Subscriber Modifications

Battle of Britain "Wings of Victory"
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rogeroger
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by rogeroger »

Ive placed a hell of a lot of objects using the templates from the 2.11 list of ground objects. I initially created pencil illustrations of each template in a notetbook for easy access. I then created my own templates to fill in the remaining gaps, using screenshots of those templates as a guide. I've pretty much memorised most of the template id's and associated configurations.

Let me know where you are doing object placements so that we don't populate the same areas.

I'm placing objects or have completed placement in the following areas : folkeston, tangmere area, hornchurch, kenley, biggin hill, gravesend, central london, london docks, Littlehampton, seven oaks, tonbridge, tunbridge-wells, southend on sea, ancton, croydon and debden.

I'm currently working on cantebury. I suspect from the previous post that you might be too. :)

worthing and rochester are on the to do list.
Last edited by rogeroger on 05 Jul 2017, 13:57, edited 1 time in total.

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PV
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by PV »

Yipes. I have only just started with a couple of templates in Canterbury
when I came up against the missing library. Stickman has done a bunch of
bfield placements at Canterbury on the new open space to the southwest,
where the military installation was.

Most of the work I was looking at doing in east Kent is removing the buildings
and trees which are now sitting in inappropriate places after the reworking of
the terrain. If you have the new terrain set loaded, you will know what I mean.
The treelines all through the "watermeadows" in the lowland that used to be
ocean when Thanet was a real island are particularly bad; besides now crossing
rivers and ditches, if you look at the 1940 images of Kent on google earth, you
can see that at that time there were no trees in that area whatsoever. (The
'40s images on google earth are a particularly excellent reference for what sort of
buildings should go where; "Britain from above" website is another one.)

For me, now that I have vramesh's placement guides, making new placements
is vastly easier than editing old ones, whereas before I was about equally useless
at each aspect. It's a painful process, loading a small portion of the existing file,
tapping tab key to spot each item blinking, then looking to see if it is one which
needs to be tweaked or deleted. I did this for Littlehampton prior to the v2.13
release, throwing out a lot of placements, and putting in a few, including the
rail station and a strip of shorefront "resort" apartments, plus some industry
along the river. But I haven't done any other placement work since 2.13 went out.
I don't do it much, as I'm not terribly good at it, and no one else works on the terrain
itself, so that's an open field for me. I just try to do placement clean-up after I
rework a section of terrain, because I basically mess up the placements which were
done before, so I figure it's my responsibility, I shouldn't be making work for someone
else.

I'm more than happy to step back and let someone else do it.

The manston placement file I included in the link for the Canterbury upgrade, which
includes the cathedral, has the first of my small corrections in it, cutting a 1207
(I think) template into three 1208,9,10, of which 1208 was deleted as it went across
a road. This was done because the full template sat on its origin at the top of a
slope, so the 1208 end was about 30 ft up on the air as the terrain dropped down
to the riverside. By splitting it up, each section gets its own origin successively
closer to the river and thus lower, so the buildings aren't seen to float.

...I can't remember if in 2.13 at Littlehampton I included the first use of the dockside
object which provides a proper vertical dockside, instead of either having docks end
abruptly hovering a metre or so in the air, or sloping down about a 3m long ramp (the
smallest distance possible) to get the land height to 0. Or if I made that trial after
2.13 went out. I'm relatively sure it was in 2.13 . I would like to get that dockside
object used along a whole bunch of docks in different places, that's the only placement
activity I'm actively interested in, at the moment. But it will be quite a while before
I have time to look at that.

rogeroger
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by rogeroger »

your work as a dedicated terrain specialist is much appreciated. I would be be more than happy to clean up the objects after the earthquake has hit. :)
I usually listen to some good music or have a documentary running in the background while I work at placing, find it pretty relaxing.

Also nice to contribute after years of enjoyment flying the sim, thanks to the selfless work of the bdg team.


my cantebury objectadds work so far:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/ws105k7bu ... TEBURY.zip



cleaned up some buildings obstructing the railway line and filled some gaps.
Image


Image


littlehampton (see more gaps to fill as I look at this image)
Image

I've placed objects up to just before worthing.
Image

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PV
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by PV »

Great!

I have a plan to sometime a fair ways down the line, do a
fix to the Adur River upstream from Shoreham, and give
the Downs there some more definition, as I did with the
Arun and the Ouse. That will complete my attempt to
bring out the lumpiness of the South Downs properly, and
get the rivers properly more narrow near the mouth, and \
wider upstream. Rowan's terrain people had a tendency to
create comically fat rivers that shrink suddenly down to
nothing about 5 miles inland. I won't do anything at the
shore near Shoreham and Brighton, as it's much too late,
they've been thoroughly placed. But don't do any placements
upstream on the Adur, as it will move quite a bit when it gets
corrected.

...this shows a good view of Littlehampton, the riverside docks
and industry, and the rail yard, and indicates why this site is
so good for figuring out where things should go (you'll notice I
left a bare "city base" texture where all the big industrial buildings
and railyard stuff want to go):
https://britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EPW039463

Boreas
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by Boreas »

Not thinking of diving in as yet but it would be easy to replace the woodland textures with grass or scrubland (at least using the current textures from img0004 and img0016) where 3d trees would likely be placed. 2d hedgerows presumably would be best retained. In textures for good farm land adding more grass or scrub might not look right unless to be well covered by 3d trees. I wouldn't be keen on widening adjacent fields unless it was obviously was the best solution (although that might be a way of adding more variation).

rogeroger
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by rogeroger »

Wow!
Looking at that image you guys got it pretty close. I was googling old 1940 images yesterday,without much success.
This site is great, have it bookmarked.
Not thinking of diving in as yet but it would be easy to replace the woodland textures with grass or scrubland (at least using the current textures from img0004 and img0016) where 3d trees would likely be placed. 2d hedgerows presumably would be best retained.
I agree, the 2d hedgerows should stay.

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PV
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by PV »

As I mentioned, I rely a lot on the Britain from Above website, as well as
the historic 1940s aerial images on Google Earth, and the period Ordnance
maps from here: http://www.old-maps.co.uk/index.html and here:
http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=7& ... ers=10&b=1

The latter is one I've only recently been introduced to, and it's amazing...

rogeroger
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by rogeroger »

A while back I was searching for town names east of bognor(litlehampton,ancton and worthing) and downloaded a tourist map, nothing as detailed as this though.Thanks. :)


Its a bit of a battle sometimes to find the correct place names in objectadds when doing cleanups. I have to go through each file, comparing co-ordinates. At the moment I'm struggling to find where rochester's objects are filed.

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PV
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by PV »

Ah, I think if you are doing all this work, it is about time
to pass you access to the beta forum, where you can
have access to the archive of all this stuff. If you think
vramesh's placement and modelling tutorial stuff was a
lot, just wait til you behold the record of a decade of
dedicated flailing about with this beast.

Regarding Rochester, the BoBworld coords are
x =3198nnnn to 3250nnnn; y = 3368nnnn to 3420nnnn
(most of the buildings are to the upper right of this,
say x > 3230nnnn, y> 3390nnnn)

and there are a couple of ways of getting to this. There is
a terrain modelling version of a BSDK, which I have written
a tutorial for, and it contains a 512x512 image of the BoB2
world map. Each pixel on the map, if counted from the top
left as most image manipulation programs work, has x y
coordinates which can be multiplied by 2 to the 17th (131072)
to yield the BoBworld coords of some point in that pixel. This
is possible because the map is displayed upside down - when
it's right way up, the coords are 0,0 at the lower left,
somewhere in Normandy.

This is roughly handy, but the image is so low res that it's
hard to see fine detail for more precise locating. We also had
a guy create a map from the files for the BoB2 campaign screen,
and load it with information including BoBworld coords. This is
somewhat handier. The viewer used to be a free download, but
now requires going trough hoops.

But for you, you can get the viewer here,
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?pgwvp8luyyb7axx
and the file here
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?01xikltbis63kty
if those links are still live. The BoBworld coords are displayed
along the bottom of the window. The interface is a bit goofy,
you can only scroll or zoom, not both at the same time, but it
gives BoB2 coords on a much higher res map. Very handy for
finding your way around.

Once you have the right BoBworld coords, finding an entry in the
ObjectAdds files is a matter of using a files search tool on the
folder. I have an ancient version of zed tree, but also a free tool
called window grep. Either of those, and probably several others,
can zip through all the files in a folder and flag the lines which contain
the coord entries you're looking for.

For Rochester, though, I have done this exercise before, as we modded
Rochester about 2014, and I can quote what I located then:

"Rochester stuff seems to be in ObjectAdds\London.txt, in the
section labelled

#Gravesend area

# Objects added on Wed Jul 18 19:52:02 2012

numbers around 324...,340..."

rogeroger
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by rogeroger »

Ah, I think if you are doing all this work, it is about time
to pass you access to the beta forum, where you can
have access to the archive of all this stuff. If you think
vramesh's placement and modelling tutorial stuff was a
lot, just wait til you behold the record of a decade of
dedicated flailing about with this beast.

er....Thanks I think, :) any extra info is welcome.
2nd link is dead.

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PV
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by PV »

rogeroger wrote:
2nd link is dead.
OK ...try this one:
http://www3.telus.net/v1ncent/bob/BoBII ... p_v101.zip

And, you should find a new subforum appearing under the BoB2 section.

rogeroger
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by rogeroger »

Got the file, see the Beta forum, :shock: cant wait to dig in. thanks :)

rogeroger
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by rogeroger »

Progress on westminster abbey thus far:


Image

roof tower, more buttresses and other details still to be added.


Image

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PV
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by PV »

Looks excellent! you seem to have gotten the knack of getting
the most sense of detail for the fewest necessary polys, a good
skill for sim modelling. I don't know a lot about this stuff, but if you've
drifted through the archive on the beta forum, you will see the
talk among the modellers about balancing FPS with polys, and
achieving the right performance balance. You can be a little more
lax with unique buildings, but for ones that will be rendered hundreds
of times across the landscape, the poly count must be severely
constrained.

Fortunately, as time goes on and vidcards get more muscle, the
constraints get less severe. The aircraft models have been enhanced
twice that I'm aware of, to allow for higher vidcard performance
(but we no longer have access to the source for the current models
I believe, as they remain with A2A.)

Boreas
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Re: Subscriber Modifications

Post by Boreas »

Yes, surviving historic buildings in the city might now look too clean for the period but the effects of smog can still be seen in the blackened yellow London brick clay of many older residential buildings. Have been looking at removing 2d trees. Not much fun as things start off looking less impressive. Sometimes it leaves a tree shaped bit of grass across a road or more often the edge of a field. Will restore the roads but leave the fields ‘til later. A new grass texture I made for this wasn’t a triumph but I used it to add to my current airfield grass texture. http://www.mediafire.com/file/6991m9lej ... rass_2.zip

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