baffmeister

I started working on this fictional terrain about three years ago. The first year was spent just finding a location I liked. Got quite a bit of practice autotiling during that period. The Big Project is actually a new fictional terrain for Dhimar, Paran, Dohar and Sharnak but it is going to take so long to make it seems like a good idea to try and get a simplified "Return to Dhimar" terrain out this year. It won't have the road network, dried up riverbeds, oasis's[?], small towns, mine sites, multiple city center tiles, the odd lake, multiple port tiles, new high density building tod's, a meteor crater etc-etc-etc that I plan for the final version. What it will have is more terrain tiles than ThirdWires desert terrain has and a lot more transition tiles. It is based on ThirdWires desert terrain though and uses some of the stock tiles so it will require SF-1 or SF-2. With this thread I will have a place to ask questions and get some ideas. Starting to get the hang of the terrain editor but now I find my tile painting skills are horrific so there will probably be a lot of questions on that topic. In the photo many of you will probably recognize some of Deuces' Madagascar tiles. They have been run through a photo editor to match the TW colour palette better. Lifting textures, copy and paste, and photo editors is probably the way I have to go. Cheers.

The drop tank situation for the Hunters is hard to figure out, especially using the internet. I have seen some sources claim the 230 gallon tanks can not be jettisoned in flight. Using 100gal only tanks on the Mk-6 seems to be the general agreement although British aircraft seemed to be in a constant state of modification at the time so it's hard to say with any certainty what was going on.

For anyone wondering, here is a brief description [not the one I remember] of the TE tool bar function explained by Dueces: Lexx_Luthor, on Jun 9 2005, 11:05 PM, said: The small square tool buttons on upper left of TE -- are those specific functions not covered in the drop down menus? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yea they are. The pencil tool will place a single tile on the map(whichever is displayed in the drop down window). The rotate tool will rotate any tile clicked by 90deg CW. The eyedropper tool when selected and clicked on a tile in the map will display that tile type in the drop down. The bucket will fill with the tile type shown in the drop down. Be extremely careful with this tool. It can fill areas you had not intended to fill. I find the best way to use this tool is to outline the area I want to fill with the tile type, make sure there are no gaps, then fill inside. Lastly the drop down shows all tiles you have built in your texturelist.

I just did a quick review of the terrain editor sticky as well as all the terrain editor lessons and noticed lots of references to manual tiling or hand tiling but not one explanation describing how to actually do it!

The thread I recall reading described in great detail the operation of the tool bar as it pertains to placing a tile. Before reading that thread, I had absolutely no idea what the tool bar was even used for! Making terrains is coming close to being my Waterloo moment but then, just in time, a modest success keeps me going. So thanks to Wrench, Gepard, and anyone else who can describe the intricate and weird operation of the terrain editor. Quote Wrench: and, did yo still need advice/help in placing a tile?? Nope! Remembered the lesson.

Somewhere out there is a really good explanation for placing individual terrain tiles. I think it may have been written a long time ago but it was so good I actually remembered a lot of it so was able to finally place an individual tile with the terrain editor. I don't see the explanation in the knowledge base but it should be in there! Anyway, it was probably written by Wrench so "Thanks Wrench!" for that and all your other terrain editor comments. I think a lot of your comments could be compiled into a downloadable "Wrench's Terrain Editor Tips" document. The amount of patience you have explaining terrain editor stuff is "Above and Beyond".

Kind of hard to judge the position of airports on the GermanyCE map compared to a real map. Laarbruch looks like it could be located at Weeze or Uden/Volkel, it is hard to tell. In an atlas I do find a town called Bruggen in Germany though, about 55KM west of Dusseldorf so you are probably confusing Brugge with Bruggen.

Got it! One lonely green tile placed manually at the Leeuwarden Airbase. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what I did differently. I'm never quite sure how the terrain editor saves files but this time I put the TFD and HFD files in the same folder as the texture list and tileset and it seems to have worked. There may have been a good TFD file in there all the time but not sure. Done for tonight.

Wrench, I got the airfield area flattened OK but can't seem to get my manually placed grass tiles to show up in game. After hitting save all I put the TFD and HFD into the terrain folder and the grass tiles don't show up in game. I put the very same TFD and HFD tiles back into the terrain editor and they show up fine. Any ideas? This is the first time I have tried to place tiles manually so thought this would be good practice before attempting it on my own terrain build. Getting near hair pulling time in 3-2-1-

You would have to level the area you wish to place the airports. It is possible to level areas in the stock terrains using the terrain editor but that piece of software requires a lot of patience. I just leveled some areas and updated the Desert Plus terrain so if you like, just pass along the coordinates for the new Dutch airfields and I will try to level the areas. To get the coordinates, just fly over the areas you want the airports placed, go to the map view and write down the map coordinates, east/west then north south. The quicker the better, it doesn't take me long to forget how the terrain editor works! Not aware of any "X" shaped airports so you may be stuck with the large Third Wire airfield. Also, depending on the tiles in the area, it may not be possible to use the exact position. Cheers.

Did some testing placing flat lods with bit maps over top of a runway and it appears to be a no go. TGA's may be another matter. Some strange behavior with the bit maps. If I placed a flat lod with bit map on the runway and my aircraft was on the runway [ or close by I presume] the bit map would not show through the runway bit map although you could see the piece of the bit map that wasn't covered by the runway. The strange part is, if I entered the game with my airplane at a different airport and then used the free camera view to go to the test airport, the extra lod with bit map was clearly visible showing over top of the runway! I can only assume there is some kind of visual priority thing going on with the game engine but I know nothing regarding that topic. Next I went looking for a flat lod with a TGA to test but couldn't find one in the parts bin so to test the reaction with a TGA over the runway bit map I just placed the small airfield 3 across the runway and "voila" the small airfield TGA covered the runway bit map no problem. Didn't see any flickering either. If any modellers are interested in putting together a smallish flat lod with a TGA so I can do further testing please let me know. I think it may be possible with the right sized lod and TGA to just cover over the existing runway numbers with the correct ones if an airfield is rotated to a new heading. Cheers.

Never thought of it as intended but maybe TK thinks some over performance on take off is required to insure all the aircraft get airborne safely? If that's the case finding a fix may be a bit tricky.

I don't see a quick fix happening for this bird. After making some adjustments I am seeing other issues cropping up with no easy solution in site. Will try the Meteor transplant at some point in the future and see what I can do.

To clarify my question a bit, for manual placement of runway numbers I am assuming it would require 36 separate lods each with it's own TGA. Would there be issues placing the new lod's over the existing runway lod's? Things like flickering images etc. Would the lod have to be a bit thicker than the existing runway lod in order for the TGA to show up? These are the kinds of issues I am wondering about.

The drm signs do change with airport rotation, last time I looked. For runway numbers, my idea would require the manual placement of TGA's at the appropriate end of the runway. Once the positioning information was figured out it would be relatively easy to add a couple of new objects into the airports target area.

I started working on a customized runway and the SF-2 center line not lining up at some spots raised it's ugly head. Of course I became totally side tracked with the issue but do have a fix I'm working on. The original center line used an odd number of pixels so when some of the bit maps get rotated for some of the runways the pixels don't line up. The fix is to widen the center line by one pixel in the correct direction. After a couple of hours of microscopic copy and paste with Gimp the results look good but I still have a bit of clean up to do in a tricky area. [ had to move one of the taxi lead in lines by one pixel.] I will probably post the fix at some point but will wait to see if TK responds to a post I made at the ThirdWire forum. The main reason for this post is regarding the runway number bit maps. It would be nice if it were possible to put the appropriate runway number on a runway when it's not aligned north/south. My idea is to remove the 18 / 36 numbers from the default bit maps and then overlay it with a TGA of the appropriate number. It would require 36 TGA's to cover the 10 degree increments used in real life. First question, Is it possible? Second question, does any one have time to work on it? I don't have a clue how the model/TGA stuff works.

Have to agree to some extent but I have had more success addressing landing issues compared to take off issues. Regarding the Seahawk, after doing a quick review of the data.ini I suspect some of my adjustments were just covering up for some other issues from the original FM. I think too much lift and an unrealistic stalling angle are probably contributing to the high departure angle on take off. Having said that, if I edit the data.ini to what I think is reasonable, it will probably mess up the aircraft carrier landings so I could get into a circular problem very quickly. If I were doing this FM from scratch I would probably just plug in ThirdWires Meteor data.ini and work from there. For now I think I will work with the existing ini and see what can be done. I have made some quick edits and the behavior is much improved. Interestingly, when I reduced the overall lift I was able to remove some of my previous edits that were compensating for same. Anyway, I may have learned a few things in the last couple of years so will see if a quick fix is possible. Cheers.

Thanks C5. I will check that and a few other things soon. I may upload a quick beta tester on this thread if things work out. Wilches, it can be difficult adjusting take off behavior using AI entries. Some entries are only used used after the aircraft has passed certain way points. As an example, this entry MaxPitchForAltitude=xxx doesn't seem to do anything during the take off and initial climb but starts being used as the aircraft gets further from the take off point. [not sure at what point though.] Likewise, and more obvious, the entry LandingPitchForSpeed=xxx doesnt come into play until the aircraft crosses waypoint 8. All I can suggest is to start with a fresh AI table in the aircraft data ini and commence the experiments.

The Seahawk FM I did climbs quite steeply as well. Knowing now what I didn't know then, which still isn't much, I see some things in the FM that could be improved. Trying to get the AI to do a nice take off and climb out is one of the most frustrating things about this game. That and the terrain editor.

I extracted it from ObjectData001 in SF-2. And I should have called it AIRCRAFTAIDATA.INI [corrected now.]

Wrench, The MISSIONCONTROL.INI can be used to adjust the altitudes the game will assign for various missions, but for low level stuff the AIRCRAFTAIDATA.INI should be adjusted as well, to reduce accidents. It is interesting to adjust the mission altitudes though, I have an old jets install that's set up for High/Low/High missions giving lots of MiG-15, Sabre, Hunter engagements at 30,000+Ft. [The engagements end up at lower levels quite quickly, just like RL.]

For SF-2 the AI data has been separated from the AIRCRAFTOBJECT.ini so there is now a separate AIRCRAFTAIDATA.INI. You can modify the game on a global basis by editing the AIRCRAFTAIDATA.INI and placing it in the OBJECTS folder. TO improve formation behavior at low altitude you can edit the Safe Altitude as per this example: [DogfightNovice] SafeAltitude=60//500 To get the AI to fly lower when in low level formation LookoutAngle=90 DefensiveAngle=60 ChanceDefensiveTurn=0 ChanceBreakTurn=10 ChanceHardTurn=50 ChanceTurnDirection=25 ChanceContinue=100 ChanceCheckNewTarget=5 ChanceUseVertical=0 FightWithoutAmmo=0 CannonFireAngle=2.5 RQIRMFireAngle=5.0 ASIRMFireAngle=10.0 RHMFireAngle=5.0 MaxPitchInput=0.6..........................Watch this number, you may want to increase it to avoid AI crashes MissileDetectChance=10 MaxCannonRange=3500 OptimalCannonRange=1000 MinCannonRange=500 MaxRollForGunAttack=45 CannonBurstLengthShort=1.0 CannonBurstLengthLong=1.5 MaxRudderForGunAttack=0.5 MaxRudderForManeuver=0.7 [DogfightGreen] SafeAltitude=60//400 LookoutAngle=120 DefensiveAngle=90 ChanceDefensiveTurn=0 ChanceBreakTurn=40 ChanceHardTurn=100 ChanceTurnDirection=50 ChanceContinue=100 ChanceCheckNewTarget=10 ChanceUseVertical=0 FightWithoutAmmo=0 CannonFireAngle=2.0 RQIRMFireAngle=7.0 ASIRMFireAngle=7.0 RHMFireAngle=10.0 MaxPitchInput=0.8 MissileDetectChance=40 MaxCannonRange=3000 OptimalCannonRange=800 MinCannonRange=250 MaxRollForGunAttack=60 CannonBurstLengthShort=1.0 CannonBurstLengthLong=1.5 MaxRudderForGunAttack=0.8 MaxRudderForManeuver=0.9 Here is the AIRCRAFTAIDATA.ini with some tweaks for low level. It is one I have been messing with and is by no means optimal:AIRCRAFTAIDATA.rar Just drop it into the OBJECTS folder. Something to keep in mind during low level formation, the AI will try and stay with you so will take evasive action when you do. This can lead to AI crashes if you get too carried away. More crashes are probably inevitable, however.

Unexpected problem! When using a runway 18 departure the player aircraft will point in the correct direction but the AI aircraft continue to point north, but from the correct positions. Must be some hard coding going on. For Desert TZ I'm just going to set them up with the runway 36 departure and the wing man on the left.

Thanks guys, will try to make it work with lead on the far side of the runway by choosing the appropriate take off direction. [one way runways]

Tinkering with EzLead's staggered take off mod and noticed the wing man has to cross behind the lead aircraft to get into formation so was wondering, is there a military protocol that specifies which side of the runway the lead aircraft should be on during formation take offs? All I could find on the internet was the lead aircraft should be on the left hand side for left hand turn outs and on the right hand side for right hand turn outs. Great mod and the icing on the cake for Desert Target Zone!