Terrain Editor and HFD

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

I can't see Major Lee's Italy/Yugoslavia HFD file loading into Terrain Editor. I installed the HFD into the same folder as the TE; I "File-Open" the HFD, and I see a blank white screen, and the (x,y) mouse coordinates are frozen at (0,599.99). I followed the instructions below.

 

Major Lee::

Let's begin by installing the ThirdWire Terrain Editor. To do this, download and unzip the contents into the default folder path noted in the zip file (C:\TerrainEditor). Notice that the two DLL files go into a sub-folder called "system". Next, place any existing HFD file into the TerrainEditor folder. To make operation easier, browse to the TerrainEditor.exe file and place a short cut onto your desktop. Open the TerrainEditor program. On the TE tool bar, click on "File" > "Open", then select any HFD file. Note the operation of the "Zoom" feature and the information displayed in the lower right hand corner of the Status Bar. Notice that the XY co-ordinates change as you move your cursor. This system uses "X" as the horizontal axis and "Y" as the vertical axis. Note that altitude for any point is displayed in meters above sea level. "1" in the TE view is equal to one kilometer. Each number is displayed to three decimal places, denoting a positioning down to one meter. If you have opened the Italy HFD, you will notice that it is 600 kilometers square if you observe the TE status bar as you move your cursor to the upper right side of the Height Field View.

 

http://www.majorleesaerodrome.net/

Anybody here know what I may be doing wrong, or had similar experiences when starting out with TE? This is the first time in SF that I have gotten myself stuck and can't get myself out.

Thanks~

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

aha I got it...mmm I think. I found a prototype Korea folder with HFD map I had downloaded, and its working in TE.

 

Thanks~

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Okay, each terrain folder has an HFD file, and they all work well in TE. You must zoom out and engage View ~ Height Field and you see the familiar looking map. For some reason, the Italy/Yugoslavia tutorial map does not work in the TE. I got stuck there for a while.

[+Deuces 0]

Lex-All hfd files should work fine in the TE since hfd's are created by the TE. For you to actually see terrain, you need a few things. You need the texturelist.ini for that particular terrain. If the terrain was created with default textures from SF you can use the standard list. If you don't have that I can provide you with it. If the terrain has custom types and tiles in it, you will need the creators list. Another thing you will need is all of the tiles in your TE folder to populate the map. They need to be in bmp format. All tgas(sea and shore) tiles need to be in bmp format.

You will know if you have the a good list when you launch the editor. You should see a progress bar first as it reads the list before the editor actually opens. If all this goes well then you should be able to select EDIT-Autotile and you will see the terrain. You can then select EDIT-Transitional tiles and the shores and trans tiles will appear.

Hope this helps get you started-I'll check in here and see how it goes for you...we need all the terrain guys we can get...

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Thanks. I will take that information and begin some Experiments.

 

The small square tool buttons on upper left of TE -- are those specific functions not covered in the drop down menus?

[+Deuces 0]

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.

Edited June 10, 2005 by Deuces

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Thanks Deuces. I am trying some stuff from your posts, and having very limited success so far, but some success nevertheless. I need to spend more time on it. I'll be back.

 

Question:: The EAWeuro map area is 1500km wide, and AI aircraft follow waypoints in the exteneded area okay. The Euro landmass mapped out is smaller of course. Are there any limits to SF map sizes? From reading the simhq map threads, I know maps must be square, and possibly multiples of the Default 1000km.

 

Also, what is the "real" SF map scale. I am confused at the posts I have seen about this.

 

Thanx~

[+Deuces 0]

The default SF scale, I believe is, right about 60%...could be 67%

I believe the EAWeuro map was created through some creative hex editing by Kieth Bedford and FNG2K...but don't quote me. You can get full scale terrain but a problem arises in texture clipping that can be fix with some edits to the flightengine.ini.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Thanks. What I am hoping I can do is a "small" 2000+km section near the North Pole, on the Soviet side (maybe later a Canada side). Its a big place.

 

Small section of this ~~> http://www.rb-29.net/HTML/77ColdWarStory/02.03rcnbgn.htm

 

Just for starting out, I have thought of 4 terrain types to reduce complexity. It does not need fancy terrain tiles, and I personally don't really need any cities, roads, and rivers.

 

(1) Mountain

(2) Snow/Tundra (depending on season) ..

(3) Sea/Sea+Ice (depending on season)

(4) Forest ... I have fallen hopelessly in ~love~ with the Korea map forest texture.

 

:

When I have started certain "art" projects in the past, I told myself I don't need to get Fancy, but I end up not being satisified and making more.

:

(5) possible Ice Burgs...that would be sweet. If I can restrict Ice Burgs to be bounded only by Sea or Sea+Ice and no other terrain types, that would simplify things I guess.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

I am lost.

 

I think I need that standard texture.ini list. I thought it may be in the desert.cat but its not. Maybe I should start out experimenting with the Default SF map. I got the TE to tile the DBS map with one tile type. The texture list I modified but only "sea" showed in the TE.

[+Deuces 0]

I am lost.

 

I think I need that standard texture.ini list. I thought it may be in the desert.cat but its not. Maybe I should start out experimenting with the Default SF map. I got the TE to tile the DBS map with one tile type. The texture list I modified but only "sea" showed in the TE.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

It's definitely a good idea to start with the stock terrain to get an idea on how the TE works and all it's quirks. Here's the texturelist for the default desert terrain FILE HERE

 

Have a look at it in the editor. Look at the types and tiles and see how they are referenced. It will help greatly.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Thanks. I'm on it.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

And, I got it I think

 

I changed the DESERT water terrain tga's to bmp's, Auto textured including transitions, and for good measure Rotated the new map 90 degrees. Put the new TFD file it into my SF DESERT folder and flew a mission over a terrain-rotated map. It functioned.

 

Thanks Deuce. I have much to experiment with now.

 

Where do you get those new HFD files?

[+Deuces 0]

Where do you get those new HFD files?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Well the hfd's are created by the editor, if it's elevation data for new maps, you will need DEM data that is free to d/l.

You can get that HERE

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

I GOT em.

 

This is what I longed for ~~> http://edcdaac.usgs.gov/gtopo30/e060n90.asp

 

The long horizontal island off the upper left coastline is "Novaya Zemlya" where much Soviet nuke testing was done. Much Cold War overflights or boundary flights off that one.

 

I got the DEM file, but using WinRar I did not see the message that website posted above talks about...

If you are using WinZip to uncompress this file, please turn off (uncheck) the TAR File Smart conversion found under Options / Configuration (then under Misc. if using Winzip 8.0).

So, I just extracted and saw the DEM file among others.

 

Now, how to get this into Terrain Editor and how much of it? The DEM is about 2500km left to right. I have no idea how to proceed here, but will continue to experiment. Thanks.

 

I would love to use all 2500km...

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

 

 

Ouch, I am *thinking* now. This is very far north. DEM data is in polar coordinates, but stretched to be pictured as a rectangle on the website. In rectangular coordinates, the map would really look like a section of cone, wide at the bottom edge and narrow at top edge. I am guessing the maximum possible size for a square TE map would be the minimum top width -- about 1000km in this case judging by an old USSR map. I have read that TE maps must be square, so I am looking at a 1000km square map. Although, I could start at a somewhate lower latitude which would offer a larger distance across the top edge of the DEM map.

 

....worse, the polar DEM map confused me, and I looked at my USSR map wrong. Its nowhere near 2500km like I thought. :black eye:

 

 

Some good reading about rivers at ThirdWire...

 

TK to fng2k::

Like Wolf mentioned, the distance gets fuzzy as you move away from equator... and your 111km per deg assumes Earth being pefectly sphere and not ellipsoid or more properly, geoid... and terrain editor does round off the coordinate you enter to find the nearest data point, so that's not 100% accurate either... etc. etc. If its waaay off, then thats one thing, but if its not...

:

:

:

fng2k:: I did a test map of Scandinavia using EAW tiles last week, and Norway looks fairly good! I still need to tweak the autotiling parameters a bit though. I've decided that that is more of an art than a science.....

:

 

 

(page 2) ~~> http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p...=terrain+editor 

Edited June 21, 2005 by Lexx_Luthor

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

This thing goes all the way to the North Pole. ... there should be Zero linear distance across the top of the GTOPO30 map here, I think.

 

fng2k tiled a Scandinavian map, apparently from the same block of GTOPO30 lattitude, and it seemed to work somewhat.

 

I found the Import DEM in the TE menu under EDIT, but its disabled unless I first "File Open" the DEM, then I can do the Import. I setup the 89N and 60E in the Terrain Editor text file, and the Import dialogue box comes up showing these numbers. There I am stuck again.

 

 

 

What to do with the DEM to convert it to a HFD?

Edited June 22, 2005 by Lexx_Luthor

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Gettin there. I think.

 

Imported my DEM, but for some reason always must load an HFD file first.

 

Saved my DEM as HFD, and tiled it using desert tiles and texture list. Thanks Deuces. Now, I think I need to save my tiled New map as TFD to get it initially working in-game.

 

I really need to stop posting my first thoughts in excitement, its very embarassing.

[+Deuces 0]

Gald to see you're workign it out

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Hey, this is nice. Flying over Novaya Zemlya -- very flat though.

 

Try the Kamchatka DEM sometime, the peninsula is choking with nice mountains, and may (somehow) make a nice wintery Cold War scenario but with some nice short summer mountains too. Lots of 500m high tidal waves surrounding Kamchatka. I tried the Adjust SeaLevel thinking that may level the sea, but I kept crashing my TE. Any advice on this?

 

Dueces, I am trying in the TE text file to make a larger map than 1000km but I don't know if its possible. I need that extra 250km or so of playable empty sea like that surrounding the Euro map. How did you make that sea border for EAWeuro?

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

hehe this is GREAT

 

Thanks Deuces.

 

Novaya Zemlya, not so flat on the western gtop30 panel. There I go posting too fast again.

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

ezlead::

I have a question. What file does the game read to overlay the airfields onto the terrain? It has to list the tiles to read ( D_Runway or M_Runway) for dirt or metal or hard surface and the layout.

TE reads airfield locations from the CityList file that can be found in each terrain folder -- sometimes its called different, like Euro citylist file is called EAWEuro_cities. Open the citylist file when inside TE, then TE knows where the airfields are. You don't need cities to have airfields though. The airfield sizes in km relate to how much tiling is done around each airfield....I have found that there is always a little offset compared with the x,y locations in terrain-name_TARGETS file which holds information on airfields used in the sim and the Kreelin Mission Editor, so I must adjust the terrain-name_TARGETS locations a kilometer or so to make them fit in the center of the airfield tiles. Be careful, often the airfields don't work, and its a stumbling process to figure out how to make them work all the time. I think you can use any tile for the airfields, but maybe not water tiles, or tiles that have water. Also, you really don't want to use a transition tile.

 

The Euro texturfile is called EAWTexturesAdj

 

I think the dirt and metal runways are *not* related to TE, but are the airfield skins used by the airfield models in the sim.

 

edit ... the TARGETS file airfield locations are meters, CityList uses kilometers.

 

... and I typed in "data" instead of "targets" ... I give sloppy instructions here

Edited January 19, 2006 by Lexx_Luthor

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Something interesting came up...I saw a thread at the simhq about non-working "tarpit" airfields recently, and it reminded me of this but I forgot to poast something...

 

If the *first* city in CityList has an airfield, the airfield won't work, and planes are glued to the ground and don't want to take off. If you are just learning and creating your first airfields in a CityList file, and if you did like me and just made airfields with no real cities, then of course the first city in the list has an airfield -- and it won't work. This is at least if multiple airfields are used on the map. To fix this, the first airfield can be positioned off the map using negative (x,y) coordinates and so is never used in your terrain testing.

 

Note in the stock maps, the first cities don't have airfields, and all cities with airfields are listed below those with no airfields. Thus all the stock airfields work. When you finally put real cities on the map, put the ones with airfields in the lower section of the list.

 

I *think* this is what's going on here, or a partial view of what is happening.