[asheshouse]

You may add and a little of Brittain coast.So this map will be available to use for BoB scenarious too.

I dont want to do BoB scenarios with this map -- Have you not heard? There is another bigger more professional team already working on that.

Start reading up about Battle of France. Its a great campaign. Shame we lost.

[I/JG54_Gringo]

OOO yes i know the Oleg's "bigger" team :lol: .BoB will be out 1 December 2008.

Anyway...
Will you just leave a little bit from the coast of Brittain,like you've print sreened it?
I'm happy to have only 4 killometters of the Brittain's coast.Just want to fly through the channel in my Emil .

[asheshouse]

I've included a bit of Britain for various reasons.
During Battle of France a lot of the RAF flew in from British Airfields, carried out a mission, landed in France to re-arm and re-fuel, carried out a second mission, then flew back to Britain -- for tea.

Bases in Kent are needed for realistic Dunkirk scenarios.
Channel ports bombing missions during Sealion build up
Also for air support over Dieppe in 1942.
Or for bombing missions UK to Rhine.

I didn't want to move the map further west because I would lose complete coverage of the Ardennes, which is where I started with this. So we also have potential for 100% cover of the Battle of the Bulge 1944.

Heck! how many more scenarios do you want. :lol:

I considered moving the map north to pick up Arnhem but that would have put both Arnhem and Sedan too close to the map edges. We are limited to set template sizes for the maps at present.
There was also some thought given to distorting the map scale in the north south direction but I didn't want to lose the realistic scales which I am currently working to.

[asheshouse]

I've been thinking ahead to general texturing.
At the moment things have a distinct tropical look - being based on Singapore.
I'm thinking about swapping the load.ini file for the Northwest Europe one.
Does that seem like a good idea?
Are any problems likely to occur?
Has anyone documented the RGB codes for the different terrain types on the NWEurope map?
Anyone want to volunteer?

[I/JG54_Gringo]

If you mean painting and creating textures.
I may help.I don't want to make my self a pro,but i'm pretty good with the Photoshop .
So if you mean this,give me your MSN or Skype,and we'll talk .

[asheshouse]

Thanks Gringo, but its not painting and making textures that are required.
I intend to access those which are already inherent within the game, probably using the NW Europe map textures. The way this works is that the file map_T.tga is a greyscale image with various shades of grey on each pixel. Depending on which map your are using the RGB number of each pixel defines which texture map is called up to fill that space. So if you change the shade of grey the texture map which is called up will change.

A lot of work has already been done by others on this so I am hoping someone with the knowledge will step up -- at least to offer themselves as a tutor. Otherwise I have a steep learning curve to ascend.

Thanks for the offer though.

[Skunkmeister]

The only problem with map_t is that if you have an RGB value that is not associated to a texture in load.ini the map will refuse to load. So make sure you associate only lines which have textures.

[fly_zo]

Thanks Gringo, but its not painting and making textures that are required.
I intend to access those which are already inherent within the game, probably using the NW Europe map textures. The way this works is that the file map_T.tga is a greyscale image with various shades of grey on each pixel. Depending on which map your are using the RGB number of each pixel defines which texture map is called up to fill that space. So if you change the shade of grey the texture map which is called up will change.

A lot of work has already been done by others on this so I am hoping someone with the knowledge will step up -- at least to offer themselves as a tutor. Otherwise I have a steep learning curve to ascend.

Thanks for the offer though.

... well i don't have time for tutoring but i may offer some advice that made my life so much easier when modding map_T.tga....

first take every shade of gray ( from starting map file) and make swatches ... recognize which shade do what change ( forest....towns...airfields...hills... factories....) ...
changes apply via layers ( so you can easily make adjustments)
and most important of all : use pencil tool .... no blurring is allowed on map_T.tga

hope that will help

Z

[lowfighter]

Asheshouse, I don't really understand what you mean by using northwest europe load.ini..
As Zo said as you have the blank map_T you have to paint it. Then use load ini to ascribe to each painted region a certain texture (cropfields, village, river shore etc).


The color code for different regions is:

R=G=B=0 lowland0
R=G=B=1 lowland1
...
R=G=B=4 midland0
R=G=B=5 midland1
...
R=G=B= 8to 11 mount0 to mount3
R=G=B= 12 to 15 country0 to country3

16-19 city
20-23 airfield
24-27 wood
28-31 water

But again I'm not sure how to help :?

[asheshouse]

Thanks for the tips.
I'm taking notes.
I guess it will become clearer when I start on it but I have to finish all the coastline and rivers first.

I assume that the load.ini file defines which texture is used.

For example in Singapore sload.ini wood0 = forest/summer/Jungle0.tga
but in NWEurope load.ini wood0 = forest/summer/wood0.tga

The RGB shade is related to wood0, wood1, wood2 and wood3. These are in turn related to *.tga files by the text in the load.ini file

so the load.ini file will change the style of the map

I need to change any Far Eastern textures in the load.ini for NW Europe textures
But I need to ensure that all of the RGB shades I use are referenced in the load.ini or it will fail to load.

Is that right?

[asheshouse]

Asheshouse, I don't really understand what you mean by using northwest europe load.ini..
As Zo said as you have the blank map_T you have to paint it. Then use load ini to ascribe to each painted region a certain texture (cropfields, village, river shore etc).


The color code for different regions is:

R=G=B=0 lowland0
R=G=B=1 lowland1
...
R=G=B=4 midland0
R=G=B=5 midland1
...
R=G=B= 8to 11 mount0 to mount3
R=G=B= 12 to 15 country0 to country3

16-19 city
20-23 airfield
24-27 wood
28-31 water

But again I'm not sure how to help :?

This is good stuff -- but I have a question.
24-27 = wood -- That is 4 RGB codes for wood but on all of the load.ini I look at there are 5 types of wood (wood0 - wood4)

Has anyone created a complete list for all of the 256 RGB values?
This would be very useful as a reference.

[Skunkmeister]

For forests, do not look at the [wood] section in the load.ini. Look for the wood entries in the [fields] section.

[Martin98]

Asheshouse, I don't really understand what you mean by using northwest europe load.ini..
As Zo said as you have the blank map_T you have to paint it. Then use load ini to ascribe to each painted region a certain texture (cropfields, village, river shore etc).


The color code for different regions is:

R=G=B=0 lowland0
R=G=B=1 lowland1
...
R=G=B=4 midland0
R=G=B=5 midland1
...
R=G=B= 8to 11 mount0 to mount3
R=G=B= 12 to 15 country0 to country3

16-19 city
20-23 airfield
24-27 wood
28-31 water

But again I'm not sure how to help :?

thx you, long time that i search that

[lowfighter]

Yes, and on all maps I've looked into forest is represented by only R=G=B=24, but anyway the easiest way is go to a map you know where the forest is, and pick the color of the forest then use it painting your own forest. I don't know exactly because I work with gimp and gimp gives me besides R,G, and B also a parameter called value, don't know what that means :? , so easiest and safest just pick the color from a given map. Most of the maps don't have all the colors on them, but there's one Itali_online which has I think all lowland midland moun country and city colors on it. Create maybe as Zo said a palette, or a sample map where you just have all the colors at hand...

For forests, do not look at the [wood] section in the load.ini. Look for the wood entries in the [fields] section.

[asheshouse]

This is my mosaic map, pasted together in Photoshop Elements
I'm only using it to trace coast and rivers at the moment but its already set up to go for road rail towns etc. I have sacrificed an old French 1:300000 road map, which I tore the pages out of.
In addition I'm using 1:400000 for Belgium and Holland and 1:250000 for Britain
These are a good scale for picking out visual navigation features.
I have a full set of maps including the missing strip on the right.
The road maps are overlaying reasonably well on the Google basemap. There are slight differences in the map projections but not great enough to cause problems. The Google map is working as an alignment grid to line up the larger scale road maps since it covers the whole area.
There will be some historical errors due to these being modern maps (1980's) but I'm not going to worry too much about that at the moment.
Maps are being scanned at 150dpi which seems good enough to retain detail.
They are then scaled in Photoshop to fit the MWmap_c scale of 1pixel = 50m

Aim this weekend is to finish the coastline and move onto principal rivers.
First river will be the Meuse, where it all started (due apologies to any Polish readers for that comment). Come to think of it I need to apologise to the Dutch and Belgians as well.
Oh Crap! now I've upset everybody.