Italy, Southern Europe (1993-2006)

[+Menrva 4,198]

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Italy, Southern Europe (1993-2006)

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Italy, Southern Europe (1993-2006) Terrain
September 13th, 2022 (1st Release)
by Menrva and tiopilotos

>For Strike Fighters 2, Recommended Full-5 Merged
I am very proud to release a long awaited, brand new terrain made from scratch! The result of many years of dedication and sweat starting in 2017, it features thousands of manually placed tiles reproducing Real World river courses and lakes, not to mention tons of cities all accurately placed in their correct locations. This terrain portrays a pretty complex area, no wonder it never got made properly in two decades of Strike Fighters modding. It is my hope you realize the amount of time and hard effort that I have put to reproduce it with much care and detail.
The terrain completely covers Italy (with the exception of Sicily, which is included in my Libya terrain), Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Corsica (France), Liechtenstein and nice portions of Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Macedonia, Greece and even a bit of Romania. The tileset, based on one of Stary's GermanyCE tilesets, has been recoloured and expanded with needed transition tiles and features beautiful, unique tiles by tiopilotos which reproduce real islands. Expect long and very accurate river courses, all major and some minor lakes, and tons of islands in the Adriatic Sea. Numerous target areas have been added in order to expand playability, targets of opportunity and year range; those include more than 140 airports, more than 100 SAM sites and more than 70 EW-GCI sites, all placed accurately in their correct locations as shown by well-made SAM site datasets for Google Earth.

This terrain features a fresh new 250m resolution heightmap (instead of the stock 500m resolution), allowing for greater details and precision in elevation changes; overall it provides the whole terrain with a better look.

The terrain spans from April 12, 1993 (the beginning of Operation Deny Flight) to June 2, 2006 (the day before Montenegro declared its independence). This terrain is adapt for the Yugoslav Wars and for what-if scenarios pitting Serbia against NATO. For gameplay purposes, Bosnia is set to Red Side alongside Serbia and Montenegro. Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia are set to Blue Side. Airfields in Austria, Switzerland and Romania have been set to Neutral, so the AI and the player will never spawn on those by default.
Targets reflect Real World events as accurately as possible. Having SF2NA is a must, as I have enabled naval ops; if your mod folder contains American, French and Italian aircraft carriers, sometimes you'll see fleets being generated in single missions.

NOTE: The terrain is not fully finished. It currently misses targets for cities, such as bridges, warehouses, factories etc. If time will allow, maybe someday it will be completed properly.

>Credits (in no particular order):
-tiopilotos, for working on very well done island tiles which offer more unique sights in the Adriatic Sea.
-swambast, who provided me with invaluable help in tracking and fixing common and uncommon bugs.
-gerwin, whose TFDtool has proved to be essential in today's terrain making. If the terrain is pretty accurate to RL it's also because of him. I included his very nice Airfield 7+8 Addon Pack, too.
-mue, for the improved shaders he made, which I have included and reworked for the terrain, and for the tools he made for SF2 modding.
-JSF_Aggie, for his Hi-Res Runway Textures package which I have included and slightly reworked.
-Coupi, for his Soviet style repaint of the stock Runway3 airfield.
-luk1978, for the waternormal bitmap he shared at the SF2 screenshots thread. Your mods are very interesting!
-Stary, for an old version of his GermanyCE tileset included in the Anatolia v1 terrain by PureBlue.
-Gepard, for his great tutorials about terrain making, in the SF1 Knowledge Base at CombatACE. It's a gold mine!
-krfrge, who has produced a tutorial for recreating SF2-like planning maps, which prompted me to work on templates and my own high quality planning maps. Thank you very much!
-comrpnt, for his Approach and Airfield Lighting Pack mod packages for SF1 series, which I reworked and included.

>Trivia:
Some statistics of the amount of work that went into it, gathered thanks to gerwin's TFDtool. I placed manually one by one: more than 8600 rivers tiles, more than 1100 road tiles, more than 2000 city related tiles! This is just the tip of the iceberg, not counting other thousands of tiles that have been placed manually on the tilemap to better reproduce coastlines, islands and lakes, and not counting the endless hours of research since 2017 into adding all possible airports with much accuracy.

>Disclaimer:
This is a freeware; you are NOT allowed to redistribute it without my prior explicit consent.
Any changes to the terrain package's files and/or any copy-and-paste attempts of their contents are NOT authorized if you plan to release them in other mods. But permission might be granted to those who request it to me at CombatACE.
This terrain may NOT in any way, shape or form be used in any payware additions.

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• Submitter
  Menrva
• Submitted
  09/12/2022
• Category
  Full Terrains

 

[+Menrva 4,198]

I want to explain that this terrain work of mine is not fully complete as usual. It features all possible airports, air bases, SAM sites and radar sites, alongside extremely accurate topography with Real World river courses and lakes. However, cities are missing targets entirely, things like bridges, warehouses, factories, etc.
To develop this terrain has been all but a pleasant journey, it burnt me out numerous times to the point of hating it. Moreover, I've been suffering from an health issue for a year with no clear solution in sight. It has drained most of my energy. If and when I feel better, I'll consider completing the terrain with the addition of targets in cities. I think it's best that I release it as is rather than keeping it wasted on my hard disk.
For personal use only, you can modify it as much as you want. I just don't want to see the terrain being modified and/or redistributed here or elsewhere without my prior explicit consent. That's all I ask. The community has dwindled so much in recent years and this terrain comes too late, only very few fans of Strike Fighters will be enjoying it and this sort of demotivates me from doing any further terrain modding. This may well be my last terrain work, it really exhausted me to this point.

If you encounter any bugs or oddities, please do not bother me about those. I know well the terrain is not perfect nor complete, but right now I have other priorities alongside my health concerns. Take care, everyone.

Edited September 13, 2022 by Menrva