posted 12-18- 04:36 PM               

I've been playing around with DEM's and a bunch of Image/map generating software some
free, some not so free. The goal was to get
a USGS DEM of Island of Oahu into a mesh in AC3D. I had a lot of trouble initially because of the size of the mesh, and varying
levels of quality in export/import filters in
different Map software(I could give you a review of some of the various packages if you want). Anyways, I got a copy of Bryce 5 for $80.00(academic) and it seems to be the most
straightforward for getting the mesh into AC3D(Import DEMS -> Export 3ds files ->Import
3ds files into AC3D).

Well, I now have this mesh of Oahu (2 DEMS) joined in AC3d. So I guessed that now, I would need to dice it up into smaller evenly
sized tiles, so I fragmented the mesh with AC3D, and started cutting it up(almost done).

So once I get these tiles cut up:
1. Do the tiles have to be a set size? Is there a limit (x,y,z or kilobytes) for a tile?

2.Do the tiles have to be square(are rectangles ok?)?

3. With AC3d + ol tools, do we have to use
an existing map + move,cut,replace existing
lod files with these new tiles, or can we export these new tiles as lods files, and edit a .ol file to match up with the # and names of new lod files.

How have terrains been made in the past?
I know Pacific is a makeover, so It was more
of a texturing, and file(airbases/towns) linking job rather than a new mesh)(still a great job and a lot of work).

How was Somme done? Bavaria? Were existing
maps used? How?

I hope terrains can be made once we get
a terrain mesh into AC3d without having to match an existing map with respect to overall
dimensions, or tile sizes. Please comment if
you have some ideas.

Also, Im toying with the idea of placing some
carriers(possibly moving dof mode) into the
terrain as airfields(renamed appropriatly).

Will AI take off from carriers that have Airfield properties rather than vehicle props? (Also, some existing carriers need material changes to allow ac to take off, use
big akagi as an example of one that the material of the deck allow ac to sit on it)

posted 12-18- 05:06 PM               

Bavaria is a total new terrain and Nat made the structure of the whole terrain using 3Dmax if i remember right. It also use airfields and towns from the rhineland and africa terrain but this time i moved them all to different locations.

You canīt make moving carriers as airfields, because the location of an airfield is set in the airfield.sm file

To 1.
i donīt know if they can be bigger then the exsisting ones.Maybe itīs posible but i donīt know if the cloud layers will grow up too and when the side wind will be start then.

to 2.
i donīt think that they must be squares

to 3.
I think it is possible to create a terrain with only using Ol tools, but i guess this will be a very hard way. The easiest on is to replace the 400 tiles from an exsisting terrain with the ones you want. Then u can go on to move the towns,targets,airfields to the location u want or replace them or whatever u want to do. But donīt make any changes to airfields with using OPS. The only way to change them (well the only way i know) is using the ol tools.

More questions? mail me

posted 12-18- 05:35 PM               

What Im thinking of doing is makeing an airfield.sm file that is a carrier + linking it hard into a map.

I've already put a carrier model(with obdata of an airfield, located in airfields folder)
into the test water map I created from the pacific, or island terrain maps. Its there.
So the the carrier is the airfield.sm it is hard wired into the terrain, but it may be possible to give it properties to allow for dof type of motion. It may be possible to script a carriers motion and have it hard coded into the map. (ie, the carrier always starts in the same postion(so ai will take off since it is defined as an airfield), and moves the same way everytime). Of course, I dont think the ai will be able to return to carrier. Has anyone tried this?

posted 12-18- 05:46 PM               

Go on man that terrain have a important history behind

cheers,

posted 12-18- 05:49 PM               

It might be that your planes take off (well if the game engine didnīt crashed before because of the dof motion) but the planes return to the same location.
I never heard before that it will work then but wtg is the man for carriers and u might ask him.
I thought a while ago about the idea to place many carriers into the the terrain and also some of the same type and you can switch on the one u want to have with using the mission editor and hide the others you didnīt want to see in the mission.

posted 12-18- 09:42 PM               

About the carriers as airfields. When we were just about done with Midway, WTG made an airfield shaped like a carrier. It worked but its only failing was that it wasnt long enough for the AI to take off from. Alot has changed since then...believe me

Like Rends said. Bavaria is the first brand new terrain. Nat made the mountains using a greyscale map in 3DMax. The sticky part about that method is getting the elevations just right. I think Nat must have redone the entire mesh more than a few times..no small feat! I also heard WTG rumbling over on the WWI side about the same thing.

My suggestion is to get in touch with Nat or WTG on getting the mesh into game and then send Rendsberger a fruit basket with a big pretty bow and get him to help you with the airfields...he is the KING!

posted 12-18- 10:56 PM               

I always hate that answer

You can model any amount of objects with any kinds of polys you want. But the big trick is texturing. If you use OpenPlane's supertexture system then you buy into a whole lot of work. You must have square tiles... and the textures all need to be mapped and diced to match the tiles... it is quite tricky.

Here are some fun things to think about. Don't forget that you can tile textures and thereby imitate a procedural terrain like IL-2. You can get very high texture detail down low because the tile itself is small, but it repeats hundreds of times. I have done this and it works fine.

But now you have given up the supertexture system... so you need a way of hand mapping all the terrain. This is very tricky with the current tools.

I think someone could come up with a tool pretty easy that ties into Hippie's file standards. Have a DEM->LOD tool. Then you can create a way to texture map the LODS in a procedural way... like the greyscale color map that Nat used to create the mesh. But this would be an image that tell the tool where to use what generic repeating tiles.

The problem with this is that the seams between tiles would always be where polygons meet.

One way I made a pretty fast terrain was to create a large grid (mesh) object in AC3D. Now texture this with your new super texture. Now pull the verts around to give some shape to match the terrain texture you just added. Now cut the large grid into so many tiles. Now just give each grid object its own texture ID. Now cut cut up your supertexture object into tiles as well. Now that we have 1024 texture support we need less tiles than SDOE uses - so this is an easier task.

Now export each LOD/object where it is - don't center them.

I don't know what the performance issues might be, I was just doing this to quicky make various kinds of terrain to get a feel for certain ideas.

http://www.wingswithwires.com/posts/2.jpg

posted 12-18- 11:40 PM               

Sv, it looks like the texture needs to be made first so you can "pull the verts" along the natural slopes. Am I correct in assuming that? Another question. Do we have to use repeating tiles? There is nothing more annoying than that to me. A very personal peeve for sure.

posted 12-19- 05:04 AM               

I have built a terrain in AC3D and have exported ( most of it ) too.

So.....heres a few answers!

1) The tiles DO need to be a set size if you want to import them into OPS. Otherwise you face the mother of all lining up jobs! Also, when I used OL to split up a terrain and replace the lods, I had problems with the assembly. Don't know if it was me, or a problem with OL . I haven't tried exported an OL file from AC3D and building that. I will be shortly though!
I stopped doing that after I found DOF's got messed up in plane building, and airfield co-ordinates got badly affected too. I was concerned over the co-ordinate system !In theory, if this works, then the tiles can be any size.

2) Must be square to use a supertexture ... what SV said

3) So far, the only complete new mesh in game was done by Nat, who imported the tiles he made in Max into OPS. The tiles were an identical size to the old tiles, and were simply imported to replace the old maesh, and the terrain re-named to make it stand alone. It is a time consuming job! 400 tiles I am about half-way through doing this for my Ypres salient terrain.

I guess you can hand edit each tiles co-ordinates to position it ..... rather you than me!!!!!

Somme is a re-paint of teh Tundra terrain done by Parsoft. It has been dressed up a little, and had airfileds added to make it usable. Bavaria was a whole new mesh, done as outlined above.

The terrain mesh is the easy bit ..... gettingthe poly count to under 10,000 is important for good framerates ( the stock terrains are around this figure, and it does make a difference) Getting it in SM format and textured is a LONG job in comparison!

Carriers as airfields .... DONE IT! and there are problems....

Chief amongst these is the size of teh carriers. I had to DOUBLE the size of the carrier before the AI planes could achieve takeoff. You also have to make sure all teh planes start positions are lined up parallel to the deck, other wise they fall off the edge turning. You have to build the carrier as a part of the airfield structure. This can be done though. It may be possible to ease the takeoff's with Mace's RATO planes.

You can't make the carrier move though.

If you do, the planes do not move with it....they will fall off the back of the deck. They don't 'stick' to the deck at all. You also can't 'script' motion for an airfield. It is fixed in place. It is catch 22.

If you can get it to work, great ! But I would suggest getting the thing working as a stationary object would be better. Just too many problems otherwise!

posted 12-19- 05:18 AM               

Pierre, great info about the carrier/airfields being done, and somewhat successful, did you ever try boosting up the wind speed to 20 or 30 mph for ai takeoff into the wind?
Yeah, I was planning just to get a carrier in as a stationary airfield, and see if I can get ai to use it, and then experiment with dof movement. Yeah I knew about the planes not staying with a carrier from Pete Hawks earlier work, but again, if we can script it right, there would be enough delay in the motion that planes could take off before problems. Anyways, back to my terrain.

posted 12-19- 08:11 AM               

If you only repeat textures in small confined areas, and then set the areas to match land-use maps, this idea might have potential I think.

Yes, I texture the terrain first, then pull the verts around. But as you do this, the texture gets messed up because the verts pull the UV coords with them. I just remap the texture every few verts... as long as you don't move the outside verts of the terrain square, you just need to make one click to remap the texture. (it is just mapping the square texture to the square terain)

As far as positioning tiles, I forget exactly how I did this, but I think this was the way: I just created the multiple tiles in AC3D all positioned the way you want them. I just diced up the large mesh using "cut away object" for each tile. Then I exported each LOD from the location it is at. Essentialy all the LODS will be centered in OPS, but each LOD will have different coords for the verts so they will all line upo correctly. I don't know if this will cause any problems though... but it sure saves time

My only experiment was to make a 4 tile small terrain - the AC3D shot you see about is one of the 4 tiles. From begining to end it took about an hour to do.

I have another small terrain that uses 4 repeating textures... some grass, another kind of grass, a forest, and some dirt. The overall terrain looks very bad (it was just a test) - but you get an AMAZING sense of speed down low.. just like IL-2. IN fact I used a little more repeat and a higher contrast texture once and it almost made me dizzy hehehe!

My personal favorite idea right now is to mix DEM-mesh creation with land-use maps and good generic tiles. TerraScene does this and it works quite well... but to take it one step further... imaigne if the generic tiles also have attached SM references! So tree lines get a tree-line object standing up... and forests get raised... and there are fences and farm buildings near farms, houses in town, etc. And all tied to the land-use maps... these maps are what creates the real look.

An example of a land-use map:

But my real dream is to use ultra-high rez DEM! Too bad we can't do this yet:

posted 12-19- 08:22 AM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sv:
Here are some fun things to think about. Don't forget that you can tile textures and thereby imitate a procedural terrain like IL-2.

---

When you say procedural in this sense, do you mean it draws the tile on the fly, or simply repeats some existing one n times?

Gamasutra's terrain code talks about this as a future expansion. I was thinking of using vterrain's terrain files (roads, railways etc.) and trying to map that onto his quadtree engine, but never found the time.

Maury

posted 12-19- 03:40 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sv:
No, I mean that you just repeat a tile... so it looks like a procedural terrain but it is in fact not.

---

Got it. This is what Il-2 does? I'm curious how they do this and make it look nice, do they have something like 40 different types of textures with some trees, 40 with some mud, etc., and then multi-texture the tiles?
Or do they just have (say) 200 possible types of terrain texture and pick one for any tile?

I finally figured out B-17 - or think I have. It appears that the terrain is not a texture map at all, but a list of b-spline (actually, bezier I think) points. When you are over point x,y, it looks in the list to find the points near you and then constructs beziers and uses them to draw terrain squares.

The advantage is twofold. One is that you don't need much texture map memory at any one time because you only have a few tiles at high res. The other is that you can render at any detail level you want, and you get nice clean roads and stuff like that.

The downside is what you see in the game. You can watch it draw the textures over the period of a second or two as it adds details. I find it to be pretty distracting.