posted 07-31- 07:56 PM               

1. Open up Africa or Dover terrain, select a terrain tile that is water and near to the middle of the terrain and export it.

I suggest you work on the Africa terrain, it's easiest..

2. Open Africa terrain in OPS, hit F5 and zoom out using the 2 on the keboard until you can see the whole terrain.

3. Starting in the top left corner.. count down 5 tiles, and inwards 5 tiles (easiest if you select the tile, then you can see the edges and makes it easier to count.

4. ok, starting with the tile thats 5 down and 5 in, import the tile that you exported earlier onto it (replacing the LOD). Work over the whole terrain, leaving that border of 4 tiles.. DON'T import onto that border!

Now you have a completely flat terrain.

Remove all refs to towns, structures etc etc etc from the SM (just delete them from the branch in OPS. If at a later time you intend adding airfields.. then don't delete those just yet. (like I did...)

You already know about the retexturing and renaming to make it a stand alone terrain.

Next, to make the whole terrain water.. ask me nicely for my batch prog and it'll convert the whole terrain to water in a few seconds (it uses Hippies Parfile Tools)

You can build islands in Max or AC3D, just export the tile you want the island on and work on it in your 3D prog, then import the fished island back into the terrain in OPS.. hint.. dont move the tile from it's axis when you're working on it.. it's very very hard to get it back exactly right if you move it.

Well, this more or less brings you upto where I'm at, I can't fully explain about adding airfields just yet cause I need help with OPS before I can be 100% sure I'm right, but if you mail me I'll explain our thoughts and conclusions on how they are done.. here's a hint if you wanna take a look yourself.. in the SM file you'll see a file ref that says sumthin like airfield1.sm, and below that ref you'll see a Group, inside that group are tile references, you'll notice that these tile refs match up to the tiles where the airfield sits on the terrain.. so, with some editing of the tiles of an airfiled, and editing of the Group so you list the tiles where you want it to be placed, you "should" have a working airstrip where you want it.

as for changing the islands back to land, I've just posted a Q about that in the Tech Forum.

Hope you can follow all this Jag.. I'm pretty sure you can, but feel fee to ask any Q's you have and I'll do my best to answer clearly.. lol

~Nat~