Town Tiles

[Bandy 3]

Hello,

 

I've been replacing the stock portion of the town tiles that sit under Jan Tuma's incredibly detailed buildings. What I thought was going to be a relatively quick job turned into much more. I take my hat off to Jan (and all other 3rd party folks) who must have laboured long hours for our mutual enjoyment.

 

These 1024 x 1024 tiles will work in Jan's "early summer" season, though they might work in other seasons such as spring, I have not tried. My plan now that I have the Photoshop files/tiles complete is to tweak for seasonal colour variation as time permits. I will pass along the PSDs if anyone is interested in helping.

 

What I did to help with the max view distance of town tiles was to put the building roofs onto the 2D tile so that at least the roofs show up before the 3D buildings "pop up". In the first screenshot (taken from 10,000 feet) you can see one Vogensen town tile that chronically does not generate its 3D buildings (upper centre with roundabout), while this same tile does in other places in town.

 

These 2D buildings allowed me to add drop shadows as well. In fact I used extensive layers and drop shadows to fake a 3D effect as much as possible, though some may find it heavy-handed especially down low. However this means that shadows conflict across tiles (tiles can appear in 4 different orientations!)so some tile margins show up as lines in places because of the shadows. Fortunately they are mostly hidden between buildings.

 

So if you look for it, you will find imperfections, many of them. I do continue to tweak small things like shifting streets to better accommodate trees and poles. I tested mostly in Vogesen, but a recent flight over Verdun shocked me to see that some unique buildings, like churches and factories, were appearing in some towns (see 2nd screenshot) and buggering up things. These buildings must be coded into the campaign.ini as they do not appear on every tile of that name in that terrain. Also discovered that some tiles do not share the same .tod across terrains, so some trees etc. pop-up in unwelcome places consistently.

 

The number of different building patterns prohibits naturally seamless tiles. The tiles would have been best accomplished while the buildings were being laid out, or have some underlying street structure already in mind to go across tiles. Also some buildings themselves cross the margin of tiles, while others butt right up against the margin. Thus the streets do some funky turns, pass into buildings on occasion, etc. I simply did not/do not have the time resources to re-edit the building patterns to allow this, though I encourage anyone willing to do so to do so, and I will correct the streets to match.

 

That all said, I think they look good enough to release for beta testing. There is a small town in Verdun just south and west of the front that already has bridges across the river (see 2nd screen shot), but please note that churches appear uniquely on some of the round-abouts, but not others of the same tile. Please fly over different terrains and spot errant buildings that don't fit the tile and note position and take a screen shot.

 

PS: I noticed that the file limit to attach in forum is 4 MB, and all the tiles zipped are 45 MB. Guess I'll have to upload to the regular section in a short while.

 

 

[+sinbad 27]

"What I thought was going to be a relatively quick job turned into much more."

 

Veritas!

 

 

Great work. Thanks for slogging through.

[Stratos 3,192]

WOW!! Is looking great, hope we will be able to see something similar for SF2 soon

[Bandy 3]

Thanks sinbad and stratos,

 

While my own PS workflow is not anywhere near a professional's, I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time Jan spent.

 

Wanted to also mention that the towns will NOT look like real old crowded/claustrophobic French or Belgian or German towns. It would be nice, but the number of buildings required and their arrangements would have to be done all over again.

 

The buildings have too much space between them, and likely too many trees. That said, the tiles do add an underlying structure and visual interest that was lacking in the stock 3rd wire tiles, and dog fights over the towns and into the streets between buildings are much more enjoyable now, at least to me.

 

Regards!

 

EDIT: the screen shots look a mite dark to me, and hide a lot of the effect, but maybe it is just my work computer...

Edited May 25, 2010 by Bandy

[A6Intruder 1]

Great work! Very appreciated. Please give us more.

Best regards

Edited May 26, 2010 by A6Intruder

[don246 65]

Thanks Bandy very kind of you to share with us.

Edited May 26, 2010 by don246

[Bandy 3]

Thanks gentlemen,

 

Have been requested to replace the turquoise-like river colour with a darker blue-gray, and have always planned to do so once the Town tiles were done. So I just need to find the time to do ALL the water tiles now, and there are A LOT of them... Hopefully I saved all the Flanders coastal tile Photoshop files I made a while back, that would speed things up.

 

Has anyone figured out where the code is for the location of the churches that show up on the roundabouts in screenshot 2 above? The roundabout tile does not always have a church on it, so it can't be in the .tod file...

 

NB: I forgot to mention that if you go into the Flanders Terrain folder, look for the FRTown.tod file, it is incorrectly named. There should be FRTown1.tod, FRTown2.tod, and FRTown3.tod, so rename the file to whichever is not represented.

Edited May 26, 2010 by Bandy