Rivers

[gillg 4]

Hi everyone, has anybody got any tips on how to get the rivers to nicrly slope down towards the ocean?

my swedeish terrain looks good but the rivers are a little up and down.

 

cheers

[+Baltika 85]

Hi there,

 

You have two options, either hand-place all your river tiles to avoid hilly spots (difficult I know), or use the "Adjust Sea Level" function in TE, which will flatten all the water parts of water tiles (sea or river).

 

However, use "adjust sea level" with caution as it will reduce all water areas to sea level, or zero altitude. This is fine for rivers near the coast, but for rivers at altitude it will make deep canyons with rivers at the bottom. It may cut mountain ranges in half and so forth which may not be the desired effect.

 

Using Adjust sea level should also be one of the last things you do in TE as it will flatten chunks of your HFD file and can't be undone. After that, your terrain won't autotile properly at the coastline. Keep a back up

 

Looking forward to your terrain

 

Cheers,

 

baltika

Edited July 8, 2010 by Baltika

[gillg 4]

Thanks Baltika, thats what i have done. i placed all the rivers manually. i actually got a sheet of clear plastic and placed it over my monitor,, then used the height map and traced where i thought the rivers are. then using my outline in temporary texta i placed the rivers and lakes in the tile map. anything that was around 10-20 meters in relative height over a area i classed as a lake. the long windy ones i used as rivers. it was very time consuming. lets put it this way, i have over 200 bridges in my terrain. i'm not sure wether i should use them all though, because if i include all those bridges, i'll have over 400 target areas.

Wondering if this will make the terrain a very slow loading time.

[Wrench 9,851]

slow loading times can be caused by the shear number of ojbects -- believe me I KNOW!!!

 

When workingin the TE, make sure you've zoomed up to the max 3200 .. and even that isn't a hight enough zoom factor.

 

another thing to do is cheat, like I do! For some of the tiles, where it's hard to see which way their pointing, paint a line along the transition edge (for say, like the city2Farm, or any of the 75 corner tiles, or the road tiles for GermanyCE)

 

You can see in the attached screenie, how the roads and citys work. Make life a LOT easier (it also shows I forgot the city-road-grass tile on the east side of Sinujiu!!! Have to fix that!)

 

I uploaded the Germany road tiles, for TE usage some time ago ... possibly to the /Terrains download section. But it's here somewheres! Includes the river/road tile where a bridge would cross, too

 

btw, each 'center span' bridge section is 100 meters long, and it takes 3 to span the stock rivers. Bridge ends are the biggest bitch to place, as they not quite 25 meters, so you have to 'slide' them into the center sections (see the target area below ... note the offset numbers for the bridgeEnd)

 

[TargetArea048]

Name=Nampo/Nam-gan Bridge

Position=204974,442979

Radius=1000

ActiveYear=0

Location=2

Alignment=ENEMY

Target[001].Type=vBridge2

Target[001].Offset=0,0

Target[001].Heading=90

Target[002].Type=vBridge2

Target[002].Offset=0,-100

Target[002].Heading=90

Target[003].Type=vBridge2

Target[003].Offset=0,100

Target[003].Heading=90

 

--uneeded stuff snipped--

 

Target[020].Type=vBridge2End

Target[020].Offset=0,-148

Target[020].Heading=90

Target[021].Type=vBridge2End

Target[021].Offset=0,149

Target[021].Heading=270

 

wrench

kevin stein

[gillg 4]

Thanx wrench, i am using the germanyCE tiles and yes i used your road tiles. Very handy, very handy indeed............

the main problem is if the rivers aren't level where the bridges cross, the end up looking lopsided, so i have actually thought about making those bridges as airfield=TRUE in the city list, then level airfield in the TE and thats it. Nice level area and then save the height field. Then i can just use the normal city list i created. The problem is typing out 220 different little city areas for the bridges. Time consuming......

[Wrench 9,851]

You're preaching to the choir, brother!! Know how many frakking bridges are in Korea??? (that is, before the Air Force, Navy and Marines got to them....) And I have to place them ALL, and all the "interesting bits" in the cities that Dave loves to bomb (on the bright side, the Reds DO get to zap the Hyundai and Samsung factories...)

 

Don't forget, there's a 'long suspension bridge' that Gepard did several years ago, it don't quite meet the ground, but if you're VERY lucky, you can butt the ends into hillsides. It's called "bridge01"; it's in my SoCal map, and maybe in Gepard's Suez or Israel2 maps. Don't remember if there's a bmp or tga associated with it,but a quick look inside the lod with a hex editor (search, find bmp) will tell.

 

A little secret that TK told me ... you can flatten individual areas, by simply creating a NEW city list, with just that one city well, listed! That's how I added to airbases on cyprus for the Suez Expansion Upgrade. Try the smallest area possible, maybe 1000 x 1000. Like this:

 

[City001]

Name=Joe's Toll Bridge

TextureType=2

Randomness=0

PositionX=123.000000

PositionY=456.000000

Width=1.000000

Height=1.000000

HasAirfield=FALSE

 

Also, try to get the center span at the 0,0 point like I did above, then it easier to plot the spans at the river bank.

 

bridges are frakking nightmare....

 

wrench

kevin stein

Edited July 11, 2010 by Wrench

[gillg 4]

Well, thats exactly what i been doing wrench, writing down the coords from TE and then making that city list with the center point and working out with the offset from there, and yeah...... its wrakkin my brain, or what is left of it. tell u what though, its gonna be so rewarding when im done. Then its time to write the campaign.

[+Gepard 11,323]

An other way of laying rivers through a mountainious area i made in my Deutschland terrain (Germany for SFP1). For the famous Mittelrheintal (middle Rhine valley, the area around the Loreley with a lot of castles)i made new river tiles which more or less fitted to the terrain.

But this was a lot of work.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

...make sure you've zoomed up to the max 3200 .. and even that isn't a hight enough zoom factor.

 

 

Do you see this: I have always seen that 1600 is higher zoom than 3200. I think TK fluffed this, reversed the two zooms.

[+PureBlue 71]

And yet another way of doing it:

 

edit- Nevermind, what I had described was how to manually flatten the coastal tiles.

Check here if that's ever needed

Edited July 13, 2010 by pureblue

[gillg 4]

Thanx for the replies gents. I am going to continue using the level airfield option. It may not come out as smooth as i want it to but when you are flying over the rivers at altitude and speed, i really don't think you will notice.

Cheers guys