NathanKell

Should be the near, med, far clipping bands in the INI, right? IIRC I tweaked them out some and had to pull them back from stuttering (which meant they were doing _something_). I presume the near is bullet holes, the med are tod objects, and the far are terrain objects?

Looking great, B Bandy! Can't wait to try them out!

I too use CS2. But there's also GIMPshop--it has (most of) the features but none of the price (free open source). GIMPShop is a PS-like frontend on top of GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. I'm not sure TGAs do need to be 24bit--16bit may work (8+8alpha). I know Max uses 8bit bmps, and I think possibly TGAs as well. But I at school and don't have PS on this machine to check. Mike, if you'd like, I'd be happy to send you the PSD sources I used to make those extra tiles for Flanders, and you can just drop in Stary versions.* After all, each of those "new" tiles are just splices of stock tiles (with the exception of SeaRiver! But we can use the Edward/Sopwith Snipe source for that). Should work much better than color matching (I too started that way and found it easier to just splice). Wish I had time to do them myself. Heck, wish I had time to fly myself. :) *I.e. for each layer, make a mask for its transparency (so only the proper elements show) and then "paste into" with the appropriate Stary tile. IIRC I only had to do hand retouching on one of the Sea Coast Town2Farm (or whatever) ones. Well, on the SeaRiver too, but it only had to be done once (after that you can splice and recolor). :)

I use a modified profile I downloaded a loooong time ago from (IIRC) CH Hangar. Wish I could remember who wrote it. I've rearranged it some, though, so if it's still available there you might prefer that version. It's for SFP1, so many of the keys won't do much for FE, but many will (and it's what I fly FE with, so it does work fine for FE). Oh, and it's for a full HOTAS setup. If you don't have the throttle, you're in for a fair bit of remapping to get needed functionality on the stick. But I trust it's better than nothing. :) SFP1.zip

File Name: Max188 Hires Snow Extra Tiles (Flanders, Cambrai) File Submitter: NathanKell File Submitted: 12 Aug 2009 File Updated: 11 Sep 2009 File Category: First Eagles Terrain and Environmental Mods This "mod of a mod" includes some extra tiles for Max188's high-res winter set. I've also tried to blend the two extra full town tiles in better with the other town tiles. Included are the extra tiles needed for the TW Cambrai terrain (All Rough, Village3-4, River6), as well as snow versions of Sopwith Snipe's extra tiles to use Max188's tiles in Edward's Flanders terrain. I have also revised Max188's lake tiles to use the summer lake water (with a winter alpha channel like Max188's snow rivers) since in the Flanders and Cambrai terrains they serve as the English Channel as well as lakes. All tiles are merely spliced together (with a few edits or color-shifting) Max188 and/or TW tiles, and Flanders splicing is to match Sopwith Snipe's new summer splice tiles; all credit for the actual painting goes to them. PSDs available if anyone wants them. EDIT: Found error in FrCoastCityFarmSea.tga (a piece of one a field was left undeleted). Fixed. Click here to download this file

Looking at FrCoastCityFarmSea.tga I just noticed there is an error in one of the fields (I had deleted only some of the field in the upper layer, so it had a cross between two fields and thus a big splotch). That is now fixed; sorry for not catching it sooner.

The one other issue you may be hitting is the plane the water shader is rendered on is a set amount above sea level, which, when the heighmap for the shore is not flat (or the height mesh has too little detail) can lead to the terrain mesh clipping into the water mesh (load up Gepard's Test Terrain and look at the lake in the center for an example, or at least such is the case for me). My WAGuess on the color is that they're for computing shading. It may just be a straight-up average of the color in the image (and I'd have to do find how to do pixel sums in Photoshop, I know you can)--that is, the lake and the shore are going to be radically different because (a) shore has all that green (and nontrivial amount of red) and (b) shore will be significantly brighter. What's the last pic from, btw? (the rest I recognize the issue, but the last...shouldn't be there, as Stary says--frlake is replaced along with the frlake2 tiles) As a stopgap for Flanders, you can use Sopwith Snipe's Max188-in-Flanders mod, which uses Max's hires terrain (follow the instructions). That will at least give you tiles with the same layout as stock and Stary's terrains, though of course the color will be off. <horn tooting>You can also grab my snow package, and/or the summer one too (which itself requires Sopwith Snipe's)</horn tooting> EDIT: One other thing. You can ease troubleshooting by pointing _all_ terrains to a single set of season folders (by putting all of the "main folder" tiles into a new Stary_Summer folder too, and having no days during the year that are not defined as a season). This way you only have to check one set of tiles in each case, and any change you make is applied globally. Still have to update the terrain_data INIs though, but you can make one master list of tiles and copy-paste to all _data INIs. Still have to copy the TODs everywhere, though--they don't get picked up by seasons, or at any rate (even if they are, which, honestly, I never thought to check) it's cheaper to have the TODs in every terrain folder than in every season folder!

[info below is likely in the tutorial or KB forum] It seems like perhaps the easiest solution is to just edit Nations.ini and change the dates. Look for [Nation004] // may be something other than 004 if you've edited your file significantly Name=GERMANY then find ActiveDate=06/30/1918 That determines when the newest (thin) cross is used. At the end of the file, there are some extra nations defined, also with dates. Germany_Temp is the middle-period one, and Germany_Old is the flanged one. So just change the dates to be as desired, i.e. set _temp's to, like, 10/1/1918 and Germany's one to 11/1/1918, or something. Or just push them both out past 11/11. (If you haven't extracted it yet, it's in Flight\MissionData.cat and gets put in the Flight folder) Note that the nation numbers (i.e. Nation004, 19, and 20 for stock INI) control which Insignia decal is used. So you can just replace (or add, if they're not extracted) Insignia019 and 020 with whatever you want, rather than editing dates (they go in Objects\Decals). Other duplicated nations (used really only for name changes) are also listed at the bottom of Nations.ini; note that if you don't want duplicate decals, use the alias file to map, for example, Insignia022 to Insignia001, so both nations (USAAS and US Sig Corps AS) use the same decal file. Also, with the German decals, it bears noting that, stock (and this is IIRC) Insignia0xx is the one on a white field, and Fuse0xx is the one without the white field. So if you want both types on your skin, you can mix n match. (Tail, while redundant for Germany, is used for finflashes, so please use that for the tail cross even on German planes...)

I just want to add my second round of 2 cents and say how quickly and completely I became used to actually having trees in the forests! It's really almost indescribable, the difference it makes: one gets so used to, in games, seeing a few trees here and there as shorthand for "here be forest" that it really takes you back to see forest from the _trees_, not the terrain texture. Further, to have snow and mud, and mud and snow, really brings home that Flanders feel--it just doesn't seem right when everything's dry and bright. :] So, thank you Stary!

GIMPshop is a PS-like wrapper for the GIMP, and I can state for a fact that it properly shows a TGA's alpha channel as a separate channel, not automatically applied as layer transparency as it sometimes is in other programs (and, annoyingly, in some versions of PS! But they also supply a different TGA plugin). I've not seen any of Gepard's tuts, OlPaint01--is there anything in particular painting-side that's giving you trouble? No priesthood, no guilds (ni César ni tribun). Just takes some experimenting and some practice. And, yes, very definitely proper tools. Even if it's possible to do some of the things you have to (or want to) in more stripped-down programs, it's way more work and time. (For example, the steps I mentioned earlier can just be recorded as an action and batch-applied to all TGAs in the terrain--about 3-4min to choose a color that blends well and the right amount to feather/blend, another minute or two to record the actions and start the batch job, and that's all the human intervention required to add all those shores)

Looking very nice indeed, Stary! Tailspin, stock terrain does indeed have some river bank, particularly visible in riverend. More gray than brown though. And Max's summer repaints, with the dryer, less blue color palette, have the banks more visible. They're super easy to add, if you want them (at least in Photoshop): you can switch to the alpha channel, color-select the black (i.e. everything but the river), then Borderize the selection (by, say, 3 pixels?) and fill with black, then shift to RGB channels and fill with brown. Feather and tweak to taste. (To not paint over the trees, you'd have to Expand the selection a bit before doing the border, that will take away only from the river). Be sure you do fill it with black in the alpha channel, though, or otherwise you won't see the new banks, they'll be under the water shader (and technically the alpha channel is inverted anway--it's the alpha channel for the water shader).

File Name: Max188 Hires Summer Extra Tiles (Cambrai, Flanders) File Submitter: NathanKell File Submitted: 12 Aug 2009 File Updated: 16 Aug 2009 File Category: First Eagles Terrain and Environmental Mods This "mod of a mod" includes some extra tiles for Max188's high-res summer set. I've also tried to blend the two extra full town tiles in better with the other town tiles. Included are the extra tiles needed for the TW Cambrai terrain (All Rough, Village3-4, River6). I have also included minor tweaks to four of Sopwith Snipe's Max188-in-Flanders tiles (fixing seams and adding borders). All tiles are merely spliced together (with a few edits or color-shifting) Max188 and/or TW tiles, or Sopwith Snipe's combination work. PSDs available if anyone wants them. EDIT: Fixed FrFarm2Rough50b.bmp thanks to Panama Red! Click here to download this file