posted 09-12- 04:47 AM               

I have been trying to make the wetfield landing strip, and so far, things are looking very hopeful. I'm waiting a test copy of the PBY which can be splashed without blowing up. This will tell me if some od effects are a result of splashing invulnerable planes, or if there are issues as yet unresolved.....

In the mean time, I have been trying without success to re-texture an airfield tile with sea!

Should be easy, but no. The airfield uses a super texture, which references several texture tiles. I could change them, but that would screw up the airfield it originally related to.

Tried re-texturing it in AC3D, but the material flag got changed to make it solid. Looked like sea, acted solid. Changed the material flag, got red sea.

I had this effect before when trying to do glass. It was trying to display an alpha texture without one being present. I opened the sea tile and looked. RGB only.

Now I'm stuck. Got an airfield that lets you splashdown and not sink, but it looks like land......

Sea explosions or whatever, cause the plane to buck around and usually tip over. Need to find out if this is a curable problem too.

Whatever, no-one is going to want a patch of sea that looks like the site of the worlds worst shark attack...........

posted 09-12- 11:08 AM               

if not, I'll mail Nat and get him to send it to me. Until then, i'll stick with a green sea, and sort the other litle problems out!

posted 09-12- 03:37 PM               

SuperTextures are referenced to tiles differently than you are maybe used to, but it's not hard to understand, super1.tif goes on terraintile1, so for airfields..
airfield1Super1.tif will go on airfield 1 tile 1.

Let me know if this doesn't help in anyway, mail me with exactly what you want to do and I'll explain what the procedure is.

posted 09-12- 03:46 PM               

you would have to export each terrain tile for the whole terrain. Then in Max or AC3D you raise the tile by a very small amount.. do this for every tile you exported. Then after raising each tile that little bit in Max, you re-import them into the terrain. What you have now is a terrain that instead of being at 0ft is at say 2/5ft, this allows you to export a land tile from a different terrain, flatten it, import it back to that terrain, copy the tile, open the water terrain and paste the copied land tile onto a water tile, this will then appear at 0ft, giving you a land based terrain with a water terrain over the top, meaning.. the PBY will sink through the water and rest on the land tile below it.

To do this right, when you flatten the land tile you should make sure you flaten the corresponding tile to that which yo uwill paste it onto in the water terrain, i.e. you want to put land under MidwayTerrain0 then you should flatten tile 0 from a land terriain.

All that being said you probably wonder about FR, well, the reason Midway is so FR freindly is because barring the 2 snall islands, there are next to no polys. This would also be the case for the underlying land terrain, which aso being flat has a very low overall poly count, so FR would stay very high, also the land need not be textured since you wont see it in anycase.

posted 09-12- 04:08 PM               

The terrain is fun! but trying to land on water isn't

The Sim has some very strong ideas on how water should behave, and none of them are landing friendly. I've thrown up a quick post in General which sums it up. You simply cannot get a satisfactory end result to a landing.

Oh, by the way, what I was trying to do was to replace the airfield texture with water, while keeping it as water. When I changed the material flag, the texture went odd. (red) When I tried to change the flag to that of an ordinary texture surface, it was no longer water.

I presumed there were differences in the way the texture was handled, but it seems not. It sounds like I was probably throwign in wrong flags which had the game confused.....and it wasn't alone.