Falcon 4 Korea Terrain

[+gerwin 451]

@EricJ

It was configured as a compromise like this:

Navalmap=true is combined with the Navy nations being below the first nation in the nations.ini. Like making USN the 2nd or 3rd there.

This allows for automatic fleet generation when the player has a Navy plane with matching carriers, without forcing several mission types to solely be aimed at an enemy fleet.

In general though. I don't know if this strange terrain works for everyone's system. Before my earlier _data.ini adjustments it was funky. The terrain has behaved well on my system since.

 

@Gepard. the tiles are 128x128 but it takes four to cover a stock SF2 tile area, so in that regard it compares to 256x256 tiles. Other then that, it is what it is. I am not claiming this terrain is better then something else, or even good. I don't even know why I converted it. I was actually wanting to try something else but got carried away.

 

Upload no. 3 is up.

- Some lake tiles are now water-alpha prepared.

- More work on avoiding tile repetition in the farm and swamp areas. Now also applied to roads and rivers. (but the 'greener' grass farm areas are still todo...)

[+EricJ 4,245]

1 hour ago, gerwin said:

@EricJ

It was configured as a compromise like this:

Navalmap=true is combined with the Navy nations being below the first nation in the nations.ini. Like making USN the 2nd or 3rd there.

This allows for automatic fleet generation when the player has a Navy plane with matching carriers, without forcing several mission types to solely be aimed at an enemy fleet.

In general though. I don't know if this strange terrain works for everyone's system. Before my earlier _data.ini adjustments it was funky. The terrain has behaved well on my system since.

 

@Gepard. the tiles are 128x128 but it takes four to cover a stock SF2 tile area, so in that regard it compares to 256x256 tiles. Other then that, it is what it is. I am not claiming this terrain is better then something else, or even good. I don't even know why I converted it. I was actually wanting to try something else but got carried away.

 

Upload no. 3 is up.

- Some lake tiles are now water-alpha prepared.

- More work on avoiding tile repetition in the farm and swamp areas. Now also applied to roads and rivers. (but the 'greener' grass farm areas are still todo...)

Okay I see. Well No. 3 is working, I'm able to load on a carrier and fly, just having graphics issues with the planes so far, and object textures. Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't for now, and figure that's a graphics card issue, because I can't select my AMD chip. Anyway I'll see with each addition you make, so things out to settle down once more iterations are available.

EDIT: I managed to switch it to the AMD chip, and it has no problems showing the textures and the like, but I'm unable to record a session to show off the terrain, but I'll find something.

Edited February 25 by EricJ

[+gerwin 451]

On 25-2-2024 at 1:39 AM, EricJ said:

Okay I see. Well No. 3 is working, I'm able to load on a carrier and fly, just having graphics issues with the planes so far, and object textures. Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't for now, and figure that's a graphics card issue, because I can't select my AMD chip. Anyway I'll see with each addition you make, so things out to settle down once more iterations are available.

EDIT: I managed to switch it to the AMD chip, and it has no problems showing the textures and the like, but I'm unable to record a session to show off the terrain, but I'll find something.

 

Upload no.5 is available since now. Yeah, no.4 was there too, but I did not announce it.

The ReadMe of the package is now proper.

Lots of tiling work again. AFAIK all the most obvious 'Immersion Breakers' of the original terrain tile-mapping are now out of the way..

Adjusted the Nations.ini

Some more targetting work.

I am also using an old AMD Radeon. I did change the _Data today as to render the terrain well on my system, with the minimal amount of changes from the defaults. In the  [terrainmesh] section that is.

[Stratos 3,191]

Not requesting, just asking, do you have plans to add TOD files?

[+gerwin 451]

9 hours ago, Stratos said:

Not requesting, just asking, do you have plans to add TOD files?

There were a few moments that I was tempted, but I just better not start on that. I should give it a rest. Reflect on what to do with this.

Upload no.6 is there now. It has some minor tiling adjustements. One targetarea was moved to a flatter tile. NKorea Such'on MiG-29 airbase was added to the targets.

 

Okay, now for the next teaser. And don't get too excited because this proof of concept is hitting the memory limits of the game engine, and for many configs it will not load up.

1st image is for comparison plain Falcon 4 tiles and tile placement, tweaked by me.

Other five images are the Falcon BMS 4.33 tileset. Which has a crazy amount of 2880 tiles. AFAIK The Falcon engine originally had a loading-tile-subsets-on-demand system, to prevent having to keep all tiles for Korea in memory at once. But the SF2 game has no such system. It is impossible to say how much tiles SF2 can handle because it depends on the host OS and tile resolution and amount of water alpha and maybe even the space required by aircraft skins. I have seen quite few hangs at loading yesterday, went downsizing tiles again until it did load up.

This huge amount of tiles is again cause by Falcon's lack of rotation support for tiles, forcing them to make more tiles instead. I don't know who made this tileset, yet. I am not sure if I should release it. 

I like the set in general, In places it is the best the game has ever looked for me IMHO, but the village tiles with the blue roofs are looking rather 'restless' like a garbage heap. 

 

 

[Wrench 9,847]

In a way, those almost look like the EAW Europe tiles. Very nice looking!

[Stratos 3,191]

Amazing work you're doing, really impressive!

[+gerwin 451]

Back to the classic tileset. Upload No.7 is there.

 -Rewrote TFDtool randomized auto-rotate of certain tiles, to be as smart as I could possibly see it. Then applied it. 

- More manual adjustments of 45 degree road/river tiles.

- Photoshop adjustment of 4 tiles.

- Added 3 blue airbases. The ones which were historically significant.

 

Edit: Upload 8

- Added harbor target area for blue and red.

- More tile mapping adjustments and tile texture adjustments.

- Renamed one airfield.

Edited March 1 by gerwin

[+gerwin 451]

Upload no.11

The height-map is now upscaled to 4x the tile-map size. The main reason is that the Strike Fighters engine seems to run better with this change, for some reasons I don't know... It gives better frame-rate and has visually better horizon terrain buildup. So the _Data ini settings from the first post do no longer apply. It was not easy to upscale the height-map in a way that retains sharpness in the mountain- and ridge-tops. Had to program a custom upscale in TFDtool, then blend it with some filtered variants. It should be good now.

Added some target-area's in the hills and at the DMZ. This is where the terrain looks best. The DMZ is not quite so demilitarized now. 

There are around 40 .tod terrain objects now. Solely for the full city tiles. Tailor-made to fit these.

Then the usual tile-map and tile-texture adjustments.