pagsab

Thanks, I was wondering where along the coast you lived. Without radar, the Republicans had a hard job protecting their long exposed coast, especially when the He-59s attacked at low level and at first light to minimise the risk of interception. Strafing seems to have played a big role in this conflict, and on p.140 Salas Larrazabal describes the Spanish He-51s' 'chain' tactics with each plane circling for successive firing passes until its ammo was exhausted. Low level flak seems to have been less of a deterrent than it would become in WW2.

As just one example of my last point, I finally managed tonight to resolve the shimmering towns which had annoyed me for so long in First Eagles 2, by increasing the externalclipdistmin value in my planes' cockpit.inis from around 0.04 to 0.15. Were it not for finding Mue's decade-old thread at https://combatace.com/forums/topic/85970-shimmering-tods-and-target-objects, I would not have had the faintest idea that this might offer a solution.

My Spanish terrain modelling has continued to generate insights not obvious from modern maps, such as the case for including the lower course of the Jucar river (as shown below in an early morning flight south from Valencia in our Breguet 19s), since the ill-fated Tous dam had not yet been built. As seen in the foreground, I also used Photoshop to make my moorland tiles look more like variegated Mediterranean scrubland, by pasting in parts of JSF Aggie's lovely high res desert tiles from the SW US terrain and adding 10% of monochromatic Gaussian noise. This greatly improves the 'look' of the many uncultivated areas. However, as my modelling slowly continued north to Castellon and on to the mouth of the Ebro, I became increasingly frustrated by the effort involved in choosing inland terrain tiles. It took forever to cross-reference my HFD view with the Google satellite map at my side, and it was so hard to maintain orientation while zooming in and out to decide whether each individual tile should have fields, forest or scrub that I almost lost the will to continue. Thankfully, I realised at last that there might be a far quicker and easier way to achieve a broadly similar result. I analysed the tile distribution I had created so far by cross-referencing it with the elevation range on the tiles concerned, as indicated conveniently at the bottom of the TFD view in Gerwin's editor. After some trial and error, I settled on a simple rule which gave an acceptable general approximation of the overall effect of my manual efforts, namely that in this terrain, inland tiles should have a random mix of forest and scrub instead of the default field background if they have an elevation range of at least 100 metres. This semi-automatic system proved marvellously simple to apply in Gerwin's editor, after I temporarily changed the TFD.ini to allow random individual distribution of my improved forest and scrub tiles instead of my 8 field variations. Despite some false starts when I forgot to reduce the default 5x5 setting of the editor, it took only 2 hours to re-tile the Mallorca mountains and the entire mainland strip up to the Ebro delta. The mountains had sporadic patches of cultivation just as in my manual efforts, and I could use my satellite map as before to add additional forests and scrubland as appropriate in less steeply inclined areas like the upper Ebro valley. Sooner than I had hoped, I completed my coastal circuit all the way to Barcelona, as shown in the 90 by 64 tile screenshot below. This represents 360 by 256 km of real terrain, but my scale reduction halves the duration of flights and makes my preferred continuous wingman missions just about practical even in the slow craft of this period. The terrain allows complete over-water combat missions by sea and land planes throughout the SCW, and simple reassignment of the central airfields lets it host closer range combat missions in and after the spring of 1938 when the Nationalists in Aragon advanced to the sea from Castellon to the Ebro. I am celebrating my completion of the first full stage of my Spanish project by piloting the wide variety of Golden Era planes used in the SCW either in individual treetop flights to enjoy my undulating high resolution terrain or in as close a formation as my flying skills allow, with the terrain as a backdrop to the beautiful aircraft models themselves. My new techniques of HFD rescaling and semi-automatic tile selection have transformed my hand-tiling endeavours, and for the first time it seems really practical to expand my flexible bespoke tilesets beyond small vignettes into significant portions of the area covered by more conventional SF2 terrains. As I said, my next step in Spain will be to push north-west from the area shown above to cover the entire Aragon front from Teruel through Zaragoza to Huesca, including the Nationalist airfields behind the line. This will position me well to push on in due course to the Biscay coast and to central Spain, giving me a much more extensive overall terrain than the small vignette around Madrid which I envisaged originally. As my projects continue to develop, I am enormously grateful for the resources and insight of so many skilled modders on which my own belated and rather idiosyncratic efforts depend.

Part of the fun of terrain-making is the research it inspires, yielding greater understanding of the reality which our virtual worlds seek to reflect. One of the maps in Lopez’s SCW aviation atlas shows a Republican airbase at La Senyera, 45 km south of Valencia. Sure enough, I found the small hamlet of Senyera and put an airfield on the flat ground there for test flights over my new model of the mountainous cape region. However, maps in Salas Larrazabal’s 1969 history of the SCW air war show the La Senera base only a few km south of Valencia. Google searches to resolve the contradiction eventually revealed that both maps are wrong and that La Senera was the cover name given to an airbase built in late 1936 near Chiva, 30 km west of Valencia. I will now have to delete my phantom base and continue north with my terrain modelling in order to have the mainland airfield I desire!

A key feature of my reduced scale terrains is that my airfields are far smaller than in other SF2 terrains. One can even squeeze seaplane strips into river tiles, as shown below by my remodelled port and seaplane base of Mahon (Mao in Catalan) on Menorca. I have now also modelled Ibiza and Formentera, and I am about to leap further west to the mountainous cape south of Valencia, with a view perhaps to proceeding clockwise around the coast to Barcelona so as to open up this entire maritime arena for seaplane and landplane action by the time that my used copy of Herrera's book finally arrives from Madrid. Thence inland to Teruel and Zaragoza to link up with the land fronts and give me even wider settings for my SCW scenarios.

I was pleased to discover that I could rename my stand-ins to match the real aircraft simply by renaming the aircraft folder, the main ini file, and the full and short names at the start of that file, leaving everything else as is. This allowed me to create separate folders for my 'Dornier Wal' and 'CANT Z.501', and hence to amend the data files to make the former plane slower and to remove its tail gun (which on the Z.501 offers a handy stand-in for the real third gunner atop the engine nacelle). I used similar techniques to turn the Walrus not only into the Savoia S.62 but also into the smaller but similar-looking Italian Macchi M.41 single seat naval fighter, a few of which operated from Mallorca early in the war. I increased the Macchi's speed and engine power, removed the gunners, and turned the front gun into a fixed pilot-controlled HMG (instead of the actual 2 LMGs). To test my refinements, I set up a simple interception of a Republican 'Dornier Wal' by my 'Macchi' over the abortive Republican landing site at Portocristo. As the picture below shows, I did my best to apply standard realistic tactics from FE2 and to use the enemy craft's tail assembly to shield me from his dorsal gunner, with much greater success than in my previous dogfight. Having lamented only the other day the lack of models to simulate seaplane missions in the SCW, it is amazing what a little ingenuity and lateral thinking can achieve!

The single engined Walrus makes a good stand-in for the Savoia S.62 biplane flying boats which served both sides in the first year of the conflict, just as the Arado 95 can double up as the similar Heinkel 60 biplane floatplanes which were also trialled by the Condor Legion. However, as shown in Stratos's pictures above, other SCW seaplanes were significantly bigger, so I decided to look for available models which reflect this. The big parasol-winged Dornier 24 flying boat can stand in both for the earlier Dornier Wal and for Italy's CANT Z.501s which served for much longer than the Z.506. I could not find a big biplane floatplane to stand in for the Heinkel 59s, but the twin engined Fokker T.IV monoplane floatplane serves as a fair substitute in all other respects. I dropped the speeds of these stand-ins to accord better with the performance of the real aircraft, and I increased the vertical ContactPoints of the Do 24's landing gear from 0.9 to 1.1 to allow safe takeoffs and landings. The picture below shows a Republican 'Dornier Wal' over the small port of Mao, and a German 'He 59' over Palma harbour. These various substitutes allow me to me recreate flights by every significant SCW seaplane.

I already tried using your own very nice Espana map, which covers more of North Africa, but I decided in the end to go with the other HFD which does not suffer from longitudinal distortion and could be exactly halved to make rescaling less disruptive. I also considered basing my SCW games on FE2 rather than SF2 so as to have more detailed terrain (at the expense of harder mission editing), but the FE2 Golden Era section here on CA contains only some of the SCW planes, and I ran into difficulties importing more from SF2 models. I was pleased to find it easier to import FE2 planes to SF2, so the Golden Era models can hopefully bolster my evolving SF2 SCW playset if required. The bottom line is that, the more resources that are available from the incredible modding effort which has taken place over the past 2 decades, the easier it is for non-experts like me to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' and benefit from the incredible potential and flexibility of this wonderfully accessible sim. My dogfight illustrated above was exciting, but my complete sortie from leaving the water to crashing fatally back into it after the crippling damage to my tail assembly lasted only a few minutes. That is why I tend to prefer longer and less ahistorically bloody missions using my simple tweak to allow me to enjoy formation flying along the way. The picture below comes from an hour long mission which I just played recreating one of the many recce flights from Pollenca to monitor airfield construction at San Luis on Menorca. The field was too vulnerable to bombing to serve as anything more than a diversionary strip for damaged planes, but along with the nearby port of Mao it had significant AAA defences, as described in the article I referenced. My leader fell foul of these, and the picture shows me inspecting his damaged left wing and missing left elevator as we prepared to descend back down to Pollenca in the evening sunshine. Thankfully, both he and I landed safely after an atmospheric and enjoyable hour of virtual flight with just a taste of vicarious peril.

The CANT Z.506 and Arado 95 which are the only seaplanes included in the SCW conversion played only marginal roles in the real conflict. As a quick and dirty way of modelling more typical craft, I painted Nationalist and Republican markings on the Supermarine Walrus. The photo below shows my Italian plane coming a cropper in an exciting seaplane duel among the flak bursts over Pollenca bay. It took only a moment to create this clash in the SF2 mission editor and to exit the sim briefly to adjust the Republican plane's takeoff time so it would arrive just after my scramble from the base. Having to depend on my gunners rather than pilot-controlled weapons made for a novel and interesting dogfight experience.

Drool.... Though it would only make me sadder at having so few models available to simulate the clashes. It is wonderful how much information is now available freely on the web. I just found this detailed 2024 article about the aerial dimension of the SCW in Menorca: https://revistes.uab.cat/rubrica/article/view/v14-n29-de-salort-lopez/414-pdf-ca.

Yes, I am often simply rediscovering wheels invented by real experts like yourself. I could kick myself for not trying harder sooner to edit HFD bitmaps, though had I done so, I might have stuck with automatic terrain generation as well, and never been inspired to create the more flexible tilesets which are key to the success of my reduced scale hand-tiled terrains. Hand-tiling is a lot of work, but even small terrain vignettes can host fulfilling air combat missions in the pre-jet era. The picture below shows an obsolescent Nieuport 52 of the beleaguered Republican garrison on Menorca flying over its newly constructed base at San Luis while the pilot keeps a lookout for fascist bombers approaching from Mallorca on the horizon. It took me only a couple of hours this afternoon to add this new island and hence allow both sides to fly complete combat missions even before I model any of the Spanish mainland.

Yes, I read that He-59s also operated from the island. There is a recent article in Spanish by David Ginard on the Balearic Islands in this period, available at https://www.e-revistes.uji.es/index.php/millars/article/view/9371. I would love to have models of the He-59 and of other seaplanes of this era such as the Dornier Wal and Savoia S.62 as shown in Lopez's book, but unfortunately seaplane models for SF2 are much rarer than for land planes.

Since posting at https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101179-european-air-war-reborn/ my last update on my SF2 hand-tiling project, I have been playing several of my own boardgame conversions on air and naval combat, and then enjoying First Eagles 2 by manually tweaking mission files using location data from Gerwin's invaluable TFD editor so as to create my preferred short range real time wingman missions. This inspired me to progress to the classic planes of the 1930s, using SF2's built-in mission editor to make things easier. I have the SF2 Spanish Civil War conversion from 'another place', but the included 1:1 scale terrain seemed rather blurred and bland after the wonderfully detailed FE2 terrains, and it took forever for the slow planes to fly between the scattered airfields. Inevitably, I wondered whether I could use my hand-tiling techniques to create a reduced scale vignette as a more impressive and playable terrain background for the SCW planes. It soon became apparent that creating height maps manually as I had managed in the flat lands of northern Europe was hopelessly impractical in mountainous Spain. This prompted me to revisit Baltika's advice in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/80880-te-question-height-map-to-hfd/ regarding manipulation of HFD bitmaps exported from TK's terrain editor. My naïve earlier efforts to do so using Microsoft Paint had been wholly unsuccessful, but now I tried using GIMP, and found that I could scale down and overwrite the 2000 pixel square HFD bitmap from the SCW terrain as a 1000 pixel square bitmap which re-imported perfectly into a new blank 500 km terrain in the Third Wire editor. I cut the bitmap import height scale to 5 so as to halve elevations as well, thereby stopping the mountains becoming disproportionately steep. I later re-did the conversion using the Canvas Size tool in GIMP to add blank space around the reduced bitmap, expanding the new terrain to 700 km square and so stopping the hard-coded 80 km 'wall' in SF2 blocking access to features near the edge. It was obvious that standard SF2 tilesets intended for automatic terrain generation were far too ham-fisted for my reduced scale terrain, so I decided to re-use the bespoke high resolution tiles and TODs I had created for my NW Europe terrain project, based on Gepard's Battle of Britain tileset. By using Enhance – Adjust Color – Color Variations in my old copy of Photoshop Elements, I was able to redden my tiles and trees to give a more Mediterranean look, applying the Quick Selection tool beforehand to keep the blue water intact. I used Gerwin's editor to create a random background of my 8 Field tiles, and then I gradually placed coastal tiles and inland woods, moors and urban areas by flipping back and forth between TFD and HFD views while referring sideways to a big old-fashioned atlas of Spain and a laptop showing zoomable online satellite and elevation maps. It was then just a matter of pasting in the sea, and refining elevations to remove previous flattening and to fit with my own coastal tiles. As with my previous projects, I began with an island, in this case Mallorca which the Republicans abortively invaded in autumn 1936 and which then became a key base for Italian bombing of Republican ports and shipping. The maps below show that my reduced scale version of the island is at least as geographically accurate as that in the original SCW terrain on the left, despite having only a quarter as many tiles selected from just 54 variants instead of 124. Years ago in Toledo's military museum I bought a copy of Lopez's illustrated atlas of SCW aviation, and this has several images of the 'hidroaviones' based at locations like Pollenca bay in NE Mallorca. I could not resist modelling this seaplane base by placing a hidden offshore runway like that which I use in my small grass airfields (by commenting out the ModelName in the runway's TargetType entry). I already knew that standard land planes can fly (anachronistically) from coastal water, but I was dismayed to find that actual seaplanes moved at no more than a crawl even at full throttle. I almost gave up in frustration when multiple attempts to solve the problem by tweaking the Landing Gear entries at the end of the aircraft data files caused the seaplanes to explode instead! I finally realised after much confusing trial and error that the torpor seemed to go away when I changed my landing setting to Easy in gameplay options. The one data file tweak which is worth making if needed is to add the various lines relating to tail gear steering, since this allows both sea and land planes to taxi to the hangars for added immersion. The picture below shows my big CANT Z.506 Heron flying over Pollenca bay, with the coastal hangars just visible above the cockpit and the Tramuntana mountains looming in the background. Having refined my new techniques with Mallorca, I can now create a vignette of similar size to my 45 by 32 tile Kent and Pas de Calais terrain, this time covering the Avila-Toledo-Guadalajara triangle which includes the key battlegrounds around Madrid. Lopez's book has some very useful maps showing the dozen or so historical airfields in this area, and modelling these will allow a wide variety of short SCW missions to be flown using the vignette alone. Thereafter, my belated discovery of how to use GIMP to resize and reshape HFD bitmaps has very welcome implications for the future of my other hand-tiling projects in NW Europe and the Baltic. By differential rescaling I can now easily remove the longitudinal distortions which I find so off-putting in published terrains. Although some HFDs like EuroWW2 are disfigured by excessive flattening, correcting this is far easier than adding new HFD data manually as I had planned. Combining hand-tiling using bespoke tilesets with properly proportioned reduced scale HFDs from existing terrains offers a much more practical way forward for the gradual expansion of my various projects from the initial vignettes. Being able to take off and land in the seaplanes which were such an evocative feature of early aviation is only the icing on the cake! If anyone would like a more detailed step-by-step guide to any of the techniques I have discovered, please let me know and I will try to help. (Site rules preclude me posting my files, due to my routine cannibalisation of existing resources for my own private use.)

Thanks Major Lee! As usual, my recent progress with my computer air gaming inspired me to flip back and model related engagements in my manual air designs, as shown in https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3715370/tip-and-run. As discussed in my video, it is great to have these two complementary ways of simulating classic air combat missions from different perspectives.

I am currently reading Chris Goss’s 2003 book on ‘Luftwaffe Fighter Bombers over Britain’, which is chock-full of mission reports which leave me itching to model the sorties on my new terrain. I found that by cutting waypoint altitudes manually in the mission file while in the process of cloning my own entry to create my wingman flights, I can get around the minimum heights in the SF2 mission editor and drop my colleagues to 500 feet, giving a much better sense of the wavetop and treetop altitudes common in fighter-bomber sorties. Strafing is fairly easy if targets can be identified in time, but pinpoint bombing is realistically hard without getting dangerously close to one’s own bomb bursts. The picture below shows our Whirlwinds as we at last outdistanced the coastal flak off Calais. For once I had managed to hit and sink our small target vessel, but at the cost of bomb fragments shredding my craft. With no height whatsoever in hand, the White Cliffs looked frighteningly far away...

I did too until a year ago, when I discovered how to achieve similar satisfaction from SF2. See my 3D air gaming video at https://www.youtube.com/@philipsabin1653 for a quick review of my own experiences.

I described in previous threads how my interest in SF2 has been revived over the past year by discovering how to fly as a wingman, how to drop the 3D clouds to a more realistic altitude, and how to model small low-lying areas like the Baltic islands manually, without using the horizontally skewed elevation data provided by DEMs. My last thread showed how escaping the constraints of automatic terrain generation allowed me to construct a compact but flexible high resolution tileset based on the best of the wonderful artwork which other modders have created. As shown below, I have now completed the first stage of my associated project of gradually making my own manual tilemap for WW2 NW Europe. Besides avoiding horizontal distortion, this tilemap squeezes much more real land area into each tile than do other available terrains for the region. My manual modelling hence does not take impractically long, and I can fly entire wingman missions from takeoff to landing without unduly protracted transits. I am now ready to expand the modelled area gradually in all directions to allow longer missions than the brief cross-Channel hops possible already, as I build up my graphically far improved echo of the European Air War sim which I enjoyed so much 3 decades ago. I have made two main improvements since my last report. First, I decided to change horses again before it was too late by shifting to a new reference map made from a patchwork of screenshots from the online elevation maps at https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/, with the top contour locked at 1000 metres for consistency. As shown below, this makes it easier to select the base height of each tile, in conjunction with a zoomable live copy of the map alongside to show more precise contours. I have now standardised on 2 raised points on each tile, to create just the right amount of rolling terrain on all tiles except those showing watercourses, airfields or flat fenland or built-up areas. The road and rail lines on the reference map allow me to correlate with the live elevation map and with other zoomable live and satellite maps showing towns, airfields and vegetation. My second improvement has been to make my airfields many times smaller than the multi-tile monsters which dominate most SF2 terrains. As shown below in my representative selection of the several real airfields crammed behind Cap Gris Nez in 1940 to maximise the reach of the Bf 109, I now confine airfields to just the 4 central squares of their single 16 square tile. Not only does this make them look much less overscale on my reduced scale terrain, but it also allows the other 12 squares of the tile to slope up or down as shown here. By tracing runways diagonally rather than orthogonally, I keep them long enough to allow even 4 engine bombers to take off and land successfully if the data file constraint is removed. Deciding which of the many thousands of WW2 airfields to include on my terrain is hard (particularly in view of the many changes across this long conflict), but Henry Deng’s research collected at https://www.ww2.dk/lwairfields.html is of invaluable assistance, helping even to choose which side of each airfield to put my generic buildings. I have now switched my horizon distance setting back to ‘far’ since this makes my mass of small TOD objects look much better, at the cost of visibility on my reduced scale terrain being far greater than it would be in real life. I am currently using my new arena as a sandbox for a wide range of combat missions like those which I flew over published terrains as shown in my previous threads. The picture below shows our Whirlwind flight outbound past the radar masts and balloon barrage of Dover for a strafing run on Marquise in spring 1941. On my reduced scale terrain, the entire sortie from takeoff to landing back at Manston takes just 15 minutes. I have slashed the accuracy and warhead weight of low level flak so that such missions typically leave one friendly plane damaged, posing the added challenge of nursing the crippled craft back to base. I love the ability to tailor SF2 and its many mods to my personal preferences in this way, and having complete flexibility to shape my new NW Europe terrain adds greatly to my enjoyment of this classic sim. Eventually, I hope to return to the Baltic and to modify published artwork into a high resolution seasonal tileset with which to model the equally classic arena around Leningrad, as the kernel of another reduced scale manual terrain for aerial battles between Finland, Germany and the USSR.

Experimenting with different aircraft types led me to discover a whole new way of enjoying my evolving WW2 terrain. The ungainly Lysander rarely flew in formation, so I cannot enjoy cockpit and external views simultaneously, but I decided instead to see if I could recreate its characteristic hedge-hopping clandestine night missions taking agents and arms to support the French resistance. In my first attempt I could see nothing except my own instruments, but luckily I persevered and changed the date by 2 weeks. SF2 has a wonderfully accurate sky dome, and sure enough, the full moon now gave just enough illumination for me to glimpse fields and trees once my eyes adjusted. I added basic runway lights to the INI file of my grass airfields, and I set up a training mission from Ronaldsway in which I would fly at low level across the island to Jurby, land and take off from the simulated strip prepared by the Maquis (as shown below), and navigate back to base for another night landing. The half hour sortie involved some close calls, but using a combination of my instruments and glimpses of the ground, I managed to return safely. Successfully navigating my route and flying low enough to escape detection without crashing provided ample continuing challenges equivalent to my usual endeavour to maintain close formation, and I look forward to simulating real clandestine missions of this kind as my terrain modelling extends across the Channel into France.

As usual, I have been enjoying short formation flights around the island, while tuning my graphics to strike the best balance between appearance and frame rates. I set Terrain Texture and Ground Object Density to Unlimited, to get the full benefit of Gepard’s high resolution tiles and my numerous TOD objects. Horizon Distance, by contrast, should actually be set to Near for my reduced scale terrain, but I compromise on Normal to stop nearby ground objects fading away too soon. Even at this Horizon setting, I decided to model the closest promontories on the Galloway peninsula, since they appear distinctly in the distance. I set Shadows to Medium, since otherwise ground object shadows pop distractingly on and off. As shown below by the island’s two northern airfields, I have made two generic airfield types using stock SF2 buildings – one with grass runways, and a more developed type using the single tile runway overlay in airfield3.lod. Both look good from above and allow me to taxi back to the hangars after each sortie. Even these single tile airfields are significantly too large for my reduced scale terrain, but at least they are preferable to the multi-tile airfields which are the norm in SF2.

Having successfully modelled part of the main air arena in NW Europe, I decided to construct another island after all. The Isle of Man offered a great test to see if my manual approach could cope with hills 3 times higher than those in Kent, and its isolated location in the middle of the Irish Sea meant that no more terrain would be needed to model the many training sorties flown by the RAF from its wartime bases at Jurby, Ronaldsway and Andreas. As shown below, my new tileset came into its own in capturing the island’s geography far better than with standard SF2 tilesets, despite using only 85 tiles due to the reduced scale of my terrain. Douglas is the only town warranting an urban tile, but I was delighted that I could show the smaller coastal settlements of Ramsey, Peel, Laxey, Onchan, Port Erin and Castletown using port villages on my farmland tiles. As I expected, creating the HFD proved the biggest hurdle, and it took a lot of trial and error before I realised that the most practical solution was to construct a third ‘noise’ template for substantial hills, this time with 4 elevation points raised by 2 steps and a central point raised by 4 steps. Using this generic template, I could easily set the base height of each hill tile as before, and then polish the overall HFD by tweaking selected elevation points to smooth out unduly sharp angles or height differences. The picture below shows one of my first flights over my new terrain, with the Snaefell massif showcasing the uncultivated tiles which I have added to Gepard’s set, and with Douglas Bay and Ronaldsway airport in the distance bringing back memories of my regular childhood summer holidays on the island. I now know that I can model hills of this height if need be (albeit with some extra effort), so my evolving manual terrain is not limited entirely to the most low-lying parts of the European theatre.

I described in my previous thread my experiments in creating a manual terrain for the northern half of the WW2 Eastern Front, to avoid the distortions caused in most published terrains by cartographic asymmetries in the DEM data at these high latitudes. It became increasingly evident that standard SF2 tilesets are a very blunt instrument for modelling real landscapes, and that ditching automatic terrain generation gave me the freedom to create a much more compact and flexible tile layout. I decided to do just this for my spin-off project of a truly reduced scale NW Europe terrain which would avoid the distortions and long E-W flight times of the classic EuroWW2 terrain and of Gepard’s more detailed Battle of Britain tileset. Since my terrain was designed to reduce flight times in my wingman experience missions by eventually squeezing the whole span from Brest to Berlin into a smaller playable area than Gepard used for the span from Brest to Dunkirk, it was vital to have tiles allowing higher resolution modelling than standard tilesets with their gentle stereotypical curves. After careful consideration, I decided to use Gepard’s lovely high res artwork as the basis for my redesigned tileset for my own private use. I confined my interventions to relatively simple graphical adjustments such as lightening water, forest and urban areas, creating my own shorelines, and cutting and pasting Gepard’s elements to construct my own preferred tile mix. I ended up with a compact set of just 54 tiles as shown below. The top row includes my standard single tile airfield and Gepard’s 8 farmland tiles including copses and small villages, which are randomly mixed and rotated using Gerwin’s invaluable TFD editor to form the default background of my terrain. Tiles 10 to 31 add water to these 9 basic tiles, with the key twist that my coastlines now run to the middle of each edge. This allows me to create narrow channels and isthmuses and to complement the standard coasts with ‘bays’ and ‘points’ which touch the middle of other edges, giving greater flexibility in mirroring real coastlines and allowing optional junctions with lakes and rivers or with small island tiles to create larger islands or peninsulas. Tiles 32 to 45 add woods and built-up areas to the basic tiles, with the key refinement that every edge retains the same mix of fields and copses as on Gepard’s farmland tiles, so they may be placed individually or in fully flexible clumps with the edges representing forest clearings or city parks. The bottom row adds a couple of tiles for the chalk cliffs on both sides of the Channel, and a selection of uncultivated tiles adapted from the high res Grass Base tile in Sundowner’s Photo Real UK Terrain, so that hills and moors need not be shown by unbroken woodland. Instead of starting with peripheral islands as in my Eastern Front project, I decided to leap straight to the heart of the WW2 action as shown below by modelling the ‘front line county’ of Kent. My approach of scrolling and zooming Google Maps to complement my Google-based reference map worked well, and my reshaped tileset came into its own in mirroring the intricacies of the north Kent coast and letting woods and towns appear correctly despite the much reduced scale of my terrain. I have included the 3 forward airfields of Manston, Hawkinge and Lympne, as well as the Coastal Command fields at Eastchurch and Detling. Although Kent is only a tiny percentage of the entire playable area, the ease of modelling the Channel itself means that it is already possible for me to fly intercept sorties from Manston. Filling out East Sussex and the Pas de Calais in similar fashion will allow me to model plenty of short range Axis or Allied missions from 1940 to 1944, as I seek to recapture with updated graphics some of the fun I had with European Air War nearly 3 decades ago. As Gepard said in my previous thread, it would be impossibly tedious to adjust 16 elevation points per tile manually, even if the data were to hand. However, as shown below I have now refined my more practical approach of raising entire tiles using Gerwin’s editor, by first copying and pasting generic ‘noise’ into all tiles not representing flat marshland. I add 2 raised points for rolling farmland, or 4 raised points for hills. I use unusually large height steps of 39 metres each, so in the low northern European plains to which my manual approach is most suited, I need only to select one of a few different underlying heights for each tile, based on the zoomable elevation maps available at https://en-us.topographic-map.com/. After careful experimentation, I now understand the intriguingly asymmetric procedures which SF2 uses to generate slopes, so I can make selective interventions around coasts, rivers or airfields or to smooth the course of steep slopes like the North Downs escarpment below. My generic noise masks the orthogonal nature of my smaller height variations, and makes treetop flights over my terrain a truly immersive and exhilarating affair. I still do not fully understand the tangled nuances of TOD objects, but after an extensive search I found a compatible set of tree and building TODs in ShrikeHawk’s Continuation War conversion which I could adapt for my purposes. I halved the height of the tree clumps to give a more realistic sense of speed, and I darkened the buildings to blend with Gepard’s tiles and reflect soot-blackened 1940s Europe. I employ only a tiny variety of these small TOD objects, but through assiduous use of Moe’s TOD editor I have keyed them fully to Gepard’s lovely tile artwork in such large numbers that I often reach the 10,000 vertex limit per tile (for instance when combining the low square blocks to represent warehouses and the like). I have already logged many hours in my trusty Hurricane to check and simply enjoy my evolving terrain, and the picture below shows me overflying the iconic Dover cliffs with the rolling Kent hills in the distance. I do not even try to match the huge variety of unique tiles and objects created by Gepard and others. My focus lies instead on combining the best basic elements from their work to create a simple, immersive and graphically striking generic terrain system which fits with my own idiosyncratic preferences and which I may extend gradually to cover other areas of NW Europe as time allows.

Much of the fun I have with SF2 stems from the sheer joy of vicarious exploration and virtual formation flight in classic warplanes. The picture below shows me struggling to follow my leader’s manoeuvring I-16 through the clouds above the NW tip of Saaremaa, while the morning sun sparkles on the bays and lakes below. I also love how radically this theatre changes across the seasons, as I saw myself when I visited Helsinki, Tallinn and Narva a few winters ago. My terrain will eventually allow me to model the summer battles which took place on the Finnish front in 1941 and 1944, as well as bringing the frozen world of Baltika’s North Cape terrain down to classic winter battlegrounds like Schlisselburg, Demyansk, Velikie Luki and Moscow.

As shown below, I have now completed the Estonian islands as the first step in (very) gradually filling out the playable area of my manual Eastern Front terrain. Using Google maps alongside a square window for Gerwin’s editor worked well, with a blurrier map based on the same Google data underneath the tilemap for direct reference. The detailed Google map helps in modelling small lakes and islands, and its satellite view is invaluable in identifying the minority of named settlements which actually deserve a town or village tile, but for forests I found it easiest to scatter forest tiles (as seen below on Hiiumaa) in those areas marked as heavily wooded on the zoomed out Google map. Two improvements since my Gotland trial have made a big difference – I used my hard-won TGA editing experience to double the number but halve the height of the overscale 2D trees, and I raised most non-coastal tiles one step before adding specific relief on top. This makes low level flight exhilirating thanks to the far better sense of speed and natural contours. Henry de Zeng’s website details several primitive airfields on the islands in 1941. That shown at Monnuste was used by Soviet bombers as a forward base for retaliating against East Prussia after the mainland airfields had been overrun, and this attracted several raids by the Luftwaffe. (Primitive grass strips like these may be rotated by retaining a small runway as the first object in the airfield’s targets.ini entry, but commenting out the runway’s Modelname in the types.ini so it does not appear in the sim.) I already have enough completed terrain to host several interesting combat missions, including Soviet interception of German bombers flying in from Kuusiku south of Tallinn or Luftwaffe close support missions from a captured forward strip such as Monnuste during the 2 week battle for the narrow Sorve peninsula or the follow-up invasion of Hiuumaa. I may go on to model more of Estonia, or I may leap first to another vignette such as the Continuation War pocket battle at Sortavala north of Lake Ladoga in July-August 1941. Either way, my approach of gradually filling out my terrain while enjoying atmospheric historical wingman missions along the way is working gratifyingly well so far.

Many thanks. My terrain projects are currently veering away from small but detailed full scale vignettes like Gotland, and towards reduced scale terrains which will make recreation of longer range missions more practical within my real time approach. As I said, I have taken advantage of my shift to Google maps by extending the scope of my Eastern Front terrain south to Warsaw and east to Moscow, while retaining the standard 1000 km pattern. For a possible follow-up project on the similarly low lying region of NW Europe I have gone even further, creating a Google reference map whose nominally 800 km wide playable area stretches from Brest to Berlin and from St Nazaire to Kristiansand. This will allow much less protracted sorties than on the standard EuroWW2 terrain, whose 1500 km dimensions mean that it is actually full scale along the E-W axis (just like the Norway terrain). The corollary is, of course, that my tilemap will have a much lower resolution, but this has the significant benefit that it makes it more practical for me to create each successive stage of the terrain, starting with short cross-Channel hops and building towards 8th Air Force raids on the Biscay U-boat bases and on Germany itself. First, I will hone my approach on the Baltic, which is looking a bit less intimidating thanks to its own intermediate scale reduction.

Yes, the fun (and learning experience) lie at least as much in the terrain creation itself as in the resulting sorties. Although I have barely scratched the surface of the huge range of missions which can be flown across the many published terrains, it is satisfying to do it oneself for a change. As I said, I won't be able to post my own effort, and my aim in this thread was rather to inspire others to tweak terrains for personal use if desired, to create their own preferred 'sandbox' using the wonderful flexibility of SF2.