[lowfighter]

Ahaha, I never thought, that's a very very very good idea, especially if community would join in the effort of creating diferent variants. It would not be so fast as a full automatic, but it would offer the BIG advantage of variety!
Thanks FC! 8) 8) 8)

You can make template actors.statics with villages and cities and use paste from file to put that template at different spots. That's not as fast as full automation but much faster than creating every city from scratch.

Community can even make couple of templates that can be used in maps, some sort of libraries with different cities and villages.

[ClockWatcher]

FC and Lowfighter,

That would be a cracking idea. The library could be like a textures library, a small jpg so you know what group you are using. You could add a small section of groups together like building blocks and end up with a lot of variation.

Nice one!

[FC]

OK, I tried to do what I suggested and after few tries I managed to paste my template into map. So this can work and all that is needed is someone who will make templates.

Here is a picture of village I made by pasting same template couple of times, much faster than placing single objects.



In addition every village and city can be personalized by adding few characteristic objects to make it slightly different than others.

[lowfighter]

I'll give a try next days with a village texture (country, bigcountry etc). I have no idea yet how extended is such a texture till it repeats on a map. So I don't know how much time would it take and how many objects would the corresponding actors.static contain. I hope more people will invest in it...

OK, I tried to do what I suggested and after few tries I managed to paste my template into map. So this can work and all that is needed is someone who will make templates.

Here is a picture of village I made by pasting same template couple of times, much faster than placing single objects.



In addition every village and city can be personalized by adding few characteristic objects to make it slightly different than others.

[lowfighter]

Also even when placing all objects by hand a simple actors.static template containing all objects you might think probable to place would be useful. For example create an actorsvillage.static containing all possible village houses, trees etc, all placed on a small area. Then when you do your villages paste the template near the empty village, pick the objects you want and build the village. It helps because you don't need to scroll thorugh items in the object viewer and you have an overview of all village objects at a glance. I've been using such a thing for mission template building, enhancing towns, in that case I was pasting using Quick Object Tool a template containing all possible town buildings. Or with airfields I have also a template containing all possible airfield objects...

[ClockWatcher]

Road and railway textures, an easy method.

Moved to Tutorials thread

[ClockWatcher]

Using MicroDEM to make SRTM files for map_h and map_T.

Moved to Tutorials thread

[6S.Maraz]

Road and railway textures, an easy method.

Rail and road use the base greyscale RGB values 132, 68 and 32. But these change value when they cross a texture of a different RGB value. I.e.

Very useful post.

The base value for "highway" should be 128, not 132.

I suspect the base value for "rail" is 64 but did not try that yet.

Maraz

[ClockWatcher]

6S.Maraz

Thanks for the info, post amended to reflect the error. If you find any more errors, please let me know.

Cheers

[lowfighter]

Nice guides Watcher, why not pasting them also in the tutorials sticky?

[Deadparrot]

I have made a small grayscale map in Microdem to experiment with. North of Netherlands around Den Helder naval base (50 km). So I am just starting out. (Earlier I did some work in Microdem on the Grebbeberg for Operation Flashpoint).

How did you solve the problem of The Netherlands being partly under sealevel? Is the base number to be set at -10? 10 meters below sea level. There are areas up to -7 that are dry, mostly former lakes.

What determins what area is filled with water. I can imagine that there is a separate file that dertermines where there is water. How to make mountain lakes? Or rivers in mountains without creating Grand Canyon like elevations differences.

[ClockWatcher]

Deadparrot,

IL2 cannot deal with negative, below sea level, heights. You can do the following though.

1. Edited this because after looking at asheshouse post I realised I was talking rubbish. Just set your RGB scale to give -10m a value of RGB greyscale = 0 (this is normaly 0m) when you set the height map colours. You can do this because the water features, sea, lakes and rivers , are determined by map_c, not map_h. Therefore your new sea level will be at RGB = 33, normally +10m, that is if you use my correction curves for MicroDEM. But these may have to be modified again because they are set up for landmasses starting at 0m. You can then have "under sea level" land masses, but his may cause other problems. You only have 256 RGB values in IL2 to decribe land heights between 0 - 4000m, so you may find that on certain maps which have a mix of below sealevel and very high surface features you may be limiting the maximum height of the maps. This is because you have "stolen" RGB values to describe undersea level land heights and IL2 always thinks that 0m is at RGB = 0.

2. Just raise all negative landmasses to sea level, -10 m is not a large difference when flying, and pretend there are no -ve landmasses.

You can have water at any height, this is dictated by map _c. But ensure that your lakes are on level ground otherwise they will look as though they defy gravity. Rivers can be placed going downhill, but if the gradient is too large then the bleed through, water is a semi transparent texture, will allow you to see the land behind it from certain angles.

CW

[asheshouse]

When I created my map_h using SRTM data I set sea level to -10m so as to pick up the topography below sea level.

Later when you make map_c this will define where the coastlines are.

In map_T use map_c as a template to set all the sea area to water texture, otherwise land textures are visible in the water.

When you make map_c use an airbrush tool or similar to soften the edges of the coastline, but use a hard edge tool for narrow rivers otherwise the land merges in too much.

It takes a bit of experimentation. I am still adjusting things.

[LSA]

...The scale, roughly is the following:

0 - 600m: 1 RGB increment in value = 3.75m: RGB range 0 to 160
600 - 1100 m: 1 RGB increment in value = 15.6m: RGB range 160 to 192
1100 - 2080m: 1 RGB increment in value = 29.7m: RGB range 192 to 225
2080 - 4030m: 1 RGB increment in value = 65.0m: RGB range 225 to 255

ie, if
RGB = 2, height = 2 x 3.75m = 7.5m
RGB = 160, height = 160 x 3.75m = 600m
RGB = 180, height = (160 x 3.75m) + (20 x 15.6m) = 912m

Well, mr N developed more precise method, which is pretty straightforward:

c = 0 - 64, h = 0 + (c - 0) * 1, h = 0, 1, ... 64 (i.e. h = c)
c = 65 - 96, h = 64 + (c - 64) * 2, h = 66, 68, ... 128
c = 97 - 128, h = 128 + (c - 96) * 4, h = 132, 136, ... 256
c = 129 - 160, h = 256 + (c - 128) * 8, h = 264, 272, ... 512
c = 161 - 192, h = 512 + (c - 160) * 16, h = 528, 544, ... 1024
c = 193 - 224, h = 1024 + (c - 192) * 32, h = 1056, 1088, ... 2048
c = 225 - 255, h = 2048 + (c - 224) * 64, h = 2112, 2176, ... 4032

where c is an RGB value