posted 10-22- 11:45 PM               

How I created my WWI aerodrome that is currently in development. Learn about SDOE airfield texture tiles, Untiling, dicing, and blending your new airfield into the existing SDOE terrain.

------------------
-Sv =FC=

WWI in SDOE!

posted 10-23- 12:55 PM               

That is JUST the stuff I need to understand! I have been putting it off 'cause it looks complicated

What I want to learn how to do is come up with a method I can use to determine the upper left hand and lower right hand coordinate values of an airfield super texture in relation to the terrain's super texture. This way, I could create an entire new terrain texture and then extract the exact area to base the aerodrome super texture on. This should be possible...

posted 10-24- 01:58 PM               

The airfield structure stuff I will brush up and mail to you once I have tested it for being 'right'.

What it covers is how to create a new airfield and position it, as well as how to change buildings etc.

p.s. If you find the solution, let me know! This is really the final piece of the terrain puzzle.

THERE IS ONE AREA I DON'T KNOW....

That is the texture alignemnt, and I cannot get this locked down.

I started by adding airfields to Midway, and this was easy. The airfield tiles were replaced by a single tile copied from the terrain. This took the texture of the tile the airfield replaced, no problem. Add in an island to the tile, with a single texture, and it worked. Trouble is, it was fuzzy. Cutting up the island and mapping several textures to it was the answer. As in the OE airfields. I didn't have to worry about making it line up though, since the edges were taken care of by the water. The thing gets worse when the airfield is part of the terrain. The tile can be made in the same way, cut up into at least four pieces, and texture mapped seperately. Then the trouble starts. The edges don't match. Any feature or colour change on the terrain that doesn't match with the airfield sticks out like a sore thumb.

You either have a fuzzy airfield, or you have a clearly visible edge. The original game solution was to have featureless tile edges around the airfield tile. Not a problem on tundra, but a real pain when it's lush greenery.

The only solution I can see, is to paint things up as per SV's tutorial, and to make sure the tiles that surround it have flat colour where the airfield sits.

posted 10-24- 02:39 PM               

Start with a full terrain graphics supertexture file. Now locate where the top left coordinate of the airfield will go, I am not sure how to determine this though, how are airfields located? I imagine they are located like any other child object, so this is a bit of a mystery to me. How do mesh coords relate to texture coords? One might experiment by finding where a given airfield fits on the terrain supertexture and then reverse engineer how the coords relate. Look at the upper left hand corner coords of the airfield texture and then see where the filed is located in the SM file, is there a secret here?

posted 10-24- 04:24 PM               

I forgot what I wrote in my own bloody notes!!!!!

The co-ordinates for the airfields are found in two places:

firstly, they are in the terrain .SM giving the x,y,z co-ordinates for the centre of the tile in which the airfield will reside.

secondly, they are in the airfield .SM itself, with a matching set of co-ordinates. This also gives a range. I believe this is the sphere within which the airfield is visible to the sim engine.

This fixes the co-ordinates for the central point of the airfield tile. All co-ordinates within the airfield are relative to this central point.

Move the co-ordinates, and the airfield moves. Unfortunately, when the surroundings are not flat, your tiles won't fit into the hole in the terrain.....

The other thing to look out for is the airfield 'plug'

From what I can figure, this tells the sim what tile to remove in order to place the airfield. It effectively creates the hole into which you fit the airfield. If you didn't remove a slice, there would be texture conflicts etc.

hope this helps, because, from what you have posted and your tutorial, along with what I have found out, I think we have this sorted.

Diego's problem with PTO can be solved by a careful re-paint.

Adding an airfield to Tundra just requires building the base tile from an existing Tundra tile, chopping it up into smaller pieces and texturing each one to get the required definition, then just set the co-ordinates in the tile, set the startup co-ordinates for the planes, dress the airfield with added in models of hangars etc. and you are done!

I think I'll download Tundra later on, and put my theory to the test again!