Now, let us begin ...

[Wrench]

again, and anew. With extensive thanks to Baltika for the base pallet to work from...

 

the potential this terrain has is astonishing!!!

 

Going to be reaching out to some of our Experts (ah, Sandesh, are you there??? LOL!!)

 

 

This is one of the biggest one's I've ever taken on. Of course, I always pick someplace where hard data is not easy to come by... why would I want to make my life easy, eh???

 

In between the new aircraft Cocas & Co are working on, I'll be fiddling with this, too!!

 

Months and Months away....my target date in sometime near summer's end.

[+RAVEN]

Well don't take too long or your glacier will melt!

:-) Looking foreword too it.

[+JonathanRL]

Pardon my ignorance, but what part of the world are we looking at? Spontaneously, I am thinking Kashmir or India or something like that.

[Wrench]

East India (the city under the 2 airfields top center is Calcutta) btw, the part of india on the east side of the bay (of Bengal) is now Bangladesh, Burma, Thailand, French Indo-china*, parts of southern china, Tibet/Nepal, Malaya (RAF Tengah=Singapore), eastern Sumatra in the lower right corner

Andaman and Nicobar islands near the center

 

basically, almost the entire CBI Theatre, minus China north of Kunming. If you look on the right (eastern) coast of Indo-china, and follow the coatline past the large island (aka Hinan Island), you'll see a large U shape in the coastline. That's where Hong Kong is.

 

all the major rives will need doing ... all the cities added (yes, the future Vietnams will get their cities, and least Hanoi, Haiphong -a major Japanese port-, Saigon, etc.

 

 

*-what will become Laos, Cambodia and both Vietnams

 

Don Muang = Bangkok

Mingladon = Rangoon

 

in theory, this map could be used for more than just ww2 -- the (?) Indo-East Pakistan (Bangladesh) war, Malayan Emergency, possibly even a replacement for the stock VNSEA -- all of Thailand and Vietnam are usable- for SF2V . I will be leaving spaces for the locations of post-ww2 & 1960's historic airbases

Edited January 22, 2014 by Wrench

[Wilches]

Would be nice to have both WWII and Firedog timeframe. Fantastic!

[+Stary]

what size is it? Good old Hainan looks oddly small, as in: if the scale of the map is standard 100 km then the island is about half of that noth-south while in reality it's circa 210-220 km as uncle Google Earth says

 

or you did some terrain tricks didn't you?

[Wrench]

ask Baltika! He did the base TFD/HFD (from 2 DEMS) for me

 

the ini says the map is 2000 x 2000

 

I won't be targeting anything further east than Haiphong, as Hinan doesn't really play a part in ww2; at least not in reference to the main B/I operations. Although there was a small IJN naval base with attached aircraft (some Zeros, Mavis Emily) for sea search/recon. Also leaves plenty of space away from the Eastern Wall ™

 

be using GH3, of course, and MANY of my GH3 speced 'specials', including the new river-paddy tiles and the various port tiles

[+Stary]

good, than seems the lines are 200 km apart, indeed not an issue

[+ghostrider883]

Looking forward to it.

[+Baltika]

Well don't take too long or your glacier will melt!

:-) Looking foreword too it.

 

Hmmm, fair point re the snowline, quick check on google earth shows the snow is restricted to the high mountain peaks of the Himalayas, and the Tibetan plateau to the far north is some sort of arid desert/grassland type terrain.  Wrench, I can tweak the autotile settings a bit to try to sort that out, although probably you have that covered I guess.

 

 

 

what size is it? Good old Hainan looks oddly small, as in: if the scale of the map is standard 100 km then the island is about half of that noth-south while in reality it's circa 210-220 km as uncle Google Earth says

 

or you did some terrain tricks didn't you?

 

Like Wrench says, the terrain is 2000km x 2000km in TE, however, I did not scale this up to full-scale using the heightfield-bitmap editing trick, so what you get is the raw TE data for TW terrains, which have 66% scale or so of reality.  This is the same in all the stock terrains, and doesn't really seem to be an issue unless you are very particular about fuel capacity and a/c ranges.  The reason for not upscaling this terrain is that the heightfield runs from the top of Everest (you can do a fly-past of Everest in the top left of the terrain, near the blue dot which marks the location of Khatmandu) right down to sea level. The export/import heightfield bitmap function in TE inevitably results in a loss of detail in the heightfield, especially at lower altitudes, and this would be the worst example of that data loss.  So, this is perhaps a compromise, but hopefully an understandable one.

 

Also, upscaling terrains in that way can result in a certain "blockiness" to mountain peaks, ranges and the like - look at my old Iceland02 terrain to see a bad example of this.  That happened because the available dem data for Iceland is compressed in the north-south axis.  When you expand the heightfield bitmap, you naturally lose resolution detail, just as with any bitmap which you enlarge.  So, to keep the mountains looking suitably jagged, natural and mountainous, I did not upscale the heightfield for this project.

 

Hope that answers the question!

 

 

Wrench, thanks for taking this on, it's  a huge project but should be a dream for the WW2 CBI players - as well as the other modern uses it could be put to.

 

Personally, I'm really looking forward to rebuilding this old campaign for the new version of Burma:-

 

http://combatace.com/files/file/9133-burma-air-war-the-longest-retreat-v10/

 

 

Slainthe! (Happy Burns Night 25th Jan!)

 

Baltika

Edited January 24, 2014 by Baltika

[+Baltika]

Also on the subject of tiling, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Borneo should be almost completely jungle-covered, with very little in the way of open fields.

 

Again, this is down to the autotexture function, which is set pretty much to the stock VietnamSEA settings, with a few tweaks for snow etc.  But again, I guess Wrench will have that covered ;-)

[+Stary]

those are a non-issue for me, thanks for lenghty answer old friend!

[+Baltika]

Happy to oblige, TE has become something of an obsession for me over the years, there's always something else to work out

 

 

@Wrench, attached is a slightly modified Texturelist which should give a more realistic treeline and snowline for the Himalayas/Tibet/China.

 

WW2CBI_TextureList.zip

Edited January 24, 2014 by Baltika

[+RAVEN]

Sorry Baltika, the Glacier comment was related to time. :) On another note I've been converting .bmp's to .png's ( no loss of detail) ,resizing and copying back into PS as a layer them exporting as a .bmp, so far I've gust done that for lines , but I've gotten good results from 1024 to 2048 to make hires skins, still testing the process but it might work for resizing height maps?

[Wrench]

already reworking it ... lot's of paddy tiles to remove (many places are more like open grass fields (using G1 - think of razor or elephant grass), especially in central Burma along the Irrawady). Already added lots of new tiles; my 'specials', and so on. I can tell you right off, running the majority of the rivers is going to be a task! Around Rangoon there's dozens of little streams, rivers, inlets and so on.

 

It's going to take time, for sure.

 

I don't mind hand tiling -- pretty much all my terrain mods are done that way. The flood tool does come in hand, but you've got to be REAL CAREFUELL where you touch!!

[+Baltika]

Reckoned you had it covered.

 

Thanks for all the hard work

[Wrench]

some wip shots from French Indo-China

 

Saigon (than shon nut in the airfield tiles, using one of my special airfields)

 

Phnom Penh (note the Mekong is still 'in progress' -- still trying to deciede where to break it into the smaller river tiles, and how much of the 4200 km length I need to do...oi!!)

and of course, the various and sundry mouths of the Mekong in the s/e corner of (not yet) vietnam.

 

[Wrench]

lots of progress, but still slow going trying to coordinate modern charts to their ww2 equilivants, and locations of airfields

[+Baltika]

Excellent work, Kevin - can't wait to fly it ;-)

 

I'm sure you are good for maps, but just in case:-

 

 

Source: "The Burma Air Campaign 1941-1945" by Michael Pearson, Pen & Sword Aviation 2006 ISBN 1-84415-398-3

 

 

As a whisky-drinking Scotsman, I am particularly keen to see Johnny Walker, Highland Queen and John Haig Airfields included on this map 

 

Also, I notice you are going for a late-war front line - no worries, it's your call, and it fits in perfectly with the inclusion of Imphal and Kohima, but for that Flying Tigers Campaign we may need an alternate data set with the front line fixed with the Brits and the Tigers at Mingaladon, and the RAF fighting that last-ditch defence of Singapore - well, that's what Churchill wanted them to do!  Happy to oblige for that if need be.

 

Slainthe!

Edited February 1, 2014 by Baltika

[Wrench]

more or less after the Fall of Burma.*

 

I'm good for maps, but THAT one answers buttloads of questions I had -- like 'were some of the Vietnam War Era fields in use in ww2'.

The "spaces" are all there, too. I made sure it's expandable into the 60s

 

Loiwing is the one giving me crossedeyes -- working on the Assam Valley atm....

 

If I need help, I'll be shouting!!

 

(* to say nothing of post-war, I'm sure Sandesh will want stuff for the 71 war. I'm dreading Malaya!!)

[Wrench]

actually, giving it some thought last night...before I started this project, I was reworking the original Burma map (about 1/2 way with retiling and correcting tiles). There's a lot of places 'missing', or behind The Wall (Akyab, for instance).

 

It still would be a good map for the invasion of and defeat in, Burma in early 1942. Then, this larger map can be used for everything else.

 

of course, the old targets ini has to be shitcanned, as even my 'update' is extensively flawed.

But it's something that VERY doable, and means Longest Retreat would need minimal reworking

[+Stary]

Kevin, maybe try making these rivers less straignt? Some turns and variations to them would make the layour more realistic

[Wrench]

some of that is dictated by the damn mountains and hills ... I truly dislike have to repaint the height field (which happens no matter what, due to the nature of the Real World terrains)

 

But I will try and twerk them a bit. OTH, many actually are pretty much that straight n/s, especially in Burma.

Don't even think about the Mekong!! (SG series, cause it so damn wide, almost all the way to the eastern Himalayas-- bloody nightmare!)

 

I'm really beginning to HATE the tile system!!!

 

edit:

new PM3,with additional fields -- with extra special help from Steve

 

this is still just the base, internal framework, so to speak. Once I get everything placed, THEN I can back and start filling in the cities and such with their target objects.

 

oi vey! 

Edited February 1, 2014 by Wrench

[Wrench]

basic tiling done, now to start on targeting.

 

new 'specials' for Calcutta -- King George's Docks and Kidderpore Docks (best and safest representations given the game engine...sigh...)