Italy, Southern Europe (1963-1991)

[+Menrva 4,230]

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Italy, Southern Europe (1963-1991)

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Italy, Southern Europe (1963-1991) 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), Yugoslavia, Albania, Corsica (France), Liechtenstein and nice portions of Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, 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 7, 1963 (the day the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was introduced) to June 24, 1991 (the day before Slovenia and Croatia declared independence). This terrain is adapt for Cold War scenarios pitting NATO forces against the combined Red Side forces of Yugoslavia, Albania, Hungary and Romania. Airfields in Austria and Switzerland 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 4,230]

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

[madvad 659]

Hello Menrva! Thanks for create this map and share with us!

I loving it! I found this, maybe you like to fix for a future update:

 

 

Edited September 13, 2022 by madvad

[+yakarov79 11,215]

15 minutes ago, madvad said:

I loving it! I found this, maybe you like to fix for a future update:

 

13 hours ago, Menrva said:

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.

 

[madvad 659]

4 minutes ago, yakarov79 said:

 

 

I'm not complaining, just adding information that may have been left blank that even others can correct.
I wish Menrva to recover his health as soon as possible, and all the best to him always.

[+Menrva 4,230]

@madvad You're a sniper in catching bugs, I should hire you. Jokes aside, it's your lucky day, it was a rather quick fix. I've re-uploaded the two terrain packages. You'll have to wait until they are re-approved.

I won't be available for other bug fixing though. Anything else you people wish to see fixed or improved, send me a PM and I'll care to read it when I feel the time is right. Don't expect immediate support, I need some rest.

[ARG16 6]

Beautiful, wonderful! Good job Menrva, I love your work and I am a fan of your terrain.

Congratulations!

[amariani 4,951]

Any chance of a WW2 version?

[+Menrva 4,230]

11 hours ago, amariani said:

Any chance of a WW2 version?

Sorry but no. These versions I've uploaded are not even complete as I already explained in the first post. I'd rather complete them someday rather than starting a new one. They were started in 2017 and only got released in 2022. A WW2 version would require even more researches from zero and lots of free time I lack.

Strike Fighters 2 is pretty much dead, we few remaining modders can keep it alive only for so long. A mere hundred downloads don't justify spending some years behind the development of a new terrain. Sometimes it feels like a waste of effort to my eyes. I wish the community was still active as it used to be. These days it's mostly about end-users asking for such free additions. Unfortunately this stuff doesn't grow on trees and actually is very annoying to develop in the long term.

[+sophocles 1,345]

6 hours ago, Menrva said:

Strike Fighters 2 is pretty much dead, we few remaining modders can keep it alive only for so long. A mere hundred downloads don't justify spending some years behind the development of a new terrain. Sometimes it feels like a waste of effort to my eyes. I wish the community was still active as it used to be. These days it's mostly about end-users asking for such free additions. Unfortunately this stuff doesn't grow on trees and actually is very annoying to develop in the long term.

Unfortunately, I have to agree.  I suppose we were all pinning our hopes on the release of the windows 10 update; but  this has not materialized and I've given up hope that it ever will. 

If something miraculous happens and we see an update then maybe all the work we modders put into the game will have some purpose .. but as it stands, I have to concede that we modders are working inordinate numbers of hours to please only ourselves, each other,  and the handful of users left.

I wish TK would read these forums and at least give us a clear idea of what to (or not to) expect.

[+Nyghtfall 2,181]

What more of a sign do you need? After years of silence and ignoring the SF2 community TK came out of nowhere and wanted money. He found a few guys, that had enough hope, that this move was not just some sort of fake. And after not getting enough, he decided to go back into silence again... In my opinion, maybe at one time for a very short time he really had the idea of doing an up-to-date version, but this moment is gone for a long time. I know what not to expect.

[+sophocles 1,345]

16 hours ago, Nyghtfall said:

TK came out of nowhere and wanted money

I refuse to believe that this was a scam/money grab .. maybe I'm naive, but I truly think that he was serious about the update.  I know he didn't raise what he expected, and this is the result .. I guess I'd better resign myself to the fact that SF2 will remain as is .. it's a crying shame though because this game is so bloody cool!