plant too many trees

[+Menrva 4,200]

2 hours ago, mue said:

Mmh.. I thought Stary did just that: put a lot of single tree objects onto the tiles. Maybe I'm wrong here?

No, that is what namedders did, and he encountered the maximum limit of TOD objects being placed on a single tile. To understand what Stary did, download the Madagascar terrain for instance, or some of his other mods; you'll see that .tga files contain graphics for multiple trees and other alpha object things. That single .tga file is responsible for the entire graphics of a forest, not of a single tree as in stock SF2 terrains.

[Wrench 9,848]

Stary's Green Hell or his GermanyCE forests would be better examples.

[+Sundowner 4,830]

I'd really like to know what all these different Object Type and Shape boxes actually mean or do, then how the hell do you work out the texture co -ordinates ?

I've read the Terrain editor thread and so many others sooooo many times over the years but no where does any body explain what these things actually do? 

Go on, somebody make me feel really stupid now.

 

[+baffmeister 1,205]

Never actually looked at that dialog box before. Interesting. From my limited experience trying to make tod's I think the solid objects like tod buildings require a square bitmap or jpeg, then the coordinates somehow mark the points were the bitmap or jpeg gets "folded" around the box building. I would guess the transparent objects like trees are somewhat similar although they may be limited to flat [2d] or "X" placement which is closer to a 3D look. Not much help, I know. All I've ever done with tod's is to make larger buildings but all based on the stock TW bitmap/coordinates.

[+mue 715]

On 1.1.2018 at 3:36 PM, Menrva said:

No, that is what namedders did, and he encountered the maximum limit of TOD objects being placed on a single tile. To understand what Stary did, download the Madagascar terrain for instance, or some of his other mods; you'll see that .tga files contain graphics for multiple trees and other alpha object things. That single .tga file is responsible for the entire graphics of a forest, not of a single tree as in stock SF2 terrains.

Ok, I had a look at the Madagascar terrain. What Stary did is the following:
He still used stock (alpha) tod object types (eg. x-trees with base). But made them bigger in the horizontal direction. Then he textured those single objects with the multiple tree texture (the .tga file you mentioned). So that one single tree object appears as multiple trees.
Nice solution!

[+Menrva 4,200]

36 minutes ago, mue said:

Ok, I had a look at the Madagascar terrain. What Stary did is the following:
He still used stock (alpha) tod object types (eg. x-trees with base). But made them bigger in the horizontal direction. Then he textured those single objects with the multiple tree texture (the .tga file you mentioned). So that one single tree object appears as multiple trees.
Nice solution!

Exactly! @namedders please have a look at what mue described! That should be the solution you are looking for.

[+Stary 2,427]

Happy New Year guys!

 

Sorry for being late to the party. Had lot of work with Chinese fleet expansion to Cold Waters past weeks.

Long story short, albeith it might sound sane, 200-256 objects per tile is bollocks -luckily for us that is. I was able to place up to 1000-1200 individual trees on single tile. The trick is making TE (terrain editor, doh!) process the given tile's ini file when outputting TOD object.
Seems there are BIG issues with TE, no matter the version.

Solution is bit tedious (not really) yet simple -if one works on trees/buildings placement alone do so with custom TE work folder dedicated just to tiles population AND work few tiles at a time. Say, you want to work on just the forests tiles, let's call them "J" tiles (using Vietnam and Germany tileset nomenclature -of course if one has own custom tileset and terrain in the works it can as well be gobbledygook but I found keeping in line with standard naming much easier to work and navigade data ini and whatnot), then put just the finished Germany*J tiles in the folder, do new texturelist and work single tile per session. Save, output TOD. Make a copy of both TOD and the ie. GermanyGJ50A.ini (the text file that saves all the objects placement in it) then place trees on tile GermanyGJ75A etc. This is the only way I found to allow TE not to skip the trees/objects that are outside of what the memory resources of TE can handle.

Now the tricky part -I wrote to backup the finished tile's ini file and TOD right? Best in some kind of "work done" folder. That is Because after few tiles done TE will hit it's internal limits and outputs empty TODs and does not save the objects placement into the tile's ini file at all or just parts of it. Just remember to do exit->relaunch->reload texturelist combo after removing some ini files

Tip: you can make copies of your master texturelist file, rename, reload as new texturelist and so on, saved tons of work.

Also, as Mue wrote and my old treemods hint at, the values at the top of terrain's data file are mesh/scene vertices limits so you'd need to up them a bit (4096? Go with 8192 yay!) to have more shown per tile.

[+Stary 2,427]

As for the object creation panel, the size is self-explanatory, cast shadow is shadow cast option :D and size deviation is just that, randomly between placed objects (this works on TOD saving, no size deviation saved per object in ini file IIRC)

The other fields are for textures coordinates from as far as I remember 0.0 being top left and 1.0 being bottom right of texture.

Texture coordinates 1-4 being sides and coordinate 5 being flat roof.

Easiest way to find texture piece position on texture is launching it in PS and using percentage ruler at 10 percent grid or something similar.

[+Stary 2,427]

NOW MUE GET ME YOUR TOD CREATION TOOLKIT!!!!!!! DAMMIT WAITING 2 YEARS FOR IT!!!

[Wrench 9,848]

welcome back bro!

We all know the TE is bordering on crap, as it was never, EVER finished -- sort of a beta minus as there are many "features and functions" that (like the games themselves) were never implimented.

what you saying is, when creating forest tiles, is work ONLY one tile at a time (J1 for instance), plant all the trees, save, save all, THEN move the TOD and ***tilenametod.ini*** to a seperate folder within the TE, then move on to the next tile (J2 for instance)??

is this what I'm seeing?

[+Stary 2,427]

Yes Kevin, basically that allows you to manage TE's memory issues you would encounter when having too large tilenametod.ini files, then TE would simply stop reading from these inis and output empty (zero bytes) TODs or wouldn't write to inis at pressing SAVE button.

Also worth mentioning this is what I encountered while working on very dense experimental sort of sets with numbers of per-tile objects in 500-1000 ranges.

[+Gepard 11,301]

The number of available trees per tile depends also from a entry in the terrain_data.ini.

AlphaObjectVertexCount=8192
AlphaObjectIndexCount=12288

 

As higher the values, as more trees can be "planted"

[+Stary 2,427]

yeah that too, then another one is the vertex counts from terrain's data ini on dynamic TODs spawning, been fiddling with those in the long gone past to hilarious results