees, buildings and such.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

 

For myself, its going to be very simple, and take forever. But I would absolutely help a team that would like to do a more detailed creation.

 

Instead of this USSR+ map, the pure polar map, centered on the north pole, may be a more interesting idea for most.

 

Mainly, to some degree, on this USSR+ map, most playing time in my game will be above 40,000 feet, so I use 5km size tiles which offer the same "visual detail" as 2km tiles when seen from 16,000 feet which is a more typical tactical altitude for SF players. With 5km tiles, TE tiles this map rather quickly. Flying so high most of the time, I don't need many building objects, if any. Also, most time is spent flying long distances, so the SAC airfields don't need much "immersive" detail, if any. PVO airfields where the player sits and waits, and waits, may be another story.

 

 

How do you populate a 12,000 kilometer map? That is 144 times the size of a stock SF map. Either the entire SF community gets involved, abandoning all other projects for a year, or some significant compromises are made.

[Icarus999 70]

 

 

 

 

How do you populate a 12,000 kilometer map? That is 144 times the size of a stock SF map. Either the entire SF community gets involved, abandoning all other projects for a year, or some significant compromises are made.

 

 

Well in my view the potential of something like this is huge, the idea of a "standard" World map makes real sense. Look at what Dave has started with the virtual NATO idea... something like this is exactly what is needed. With the new CPU's (and dual CPU gaming motherboards like EVGA's SR-X that are about to be released) the technology to make it happen is finally here.

Edited November 24, 2011 by Icarus999