[asheshouse]

Nocturnum

In answer to your question -- So far so good. I suspect there will be a practical limit on the amount of detail which can be included but that shouldn't stop at least a basic map being produced which should have a wide range of uses. I only started this about 2 weeks ago so the rate of progress has been reasonable. I still hope to be able to issue a basic map sometime in January.

Managed to sort out my greyscale range problems using the "Tone Curve" tool in Corel Paint, so the channel cliffs heights are about right now. Problems with saving the file in Corel due to the colour mode being altered were sorted when I loaded it back into Photoshop Elements and re saved it as greyscale *.tga

So here is a bit of "in game" topography. The River Meuse near to Liege with the Ardennes in the background. These hills go up to 694m (more bumps than hills).

[Corktip_14]

Not bad at all mate!! Since I'm living there, I can tell you that the relief is pretty good. But it needs lots more of forest!

[asheshouse]

Thanks for the comments Corktip. Its always good to hear from someone with first hand knowledge. Don't worry about the trees. They are still growing :lol:
Because the road and rail cannot exactly copy reality it is better I think to do the forests last so as to fit around the road/rail network.
Next step will be city textures. There's still a lot of work to do on topography but I'll get back to that later.

[Corktip_14]

I agree, no need to put the forest exactly where they are, or where, the important things are the topography and the town and cities. As far as topography's concerned, it looks really good!

[BS8th_Jaw]

can't wait to get my hands on this map to make some early war maps for battlegrnds.

Thanks for doing this mate, awesome!

[Whizz]

This for me is the best mod so far, absolutely amazed and very happy to see this work being undertaken. Thankyou so much for this. For me it's being able to at long last fly a circus or rhubarb, taking off from England and flying over the continent before returning to an English airfield. Absolutely blooming top marks and more. I'll be flying entire tours on this map. Thanks again.

Did I say thanks?

[Guest]

Mate this is truely awsome. It's brought me back from silent hunter into the sky's of europe. Good to be home

[asheshouse]

Its becoming difficult keeping track of all the shades of grey in my master file so I'm going to try working in colour for a while. Its fairly easy to convert this back to grey by selecting each element in turn and wiping over with a grey crayon tool. Its also given me an excuse to knock out a draft of the game map at 4000x2704px which is close to the required greyscale at 2000x1352px

Might be able to see what I'm doing now. The speckled area in the bottom right is my start at plotting the position of minor towns and villages.

[LAL_RONE]

Yellow Zone is the villages and towns ... Are you place all the villages what you want ? You will only built the biggest village ?

[Deadparrot]

I see you changed the coastline in Holland and Zeeland. Looks good. The Sloe near Vlissingen - Flushing is much wider now. I see we don't get up to Arnhem. A pity. Maybe a bridge (to) short.

What do you need?

[asheshouse]

I thought about trying to include Arnhem but if I did it would have been right on the map edge. Its better to be able to fly circuits around a point of interest.

By leaving Arnhem out I have been able to give reasonable coverage south of the Sedan bridgehead, which is arguably the most critical point of the Battle of France. Lots of action for Luftwaffe against French armoured columns and French bombing raids against the bridges. I still want to see a TB3 skinned to look like one of the Armee de l'Air heavy bombers. The ugliest aeroplanes ever built.

I am tempted to think that I have too many minor villages included, but these are important in defining the road/rail network. In fact when you compare what I am including with what is on the existing Ardennes map my density of built up area is about the same.

I will be pressing on with plotting towns this week.

If anyone wants to help it would be useful to put together simple lists of airfields in France. I expect all this exists somewhere but I haven't looked for it yet.

[GerritJ9]

There was a small aerodrome near Souburg on Walcheren- in 1940, some Fiat CR.42s were based there for a short time according to my father. Pre-war, it was only used for civilian purposes. Will try to find out more.

[Deadparrot]

Can you explain more about the FIAT's stationed there. What group did they belong to and what function did they have? A bit far for the Battle of britain I guess.

Souburg (Vliegpark Vlissingen) was home of one of the two flying schools of LVA - dutch Army Aviation Department. I don't know whether they were transferred there in 1939-1940 to stay out of harms way. The other one was on the Isle Texel. That one is outside the map.

There were about 25 training planes of the Fokker S-IV and Fokker S-IX type available. May 1940 they were hidden in orchards around the field. The school staff and students tried to escape to the south with their planes, some ending up in Caen in the Normandy, France. I don't know how many students and instructors crossed over to England. The Polikarpov U-2 is a nice stand in for the S-IV.

[spitfire220]

Have I helped you with my information about Chi

[asheshouse]

[quote="spitfire220"]Have I helped you with my information about Chi