Menrva

Unless someone in the terrain modding department comes up with an idea on how to overcome the issue explained in the previous post, I guess I will have to halt development. Such a pity, but there's no point in proceeding if I cannot produce things as they are meant to be. Unless there's some desire from users to have uninteresting terrains with almost flat canyons and craters.

Right when TK is trying to fund an update, I uncover other "bugs" or limits, so to speak, of the terrain engine. It seems that the Overcast and Inclement cloud layer's height is hard coded, and on terrains with extreme elevation changes, the cloud layers directly spawn below the terrain, creating an horrible game-breaking bug. That shot was taken on my Mars terrain. The aircraft is sitting on an airbase at an altitude of around 7000. You can see the bug, below there's a repainted cloud layer (Overcast and Inclement are meant to represent dust storms on the planet). The terrain is not rendered at all, because it's as if I was above the cloud layer already. The minimum heightmap's height is around 1000. For testing purposes, I added a square at height 0 (meaning sea level); as a side effect, the cloud layer spawned even more below. This means that the cloud layer's height is locked and dependent on the minimum height of the terrain. To put it short, it's impossible to have a terrain with such extreme, interesting elevation changes, without triggering this bug on those weather conditions. The only way to fix it is to reduce elevation changes by a lot, and I have to say goodbye to the beautiful canyons. An awesome idea being strongly limited by a stupid, hard-coded thing. PS: I even tried some fancy tweaks, like adding a big ZBufferOffset to the CloudLayerMaterial. It doesn't work, of course.

The Angola terrain contains various bugs, target area wise, referencing missing objects and having sequencing errors. I can't tell if it's the campaigns, because many crashes are sometimes due to the terrain. I plan to fix it in the future, while remaking the heightmap and tiling from scratch. Thinking about it, the GroundFormation.DLL should have to do with the formation of ground units during air-to-ground missions. Most likely the campaign .ini files reference a wrong/missing GroundObject.

Other shots of the Moon terrain. The environment system has been tweaked to allow for stars to appear even during daylight hours. Unfortunately, the stars are the same as seen from Earth, and a day lasts 24 hours as if it was Planet Earth. At least the gravity is correct. And "here" we have blue-ish sunsets... orange skies... hmm...

In response to dsawan's thread (https://combatace.com/forums/topic/93782-moon-scenery/), I decided to create a realistic Moon scenery. I will use this thread to remind myself that I have one in the making, LOL. Jokes aside, I have encountered various limitations of the game engine in regards to the environmentsystem.ini file, but hopefully I will solve everything. I wish guys like @Stary were still around, their knowledge would be of help. Gravity and Inclination Angle are that of the Moon. Earth phases have been created as well. The terrain features a high quality 250m heightmap of an area between Mare Crisium and Mare Smythii. Right now, I am using some repainted objects as stand-in Space AAA guns and SAMs. I also modified two fictional aircraft available here (KF-2 and KF-1) to be used for this scenario. The scenario pits a joint alliance (United States Space Force, Russian Space Forces and People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Forces) against a fictional Settlement Defense Front, in the years 2038-2048. Those interested are invited to contribute with fictional yet "realistic" objects of a future Moon settlement, as well as new aircraft designs (IIRC X-Plane had some study aircraft designs for flight on Mars).

Challenge accepted, people! Hope you don't mind about the F-22 being used. It's all a proof of concept, but it's very promising. A new environmentsystem.ini is being worked on (hence the colors are off), with correct inclination and gravity values (it makes up for some fun physics). The terrain will only feature a small, real scale portion of the Moon, namely an area between Mare Crisium and Mare Smythii (full of interesting craters), stock SF2 terrain size of 1000km.

I had thought about doing one, and I have some ways on how to do it. It will probably be a thing in the future.

Spinners, I do not recall the Mirage F1 being worked on here soon after TK planned Expansion 3. IIIRC it took a while before the community made a new Mirage F1 model. It's not the timing that was harsh on TK, rather bad development decisions on SF2NA (the new terrain engine didn't work as intended), game breaking bugs on SF2NA release and the constant issue of pirate sites meant that TK didn't gain as much as he deserved during the years. As far as I know, some .ini tweaks that used to work on old SF2 patch levels no longer work, not to mention player missiles being more powerful than AI ones and other issues that were introduced rather than fixed, because TK decided to do things his own way, without listening to the modding community. Is that fair on a modding community that has long supported him? I'm just playing devil's advocate.

Agree to disagree. First of all, those 3d models are bad, they do not match SF2 quality standards in any way, have no cockpits, are low poly and do not have transparent canopy glass as it should be in reality. I do not understand all the people asking TK for more content, at the funding page. Either they do not understand what the funding is all about or I don't know what, really. We have so many high quality mods here that cover so many world scenarios. Some of you may remember that there was an Expansion No. 3 planned by TK, about the Mirage F1. It didn't materialize, yet in turn we got amazingly detailed Mirage F1 models by the community here, for free. As yakarov79 said, we modders can handle the content part; we may almost feel offended if so many ask TK for more content; I mean, what have we been doing all these years here at CA? Many of us here have continuously provided new stuff, the lifeblood and backbone of SF2. On my part I think I have released some decent quality terrains and miscellaneous mods and I have others on the way, all for free.

I am not sure about updating the game to DirectX 12, though. That means it will most likely drop support for DirectX 9 and 10, and it's just what my video card is capable of. With the game using DirectX 12, I wouldn't even be able to start it. I know that I need to upgrade (if only I could afford it now), but at the same time I hope he will always keep the DirectX 9 and 10 as an option for those with weaker GPUs. The game works good enough on Windows 10 as it is. I'd rather spend the funding on fixing broken AI behaviour with guided bombs, external dispensers, and probably re-add those features he originally had envisioned since SF1, ramp starts, and more complete radio chatter.

I tried to upscale using ESRGAN, but it doesn't seem to work well with these kinds of textures. I wish I could afford AI Gigapixel, which is not freeware as ESRGAN but it's said to be better. Nonetheless, I tried to do a very quick repaint of the deck, to better portray the Kutzetsov in its operational years. The original one should have been used until 1995, I have read somewhere. It was done in a rush, so it certainly could be done better.

You'd better join forces with Gepard, since he's adding skin decals as well. If I have time, I might try to use the ESRGAN AI to better increase resolution of the deck's texture as I have found the original, smaller texture, not the blurry one included in the uploaded package. Also, don't forget the Clemenceau we've been working on ;)

The number should be changed, I think. 113 was used before it was fully operational with aircraft onboard ready to be launched. When it became fully operational, it received the 063 number.

Glad to be of help! There was no need to fiddle with the old terrain, that one was utterly broken under various aspects.

Can anyone highlight/make sticky 1 of the 237 threads that have been opened about the issue?

@Richo No offense, but have you read my posts? You do not need to flatten anything, if you download the latest version of the terrain the HFD and TFD files have been fixed already for that airfield and various others.

Ditto that. I've said this countless times, by putting the effects to Unlimited, the game uses what appears to be some badly made DirectX 10 shaders. Putting them to high, most of the game uses DirectX 9 libraries.

In addition to what Erik said; when you're looking at a file uploaded by one modder, you can also click on "Find their other files".

Most likely those 568 are mostly subvariants with different skins and armaments. As I have seen in some videos of Modern Combat, there were for instance separate Eurofighters for Germany, Italy, UK etc. Same plane with a different skin shown as a new one in the menu screen, so to speak. Those mobile games use the Unity engine, which is perfect when it comes to small, quick games for mobile and PC. The models lack a transparent canopy glass and the number of polys (which is fine for a mobile game) seems low when compared to that of stock SF2 planes. It isn't worth to port those into SF2 anyway, unless they could be easily reworked, IMHO. The clouds' rendering instead, I could use some of that! But it's a totally different engine...

AFAIK that YAP add-on is for WOV, hence why it's worse than usual, they did not use your re-release for SF2, but an older version of the terrain, I guess. Still, this does not make them less guilty. As you said, for users it's better to download and use what CombatACE has to offer. It's greater quality stuff, for free! About the _HM bitmaps, I am of the opinion that it's way better not to use them at all, given that the heightmap is properly done that is. In my 250m resolution heightmaps, I am extra careful about flattening sea areas, coastlines and airbases. Without _HM bitmaps, the terrain is all in its HFD glory, so to speak.

I repeat it once again: that is NOT Wrench's terrain, it was made by me from scratch! And it's a very old version, please download this one: https://combatace.com/files/file/16395-iraq-western-asia-1980-2003/ It's the same terrain, a much bug fixed version, all airbases are properly flattened, and it's overall better (more target areas, greater quality of the heightmap, etc.). In it Iran and other countries (but Iraq) are Friendly. You won't have to touch it as it's fine on its own. You can always set Neutral countries for campaigns, without touching the terrain files.

Yeah, I noticed it. What a shame on their part, much despicable. At least they could have bothered to ask for permission, nada instead.

I just noticed from your attached image, you are using an outdated version of my terrain, included in an old mod by Spudknocker. You'd better re-download the terrain package I linked above, that one has a lot of issues fixed. It can be changed in campaigns by setting the terrain's coordinates (those can be read from TFDtool) of the fleet, inside the campaign _data.ini file. For single missions, it's mostly random, it depends mostly on a _water bitmap file. I set NavalMap=FALSE because my terrain is not Real World size but is 60% or so just like stock SF2 terrains, and you always get fleets spawn over land as there is not enough room for water. You have better chances to have fleets spawn in water during single missions in Gepard's terrain, by editing the water bitmap (just have a look at the stock IcelandNA _water bitmap). My suggestion; do not touch terrain files at all, leave those as they are (there's a reason if we terrain modders disable certain features, like Naval Map statements). You can obtain what you want by creating a Naval Campaign instead, just like the one of SF2NA. Inside the campaign _data.ini there's a parameter you can change for the position of the fleet, IIRC. If you will use the latest terrain package I released, beware that Spudknocker's campaigns won't work with it. Most target areas have different names, and there's a lot of other changes here and there for the better. You're on your own as for editing such campaigns. https://combatace.com/forums/topic/68667-alternate-tfd-terrain-tilemap-editorviewer/

They re-used the Persian Gulf terrain by Gepard (AFAIK, the re-release by Wrench is much better). The bug showed by Richo has nothing to do with the HFD, it's caused by wrong TFD tag values of the tiles; it can be fixed easily for all airfields by TFDtool, thanks to a feature I had requested to gerwin time ago. TW's Terrain Editor flattens airports horribly by creating huge circular flat shapes on the HFD. Nowadays, gerwin's TFDtool is much more accurate at doing the job, it would be a waste not to use it. It's also quicker to use than the TE. TW's Terrain Editor is only useful for creating the HFD and an autotiled TFD, nothing more. As said previously, the original terrain was made by Gepard, so credits go to him. If you're talking about this Iraq-Iran terrain instead (https://combatace.com/files/file/16395-iraq-western-asia-1980-2003/) I made this from scratch.