The A2A Simulations Community

Hey, it's been rather a while since I posted to this thread, and that's because all my terrain energy has gone into creating the new terrain tutorial update (and my free time was a bit eroded over much of the period), so here, at last, is the result of my work. I'm hosting this myself for now, as I don't expect a lot of demand, but it will probably get shifted to a simmers' website when I find one that's still in business and accepting uploads...

http://www3.telus.net/v1ncent/bob/BoB-T ... rialV2.zip

Very nicely done, PV. You couldn't ask for a more comprehensive guide.

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Finally have time to collect a few images from the latest work. First, a couple of images from the construction of the Boscombe/Old Sarum edits, which are also used in the tutorial to elucidate the process. The first is the raw height data as it appears from the SRTM datafile:



Now the landuse edit stack with the SRTM data stretched to fit on a transparent layer, a necessary step in preparing the SRTM data for compiling into the terrain:



This results in considerably lumpier terrain in the region, as the dark in the greenscale is about 20m elevation, while the brightest green is about 270m:



Nevertheless, a range of 0-260m is barely distinguishable from dead flat at even 1500m altitude, so don't expect to fly through mountain ranges...

The newly relocated and properly sized (to the best of our research ability) Boscombe Down airfield in its proper place just east of Amesbury:



And showing correctly in the 2D campaign map:



Fully populated with .bf damageable buildings:



...we've recently received even more detailed and accurate building placement information from Pat_Pattle, so the field will likely get an even more thorough and detailed set of objects in future.

The airfield at Old Sarum, where the game had its Boscombe field incorrectly placed, now reworked to appear as it should:



and also populated with .bf buildings (through a last minute error on my part, these didn't make it into 2.09):



You'll note the small treelined hilltop in the last image, which corresponds to the circular object in the lower left of the previous image. This is the original Old Sarum hillfort, from which the field gets its name. It's a little too small to model as well as I'd like using the terrain elevations - there is a ditch (a dry moat) surrounding the central elevation which is too narrow for the resolution of the terrain to manage. Here's a closer view from the southwest, you can see the airfield in the distance, before the buildings were placed:



And here is a pic of the real thing:

Great stuff!



That's true in Rl as well, especially if the slopes are not very steep. Around here ("Eifel" region in Germany) we have avbout 200 meters height difference as well, but I think slopes are much steeper, I would guess some are 30 degrees +. Enough to hang glide .



Great!

I would like to attempt to place some objects or perhaps to create a few villages or farms. I have the zip file with the instructions already, but I have a few questions.

Is there any list of who's doing what on the map, so that we don't duplicate one another's efforts?

I understand that there are new terrain textures for the villages, which we should concentrate placing objects on while leaving the urban textures alone because they are going to be replaced. These village textures represent actual villages that I could find on a map, I assume. Is there some way that I can identify them with the BOBII program or do I just need to find a map and identify them as best I can?

When created, should I post a screenshot to see if they are acceptable, and if so, send them to the BDG in a file so that they can be added to the official map?

Do the good people of Southern England object to someone from across the Pond trying to recreate their farms and villages?

Could a simple farm be created on an open field somewhere, or is there too much of a chance that the landscape tiles will change?(In other words, should I just stick to the new village textures?)

This is something that I will probably only be able to do in pieces, one little bit at a time, and not at any kind of fast pace. Please don't laugh, but it seems like a task that could be soothing, in a way, or do I not know what I'm getting myself into?

Just to follow up on my post above, one idea that intrigues me is making a template(or several varieties) of a generic farm that could be applied on open fields across the map. Would this be a help to you?

scoobared..



Excellent question. There are so few object placers now, that any area is free fire zone for you to place.
That said, since I was the one to first place objects in France at Pas de Calais, I consider Pas de Calais Nord
as my personal Dukedom! So I will start a list:
1. Pas de Calais Nord = stickman
You are welcome to place anywhere else, France or Britain.
We generally limit our meager object placement time and resources to villages at and around the airfields for now.
This is because a lot of game play takes place near airfields.



Yes, but there are two textures for villages, img0022 which Ben has primed for placement now (OK to place upon),
and img0024 which has not yet been primed OK for placement.
Leave all urban areas alone for now. I will post pics of all the city and village textures so that you can ID them in game below, here.



In Britain, the village textures are placed pretty well as to historical accuracy. Them Rowan boys (all Brits) did a damn good job
trying to make South England mapped right. The forests (raised) are also pretty well spot on, as our UK cousins may say.
You can ID the villages within game play (again, see me pics below) but may take some hours to get the "eye" for them.

A man can never have too many maps! If you be serious about this, I suggest you gaffle up some maps of South England and Northern France.
If you do not yet possess the 1939 high resolution maps that JamesB had scanned (at his personal cost) of south England,
and you are truly serious about placing villages, then I will give you my JamesB map of the area of your intent.
I also have some 1939 high res maps of northern France that Osram gave me, though not as detailed as the Anglo maps JamesB got to us.



If you are serious about improving the look of BoBII by populating the naked areas, post pics of your work here.
WORK! a 4 letter word if there ever was one! Say it over and over and over and over again! Sounds ugly!
COUGH! Anyway.. post some pics. Osram or Buddye will likely treasure your efforts and welcome into the ranks of the skeletal BDG.



AH! Our UK cousins can be very picky whence US ignorant Colonials try to mess with their sky, sea, and terrain!
Fear not so much about this, as they appreciate all efforts to make their Battle of Britain better.
Paul "Bader" will be the Editor, here. I throw rocks at him all the time. Sometimes they hit him in the head!



Are you a city slicker? Ain't no buildings on open fields! Fields are for crops or pasture for meat stock. Beg pardon, amigo..
Plenty places on the "rural, agricultural" textures that we have now, to place farm buildings.

"is there too much of a chance that the landscape textures will change?"
I spent 3 months and placed thousands of buildings (old Rowan ones) from Southampton to Portsmouth, at cities
before WoV release.
Did not look all that good, but better than before, IMO, and can I say WORK, over and over again?
Then... things changed. New city textures. Waste no time on the cities, lest your precious time be wasted, they are not yet ready.
Uhmm.. do I expect the terrain textures to change? Yes, and all in time. One village texture, img0022, that ben made special for his village objects, I hope will stay the same with the same structure.
Herein, you can safely bet that your houses will not be blown down by a Hurricane!



I encourage you to make farm templates. Many varieties of them, the more varieties, they better look.
Have you ever cut and stacked hay? Threshed wheat?
Just keep the farm buildings away from the open fields/pasture. An occasional cow shed maybe appropriate in the middle of a pasture,
but I ain't sure if the English do so.
US Montana cowboys don't usually build cowsheds. The Herefords and Black Angus cattle best weather the winter blizzards
on open prairie best they can!



As the Object Placement "expert", I will advise you that it takes time to make it look good.
I can also tell you that once you've made a village that looks good, and placed true to it's geographical location,
your heart will swell with pride!
Like making good babies!

If you are tired and bored with just shooting things, and reckon to try to create something,
you've come to right place.

_________________
"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

scoobared,

Here is a closeup of Landmap2/ img0022.
The only Anglo village texture currently held sacred and not subject to the guillotine.



This texture was the one that Ben, our treasured English 3D object maker
(our Russian competitors trying to recruit him)
made especially for placing objects upon, especially Template Multi-Objects for quick population.
You will often see this texture show in game, most often not in it's FULL make,
and chopped up to fit other neighborly textures.

This is the only village texture whereas we encourage placement upon as of now.

A NOTE:
Here I have placed yellow dots upon or near the WAR EMERGENCY VILLAGE GARDENS.



About here, I am tempted to spout out my hatred of the US Republican Party and their Isolationist attitudes during The War,
but I'll shut me mouth and curse US Nazi Republicans while holding my breath.
COUGH!
Anyway, as per object placement on this texture, the gardens are just that.. vegetables.
Feel free to place any buildings upon the roads.
Feel free to merge objects "nut-butt" to each other.
Feel free to merge objects to make a new evolutionary (is that a bad word?) object.

Above all, feel free. Just don't ye be stepping on the fresh peas and strawberries.

Ach! Scheisse! needs be I take a nap..

_________________
"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

Oh Stickman, pleeeeaaase don't call me a city-slicker! I grew up on a farm, unfortunately, I was allergic to everything on it! A day cutting hay would have also included an evening in the emergency room.

Actually, the fault is mine for using a poor term like open fields; what I meant were areas outside of villages that we Americans might call "The Boonies." Although perhaps these villages are the boonies themselves....

One of the complaints I have heard people make about BOB2 was that the terrain looked great from high altitude, but poor down low. Of course, there are always people who complain about something. The appearance never bothered me; the only problem I ever had was that down on the deck, flying nap of the earth, there were few if any visual clues to tell how low you were(other than Red Screen=0 Feet Altitude).

When I first saw Ben's new objects, I was excited not only because they look fantastic but also because they provide these visual markers magnificently. My thought was, small "boonie" farms could provide this effect over a wide expanse of sparsely populated areas of the map, and the thought of starting object placement with a farm is less intimidating than starting with a whole village!

I think for now I will look for pictures of English farms and simply see if I can recreate them with the objects. Even if they can't be used, it should be good practice before moving on to the villages.

ps---Thanks again for the low-rez clouds. Hopefully, I can have clouds and save some FPS for these objects!

Too bad about your allergies. The only better smell than fresh cut hay
is the smell of sage brush the first moments it gets lightly rained on.
Somebody should bottle that smell and sell it to us as men's cologne.
Hell! I even miss the smell of freshly dropped horse balls!
Making myself home sick..

As for making farms on the "boondocks" textures, fear not what you do. Didn't mean to discourage you there.
I doubt that the "fields" textures will change anytime soon. Indeed, there are many 2D buildings painted upon many of them.
You could make a nice look for the game planting farm buildings over these 2D buildings.
Some 2D buildings are HUGE, though. Look like modern Corporate Agri-Business chicken factories!
If you are also an artist, do not be afraid to re-paint some of the 2D buildings on the "boonies" textures. I'd like to redo some myself,
but other tweaks have my attention currently.



3 years ago I found some good English websites with pictures of various farms, villages, etc. There maybe more resources now.
One good site I remember had photos subdivided into different Counties, and different architectural styles.
The English are quite proud and protective of their old and beautiful rural landscape, much to their credit.

_________________
"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

Now there is an interesting idea...my painting experience is with oils and acrylics--not very good for this purpose(makes me think of the joke about the secretary who corrected a mistake by putting white-out on the monitor ).

The computer art revolution has turned me into an anachronism with my tubes of paint and brushes---a caveman with a hairy stick(now that sounded perverse ). However I suppose I should start sometime.

Looking at the texture files in my BOBII folder, I see they are in .DDS format. Quick research shows several programs for manipulating them: Paint.Net, GIMP, etc. Any recommendations for these programs at the optimum 2009 near-depression price of free?

I use the gimp, but I haven't updated it in a couple of years, and I suspect it handles dds better now than the version I have - I have to use a separate program called DXTBmp to separate the layers and pass them to gimp to edit (gimp seems to only open the visible layer). It may be I just haven't got the gimp plugin I'm using figured out right; I don't do a lot of dds editing, so if I find something that works I stick to it. Anyway, both gimp and DXTBmp are free, so the price is right. ...And the texture dds files only have one layer anyway, so my gimp works fine for them; it's the ones with transparency and mipmaps that are the problem.

As to a recommendation for gimp, the nice thing about it is that it gets steadily better, but particularly regarding documentation, it unfortunately started from a pretty low initial point. You may often hit the "F1" contextual help button, only to read something along the lines of "Sorry, there is no help item currently available for this item. Why don't you write one and submit it?" This is the joy of open software - creators are often more interested in generating code than documenting it, and often don't have any english anyway. I think a lot of gimp functions are just copied from the main payware platforms - Photoshop, Paintshop - so the authors assume you know what the function is because you've used those platdorms. As I note in my discussion of gimp in the terrain tutorial, there is a manual available online that is more extensive than the built-in help, and between the two you can figure out most of the program, certainly enough to do simple edits. There are also online fora where you can humbly beg assistance...

It is big and complex, as full featured as the payware programs, which may seem overwhelming, but after repeatedly running into and struggling with the limitations of simpler little editors, usually photo-retouch programs, you begin to appreciate having a suite which can do most of the things you'd like to do, and probably more if you spend more time digging into it.

You may find you want to start with a simpler program, but I suspect that the limitations you encounter will drive you to the gimp.

Thanks for the info, PV. I'll look into GIMP and just try to take it one step at a time. I need to learn how to use PC art design programs anyway, even though I've resisted it for years...it's just not the same when you've always worked traditionally(my euphemism for being stuck in my ways )

By the way, PV, I've looked at this thread off and on for a while now(before I joined the forum) and I'd like to give you a hearty THANKS for putting up with a head-spinning assortment of colors and tiles and white dots and old programs that don't do what you want in order to make such a vast improvement to the BOB world. Actually, looking at the original examples, re-creation is a more appropriate word, I think, because the originals didn't look like they gave you much to work with. Your land-fixings are great to fly over---I can't imagine the frustrations it took doing it.

So two questions:

1. Do you have a punching bag?
2. Is it worn out?

Thanks for the kind words, they are appreciated.

Frustrations, sometimes, but never emotional, just intellectual. I'm generally pretty affable. And there's no point in getting mad at inanimate objects, it just presents another challenge for further cleverness. If anything has suffered it's probably my mousing arm...