Reworked Iceland Terrain for SF2 NA - Can I have the Nice Geysers and Tiles Along with the Stock Ocean?

[Arrow 83]

I really like everything about the reworked Iceland terrain with Stary and Gerwin's excellent work, but I miss the default terrain's cool ocean. At least, I've gotten the impression that the NA ocean is different after adding the terrain. Is there anyway to have both, or does the reworked terrain make the stock ocean in NA not doable?

If I had to choose, I'd stay with the reworked terrain, because I can now fly missions and see the ground  in less than ideal light. As well, before the reworked terrain I had Floggers firing homing missiles up, over and down the far side of mountains at my wingmates and I. We now seem much more able to use geography and ground clutter to avoid them.

So is there anyway to have the 2 coexist?

[+Menrva 4,306]

3 hours ago, Arrow said:

I really like everything about the reworked Iceland terrain with Stary and Gerwin's excellent work, but I miss the default terrain's cool ocean. At least, I've gotten the impression that the NA ocean is different after adding the terrain. Is there anyway to have both, or does the reworked terrain make the stock ocean in NA not doable?

If I had to choose, I'd stay with the reworked terrain, because I can now fly missions and see the ground  in less than ideal light. As well, before the reworked terrain I had Floggers firing homing missiles up, over and down the far side of mountains at my wingmates and I. We now seem much more able to use geography and ground clutter to avoid them.

So is there anyway to have the 2 coexist?

Negative. The default IcelandNA terrain uses another terrain engine as well as different shaders. There's no way to have that good looking ocean on the other terrains which use the older, yet more optimized engine. Unless someone is capable of rewriting HLSL shaders from scratch and make them work in the old engine. By simply copying and pasting the SF2NA ocean shaders inside the terrain folders, the effect won't work properly; you'd see coastline tiles being completely cut and other issues.

So, Gerwin's awesome IcelandNA terrain uses the old engine, like all the custom terrains in the downloads section. If it wasn't for him, many people wouldn't have been able to play IcelandNA with decent FPS. In the old terrain engine, water effects are controlled by a bitmap file, which is WATERNORMAL.BMP. Effects can vary a lot depending on which bitmap you use. Once I was using a special water bump map by Stary, which has a very strong effect. Now I am using another one with a calmer, good looking effect, which was made by luk1978. So, feel free to exchange that .bmp file with any of your choice. There should be different ones in various terrain mods by Stary and others.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Menrva

[Arrow 83]

Thanks for the reply Menrva - I figured as much, but wanted to be sure. I can live with the old engine water, as the trade off is definitely worth it. I have to be honest that the default Iceland land terrain is probably my biggest disappointment I've had with any 3rd Wire product.  It wouldn't be so bad if it was just that the default ground looked like the tabletop mats I do miniatures gaming on, but it didn't even seem to function correctly around radar homing. I'm very grateful once again that this series has such a terrific modding community.

[jack33 90]

[jack33 90]

This land is better?

[Arrow 83]

3 hours ago, jack33 said:

This land is better?

The background terrain is a bit too blurred in your screenshot for me to venture a guess - what is it?

[jack33 90]

Iceland whith borrowed textures from enemy engaged

 

 

[+yakarov79 11,344]

1 hour ago, jack33 said:

Iceland whith borrowed textures from enemy engaged

 

 

guess you never uploaded that mod/tileset .. ? 

[Arrow 83]

4 hours ago, jack33 said:

Iceland whith borrowed textures from enemy engaged

 

 

Interesting idea and quite an improvement. Would these be the same textures that are found in Enemy Engaged Comanche Vs Hokum? I have the 2nd game in the series, but not the 1st.

I believe replacing textures like this would still leave a problem I encountered with the stock NA terrain; radar homing missiles seem to be able to retain lock with super-tech accuracy. 

[Wrench 10,028]

um, those would be copywrited items. There's always an issue with importing things without permissions from another game. We've had that tried before with aircraft models ripped from other sources.

also, as the stock NA terrain in LOD based, those textures, while in jpg format, are sort of part of each of the LOD meshes. Thereby making them almost unchangeable.

[jack33 90]

On 7/9/2018 at 7:55 PM, yakarov79 said:

guess you never uploaded that mod/tileset .. ? 

I can not, the textures have copyrigth, but I think that enemy engaged I release the code

[Arrow 83]

The fan-made patch out there for Comanche Vs Hokum (EE 2) includes the content of Apache Vs Havoc (EE 1.) From what I recall, that content was released by the owner of the IP to the creator of that patch .  If memory serves me correctly, the owner of the IP is Empire Interactive while Razerworks was the dev studio.  I wouldn't be surprised though, if that green light for EE 1 content only applies to it's use with EE 2, because one of the big complaints by fans at the time of C vs H's release was that it didn't bring enough new & shiny to the table. I certainly wouldn't assume it's open source to be used in other flight simulation games.

[Edit] Well apparently memory doesn't serve me too well - dug out my old flightsim disk caddie and noticed that I have disks for 2 Enemy Engaged games. There's disks for Comanch Vs Hokum and a 3rd game just called Enemy Engaged 2. I think I forgot about that latter game, because it was pretty much just a repeat of C Vs H with the added fan stuff.

Edited September 10, 2018 by Arrow