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This is an interesting challenge for landscaping...

A few questions: When the 3d landscaper selects the terrain tiles for a map section, exactly how much control does he have over where the image is cut to fit?

A few posts ago, PV mentioned that the tiles stay the same "until we edit them." Can the mapper control them not only by rotating or mirroring, but by sliding them all around until he has the image area he would like to cut?

If he has no control of the image slicing, I don't know how wooded areas could be made accurately short of 3d mapping, since there would also be no guarantee that the "unreal forests" would show up in exactly the spot they were needed.

Let me float an idea for your critique: Do the individual tree models for the "off the map" woods necessarily need to be placed on a wooded image? You probably wouldn't want to put a copse template in the middle of a plowed field, but it might not look that bad on a plain grass area. If the "unreal forests" were replaced by a green field that was slightly darker than average(but not as dark as a forest), then we could have or not have unmapped woods whenever we wanted them, since they must be placed by hand either way.

Granted, once you reached a distance where the tree models disappeared, you'd be left with a plain green patch, but if those woods had a very significant appearance at altitude, wouldn't they have been put on the survey map?

Please don't think I am trying to be disagreeable with this post! BoBII is my favorite sim, and I would love to help with it, but now I'm a bit perplexed as to which way to go next....

Textures are placed according to some arcane routine in the code, and we have absolutely no control over where they "register" onto the terrain. By choosing the colour index number, we control the texture image that is used, and its orientation and mirroring, but not the start position for the "painting". Thus, if significant macroscopic features like woods are embedded in the texture, we have no control whatever on where they are painted, and that's why I detest them. As I say, I only want to see woods where I've deliberately put them, on any terrain I edit. However, I am not in charge, and the current textureset has painted woods on almost every texture, and all are subject to change with future releases, so I can do nothing but ignore them for now, and pray for a future when we have a much larger variety of textures, and I will be free to use a wide range of textures all of which are free of painted woods, and I will go back and purge all of my edits of them.

The original Rowan textures had none of these painted woods, only some painted hedges and the occasional shrub. The errant thickets are all the result of subsequent reworkings of the textureset. If you were to remove the painted woods from your personal textureset, leaving only the deliberate woods of texture img0015, you would be seeing the terrain much as the Rowan artists conceived it.

Actually the Rowan terrain ain't all that great these days. I found some early BoBI pics the other day. Goodness me. They worked from OS maps, not modern photographs.



One thing I would comment is that the current set of textures all came from Western Kent/Eastern Suss ex. I now forget who sampled them originally (Stiz?). In fact the textures have considerably *less* woodland than they had in the original sampled photos which were far more wooded (also compare with 2.08 textures which were much fussier).

Now if you take a look at Cowbeach, Suss ex, this will be very familiar (especially as you get down to 2000ft scale and below). A lot of stray woodland, btw, not just as hedgerows.

If you look at the section from Hailsham to Ninfield and compare against the RAF map, the real world is considerably more detailed. There is just a ton of field, tree and terrain detail that isn't in the map.
Here:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=c ... a=N&tab=wl


Equally, look at Uckfield in Suss ex (close to where I grew up)
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=u ... 1&ct=title
as you look at the field area to the East, you see a level of complexity that is just not represented at all in the maps.

The real pic has a ton of trees that aren't in the map (note than the scales are not the same, it was tough to match them).


This one is much lower level than the map but you can recognise the shaped wood.

The ingame shot isn't the same as the real thing, of course, but in these areas it isn't bad. If anything things are more open in-game than in R/L. And my point is that this area is fairly typical of the area between North and South Downs.


Overall, it's just a choice really. If you sample more of the coastal areas it would look unreal inland.. And as the textures aren't really that well allocated between coastal fields and inland fields you have to play games. Of course they can be reallocated, but it does take a lot of time.


If you want to make a new set, then that's just super. I'm sure it'll be a great addition.
Given the incessant rise of texture memory on cards I am already thinking that the next set should all be 2048x2048 which means we can increase the terrain resolution further still.

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Thank you for your replies and the links, Bader!

What I had in mind was nothing as ambitious as creating an entirely new tile set from scratch! I like the naturalistic colors and textures of the current one a great deal, and I hope I didn't come across as hating the work other people had done. In comparison, viewing pictures of old BoB terrain can be quite a shock. Some of those old greens look radioactive!

My goal was to work on some of what you aptly termed "fussiness"---

There are images of roads on the tiles that are much brighter and more noticeable than our officially mapped roads, and I can have a devil of a time flying around trying to pick out the real thing from the image.

The 2d houses that appear on the agricultural tiles are huge and white. Ben's new farm objects are so nice they need to sit on their own yards like the villages in IMG0022.

As for the "Unreal Forests," what do you think of having them replaced with a slightly darker than average grass field that could either have hand-made forests placed on them or be left alone?

ps. On the Google maps, what is growing in those lemon yellow colored fields?

The bright yellow is rape. It's a modern introduction so has no place in 1940.

Yes, I have no issue at all with tweaking, just go ahead! The textures change constantly. You see an area, update it. Fly some more, see that it looks awful and fix it again, fly some more, see another issue, fix it again etc..

But that's the way it works, really. Go ahead and dive in. It can't hurt.

_________________
"Ah yes, Michael (Parkinson)," Bader replied, "But these particular Fockers were Messerschmitts..."

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scoobared,



The "huge chicken sheds" painted here and there are another gripe of mine. They are not too good, especially if white, for placing our farm buildings on.
This would be a good project for you to do. Make the farms in the rural textures better.
To do this so that the 3D buldings look good on them, you should get into placing objects.
I think it was you that mentioned the need for proper English farm research. If you cannot find much on the web,
ask on the General forum. Plenty of English men here would be proud to show off some their English rural looks.



I like the idea, and it would not be very hard to do. If you do this, I will certainly try them.
I'm allied with PV about the painted forests. Did not mind them at all before, but now we have AutoGen forests working fairly well.
Now the painted forests look odd with no trees AutoGenned on them when using AutoGen.

_________________
"Toto! I don't think we are in Kansas anymore!" Dorothy, OZ
"sniff.. sniff.. Snort! ARF! GGRRRR! ARF! (Tod der stinkenden republikanischen Partei, diesem ignoranten religiösen Monstrum.)" Toto

Hey, Stickman I've got a few work in progress shots as soon as I get set up with Imageshack.

Okay, let's try this out:

Original IMG0000:

Okay heres a WIP of IMG0000....



The unreal forests are actually covered by a texture I created from samples of the tiles. It needs some tweaking...I know it looks like I just airbrushed over it a little but those are actually textures....I just said that....experimenting with levels of transparency...



If luck holds out this should be an ingame picture of fuzzy growth next to a bona-fide forest!(just south of the village) I think it could go either way and be grass or a clump of scraggly woods....I need to sharpen it up with a few highlights, I think.

Well, at first I couldn't find any of my painted over farmhouses, so like a "gangsta" I tagged them and this should be the first one...



That red dot is exactly where a farmhouse once stood...well it was painted so it wasn't exactly standing....

FWIW, I watched Band of Brothers Episode 1 'Currahee' last night. When Easy Company do their jump training (supposedly Stateside) the filming is actually over Salisbury Plain, with a brief but unmistakable airborne shot of a corner of Netheravon Airfield. Just thought this may be of minor interest as there was a question about Salisbury Plain in another thread and this all too brief bit of film gives a good feel for it if once you realise what you are looking at

So the Salisbury Plain looks like Toccoa, Georgia....I wonder whether they thought there were fewer people who know what the Salisbury Plain looks like or who know what north Georgia looks like?

Back to business, though---

Erased the 2d "chicken shacks," swimming pools, and mansions on about five tiles so far--the difference is quite noticeable! Using an assembly line style process, I'll get them wiped out then come back to tame the "unreal forests." When I have a bit more time than now I'll post more WIP pictures. I think the towns and villages built from IMG0022 are finally going to stand out instead of being overwhelmed by the 2d images on other tiles.

House indecently sitting on roof of squashed 2d house



The same house sitting on a grass yard like all decent houses should

Yard full of flattened garbage



Same yard cleaned up and presentable



Little town with zoning problems to the north



Zoning cleared up

Village with flattened house problem



Village with flattened house problem solved



Countryside of fair England littered with two dimensional pollution



English countryside clean and green

Well, you've been busy.



Actually, I think you may have cleaned up too much on some of the painted farms with little buildings.
Farm buildings did not have grass on the "barn yard" in front of the house. This would generally be bare earth or maybe gravel.
Might be side walks around the houses, even if just planted bricks.
If you make the farms look too grassy, it will look funny, IMO.
Don't forget that there should be tractor and truck trails going out from the barn yard.
They need not go on forever, and would look credible if they just poke into the surrounding fields and fade out.

Carry on! I don't have much else to criticize other than that, someone else may.
Again, I encourage you to do as much research on English farms as you can spend time doing so.
Then you'll get less comments like "Well.. English farms do not really look like that." You can then come right back with a picture of one.
You've been warned!

_________________
"Toto! I don't think we are in Kansas anymore!" Dorothy, OZ
"sniff.. sniff.. Snort! ARF! GGRRRR! ARF! (Tod der stinkenden republikanischen Partei, diesem ignoranten religiösen Monstrum.)" Toto