gerwin

There are 9 known version of LODs. It goes v0 to v8. Last official 3DSmax exporter makes v5 ones. v8 came with SF2 North Atlantic Wings over Israel expansion 2010 (not SF2) can use up to v4. IIRC. You can check the version of a LOD file with a hex-editor. v0 has no "LOD" header and starts right off with the number of nodes at byte 1. All other versions have their version-number in the 8th byte of the file. I do not use Blender much, so I don't know about the specifics there.

The promised update is available now. At least; the city tiles are now added. I did not get to the river tiles, because the Falcon 4 terrain conversion took too much time already. The default install still retains only the stock IcelandNA targets. So to have populated harbors and some other tweaks, refer to the standalone variant files, as found in the 'standalone' subfolder. The Terrain Objects .tod file tuning was also brought over to the Novalogic terrain conversions, so these are also slightly updated now.

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.

Falcon 4 (1998) also has a tile based terrain. Like Strike Fighters 1/2, also like European Air War (EAW) and the old Novalogic flight 'simulations' Raptor/F-16 MRF/MiG-29. I had a look at the files a long while ago. But could not recognize the essential bits. Essential bits being: - The tile textures. These images are easy to find - The tile-map. In hindsight, this is interwoven in a big L2 file, together with other data. - The tile texture files to tile index numbers table. Which needs to be translated to _Data.ini syntax. - The height-map for elevation. But this week I tried again, and got it to work. See screenshots. This Korea terrain has 1024x1024 tile positions on the map. There is only 1 height value per tile, also 1024x1024. Each tile represents 1km. Each tile bitmap image is 128x128 pixels. There are 1109 tile images, 1051 of which are actually used. These 1998 original ones don't have alpha channels for the marking of water. None of the tiles are placed on the map with a rotation (nor mirroring like Novalogic did) To compare: Stock Strike Fighters terrains are 500x500 tiles. Each tile represents 2km. Each tile bitmap is 256x256 pixels. Each 2km is spanned by 4 height-map points. Tiles can be rotated 0/90/180/270 degrees. So different in all ways. I had to adjust some settings in the terrain _Data.ini to make this Falcon 4 terrain work better, as to prevent "terrain mesh build-up gaps", visible on the horizon. Preliminary values being: [TerrainMesh] TextureThreshold=0.90 LowDetailMeshThreshold=0.75 MedDetailMeshThreshold=0.50 TileToHeightGridRatio=1 Fred Balding's Falcon tools were a must. As hosted here https://www.pmctactical.org/f4/downloads.php . His Terrainviewer 1.55 has the texture files to tile index table. It can display the list without copy-paste option. To prevent hours of typing, I ripped it from hex data in the Terrainviewer executable. TheaterMaker-03 has a tool Pathmaker that can export a matrix from the Falcon L2 file. (Basically a photoshop interleaved raw file, with 7 channels and 7 byte header, with the tile-map in Red and Green channel.) As explained in this old forum post. https://www.pmctactical.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21366 Since the terrain has this huge amount of 1000+ tile textures, I automated handling of everything involved here. By photoshop batch scripts, or by programming quick temporary conversion tools. Don't want to do such manually, 1000+ times. Soon, I will host a copy of the SF2 terrain conversion on my website, when I get it finished up a bit better. Don't feel like manually doing to loads of water alpha channels and targeting area work. So I will leave that be.

AFAIK it is like this: - You can open the aircraft main ini with LOD viewer, and that is the best way of making it display properly. - You can open the .lod model file, but then LOD viewer assumes there is a main ini file with the exact same name (before extension) and tries to open that. For example: When the lod file is named phantom.lod and the ini file is F4.ini, then LOD viewer will not find, read or use the F4.ini file, and it will not know about texture subfolders.

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.

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.

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.

@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...)

Alpha version no.2 is now available for download. Together with TFDtool v1.16. The water alphas are now there. 270 tiles have been converted into a .tga file with alpha channel holding the water area. The farm tiles are now rotated randomly, to be less repetative. (Could not do the same with roads, yet, as the roads are not drawn exactly in the middle of the tile...) Looked at the Hi-Tiles Allied force set. But was not convinced of it being a good replacement for Korea. Also tried some things with the BMS 4.33 tiles again. But the files with the same name are NOT a drop in replacement. Forests and hills match, but cities and farms and their transitions are not matching up. Also these tiles look less flexible in time periods, the urban areas obviously looking somewhat modern.

An alpha release of the Falcon 4 terrain is now available for download at my website http://www.gb-homepage.nl/index.htm This evening I made the SF2NA Naval Map setting work. Added some more airfields. Made minimal working movement.ini routes. Removed unused textures. What I want to to later is to auto-batch rotate any tiles that would benefit from less repetition. With some random rotation they will look better. To open this in TFDtool, please download a new version v1.15 with tile limit raised to 1100. @Menrva A lot of the conversion process does apply to Allied Force Balkans, but a lot will be different as well. There are even more tiles in that terrain. I also looked at the Falcon BMS 4.33 Korea terrain, and it has a different files structure, different tile index ID cross-referencing. For now I have my hands full with this Korea one.

Just keep the fun and games close the Demilitarized Zone? I am considering adding an amount of dummy tiles around the terrain, or just south+east. Because the way it is now, Korea's southern part is near, or in, the game's inaccessible wall zone.

I just did a quick comparison. Using an image with a range bar. Copied the 100km range bar at the bottom. It seems to span the Falcon 4 terrain 9 times: 900km. So the Falcon 4 terrain is certainly not below 100%. Maybe slightly above. Then again in the lambert projection below, North to south is larger. So that is the other way around.

http://www.gb-homepage.nl (Go to link above, then click on the Strike Fighters page) HFD/TFD ICELAND Terrain for Strike Fighters 2 North Atlantic ..or for any other game from the Strike Fighters Series. Remake of the Stock Direct-X 10 Lod based terrain, but in the classic HFD/TFD format. FEATURES: - A natural looking texture tileset, being a blend of ThirdWire's, gerwin/GB's and Stary's work. - Gives High framerates and requires only a short loading time. - Better low altitude radar evasion behaviour compared to the stock terrain. - Shorelines and Lakes. - Towns, millions of trees and even geysers (last two are made by Stary). - As the target locations are unchanged, the campaign remains 100% functional. - Seemingly windows XP compatible with a merged install. - Works with any Strike Fighters Game; Wings over Vietnam, Europe, Isreal etc. - Includes some toned-down textures for the SF2NA Iceland buildings and trees. Note: Since the introduction of brown/stone tiles this release is for now incompatible with Stary's high-res tileset on CombatAce. Though his artwork is by default integrated in this install, blended with the original tileset. INSTALLATION FOR SF2NA: Put the files in the proper Strike fighters mods folder. By default (for an English Windows) this would be the following folder: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\ThirdWire\StrikeFighters2 NorthAtlantic\Terrains\IcelandNA As it is configured now, it will replace the stock Iceland terrain in the game. ABOUT SF2NA UNDER WINDOWS XP: -SF2NA is officially not compatible with windows XP, as written in red letters in the store page. -SF2NA can seemingly be run on windows XP with a merged game, by starting another game from SF2 the series. StrikeFighters2 NorthAtlantic.exe itself gives a DLL error. Therefore the StrikeFighters2 NorthAtlantic mod folder remains unused in XP. Use another mod folder. -The SF2NA stock terrain will not render properly on Windows XP / DirectX 9. Use this terrain mod to work around that. SUGGESTED PROCEDURE FOR WINDOWS XP USERS: Copy "StrikeFighters2.exe" and rename it "StrikeFighters2 NA XP.exe" in the same folder. Copy "StrikeFighters2.ini" and rename it "StrikeFighters2 NA XP.ini" in the same folder. Remove the 'read only' tag from "StrikeFighters2 NA XP.ini" and change this entry at the bottom: [Module] ModuleDataFile=ModuleNorthAtlantic.cat DefaultTerrainData=IcelandNA DefaultAircraft=F-14A The Module line enables the SF2NA menu backgrounds. Run StrikeFighters2 NA XP.exe, it will then automatically create the "StrikeFighters2 NA XP" mod folder. in which to put this terrain mod. INSTALLATION FOR SF2 OTHER THEN SF2NA: Put the files in the proper Strike fighters mods folder. By default (for an English Windows) this would be the following folder: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\ThirdWire\StrikeFighters2\Terrains\ Copy the files from the 'standalone' folder to the main IcelandNA folder (The Naval forces from SF2NA will not be present) INSTALLATION FOR SF1: Put the IcelandNA folder in the game's 'Terrain' folder Copy the files from the 'standalone' folder to the main IcelandNA folder Remove ICELANDNA_DATA.INI, which is for SF2. then rename the file '- SF1 - ICELANDNA_DATA.INI' to ICELANDNA_DATA.INI. (The Naval forces from SF2NA will not be present)

Almost 10 years later... I plan to upload an update to this terrain. I worked on three of the Novalogic Terrains, adding target-areas, making and adapting the tiles to suit these. This was made easier by using Mue's new TOD editor. The three Novalogic terrains being Steppe, Scrub and Island Jungle. ( These are available for download on my website. ) Was thinking of doing the same for the Novalogic's Glacial terrain. But even though that terrain looks nice at times, I find the deposition of snow areas illogical there. That withheld me. Maybe it would be better to put effort in Novalogic's Savannah2? Yesterday I decided to adapt the target-area work to IcelandNA, which has similarities with Glacial. Added some cities, then ported over the harbor, one for blue and one for red. See screenshot of Husavik harbor. Such changes did require the addition of two target-areas, which may change the stock campaign game balance. I am thinking, maybe just branch of into IcalanNA2 or something, and keep the previous IcelandNA package as-is for the campaign. That would allow me to change these stock target-areas more extensively. I always found them a bit crappy anyways. Also considering again, to add some river tiles...

Oh, that was what madvad meant... I already wondered how the package could be just 2MB, but did not download and check it. It shows 15MB now. >>madvad: I found these small issues in left flap and right elevator, here is the fixes. Confirmed. Thanks!

There were efforts to organize a two week course in bomb-sight usage. Including a live fire exam, bombing a small village nobody cared about anyways. But in the end some of the paperwork did not get through, and the idea was dropped. (just a joke) Thanks Wrench, for updating the Invader package in such short notice!

Back then, Falcon 3 was on the home computer briefly. But it was too difficult for me at the time. Instead I played F-15 Strike Eagle II by Microprose, Novalogic's Comanche, also Secret Weapons of the luftwaffe SWOTL a bit. Soon after: EA's US Navy Fighters + Advanced Tactical Fighters took over.

It works. For example; I have a few spitfires with a cockpit.ini as below. But the actual model+texture files are in a .cat. They are found and used. [CockpitData] Directory=cockpit ... [CockpitSeat001] ModelName=spitfire_F45_cockpit

FYI CatPack can do that. You have to select format version 2 two when it asks. (version 1 is the older format for SF1). It does not support folders (I could add that, but who cares?). All versions of SF2 work fine with the created cat files.

Linux Wine Compat. Layer would be preferable over a slower virtual machine, here is a report on the functionality with WOFF: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=40352&iTestingId=111344

Glad to hear that. Yes, I was in doubt there. Also because I normally don't like to come into the discussion saying "buy something better if you want it to work." Which is always easy to say. Instead, I like old hardware and still have about 30 older videocards here: AGP, PCI and even ISA and Vesa Local Bus slotted ones. Nothing intel based from around 2003 though, so cannot test anything like that.