Snake Man, theater status?

[ccc]

I think most of us got confused at dazzling progress these days.
Being the supreme producer of many theaters, could you summerize current status?

for example, with the discovery of 512x512 res tile, will it delay the progress of ODS and other theaters? and the making of campaign for various theaters?

guess most of us cant catch your pace these days!!!

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by ccc:
Being the supreme producer of many theaters, could you summerize current status?

Hah supreme lamer more likely

Okay here is the status:

Operation Desert Storm - (128 theater) Internal beta on SP2 but more likely aimed to SP2a builds. All those nasty 128 theater bugs have been eliminated, only thing left are threat circles -> radar high/low at resulting to CTD and multiplayer campaign is hung on "Receiving Units..." part. Terrain tiling has progressed bit as in my tigris tiling (the darn big river from north of Kuwait to north of Iraq) but not really other tiling has done so far. My plan is to apply CATE into the coastline, transitions and features (roads/rivers/cities) and airbases, which as you have seen from some screenshots is very good quality overall (considering it takes 60 seconds to apply). Widowmaker figured out some nice FOG values for the desert tilet-set and now the terrain looks more bright and without the stupid fog, thanks Widmak!. Most of my time has been with the campaign, today we have reasonable activity going on, still very limited ground unit deployment but there are ground forces around Kuwait. No new campaign objectives have been placed, we do have nice target list in Iraq already, the new campaign has 6002 objectives currently. Latest internal beta of ODS has the standard InstallShield one-click-exe installer. Size of the installer is nice 65mb.

Vietnam - (64 theater) basically the good old Nam beta 0.7 datas are taken from eF v1.10 + 108i2RP5 compatible setup and imported into SP2a compatible setup. Nothing really has changed in terms of terrain or campaign objectives. InstallShield one-click-exe installer is ready. I'm still confused about should we go to 128 theater Vietnam or not.

Afghanistan - (128 theater) This is the UnOfficial theater I'm creating. UnOfficial means basically that if it sucks I don't have anything to do with it... if it rocks I'm the only one who made it happen (Muhahah). No seriously, this is unofficial in the terms that I'm just doing it when I have time, but Vietnam and ODS are the PMC official theaters that we will build and support. Afghanistan is auto theater, meaning pretty much everything is made with utils and no hard working sweat has been poured over long nights with this one (of course its a new theater so that wouldn't be possible in the first place). Tile-set is currently taken from ODS which means that it looks identical to ODS. I want to get rid of the tiles and make new ones but don't have the artistic hand/eye myself. Terrain is made with CATE feature and transition tiling and looks fairly good considering the 128x128 segments done in 60 seconds or less. Campaign objectives are fairly ok, we have lot of NoName objectives and also some features are totally missing, for example china road, river, india river, turkmenistan and uzbekistan roads. DEM2L2 is killing me as it does this, it takes days to process china features and for example on Uzbekistan roads it directly crashes, all time, every time. Just last night I worked to create the teams (all seven) according to Op Enduring Freedom and it looks pretty ok to me now. Still the campaign has some problems as I cannot get any activity there, ground forces are pretty much zero, only few air defense units to make the campaign work in the first place. The theater has InstallShield one-click-exe installer and size is not yet set because it uses ODS tiles at the moment.

Europe - (64 theater) was first created by me as tutorial theater, then Javanree informed us that hes working on it so we had support for him in terms of forum. Now he passed the development to whoever whats to continue and we did. The whole theater package was created in about two days from ground up (yes all files). Terrain uses default korean tiles (quick and dirty method for "green" terrain type). Tiling is made with CATE and looks fairly good to me considering again the time it took to made all that happen. Campaign (and TE/IA) objectives are created with my village util and stand in around 5400 or something as of now. Campaign itself was made in hour or so and the historical/futuristic country etc selection is stupid (my ideas) and no ground units except few mandatory to make it work. So far it works rather well of few flights that I had in it, Mig-29's and SU-27's are teasing those NATO forces etc. It has InstallShield one-click-exe installer which weights about 8mb due the fact it don't ship any new tiles. This theater is available for download as of now, I don't tell you where tho (Haha!) but if you look real hard on Europe forum you'll get lucky.

F4ME Middle East - (64 theater, T-Bone) well the tiling is complete, uses compined tiles with ODS and tiling also. I made all files for SP2 setup and its ready as of now, but no installer has compiled yet. You can ask T-Bone for details, he is te boss.

Iceland - uhm ask Widowmaker well last that I heard was hes making new tiles and T-80's are racing towards Keflavik and B-1 bombers are coming from mainland USA to help.

Panama - Malcolm is back, theater is back. Great!

Nevada - I have very limited knowledge of the status, but last that I heard was that some progress have been made since the installer I made some time ago. There was discussion that SP2 compatible setup & installer should be created and I believe I was authorized to do that(?).

Hawaii - Crossups good old Hawaii. I think this is the first theater to get public SP2 compatible download. Very good!

Balkans - Guys are doing internal F4UT beta testing with Balkans, so far it sounds like it works ok (sorry haven't yet tried it out myself).

What else... hmm sorry if I forgot some important theater, but thats the bulk of theaters that comes out of my mind now.

quote:with the discovery of 512x512 res tile, will it delay the progress of ODS

No. Simply, no.

quote:and other theaters? and the making of campaign for various theaters?

I don't know. Lets say that theaters like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Europe that directly are in the position that all options are open in terms of tiles, its possible to use 512x512 resolution H tiles. But thats very new discovery and still we need to test it out if it brings any problems. But yes I'm looking forward to see 512 quality in new Vietnam Jungles and Rice paddies for example.

quote:guess most of us cant catch your pace these days!!!

Yeah including me. Every time I leech new SP2a build I keep my fingers crossed that ODS campaign still schedules flights like it used to hehe. Well everything so far so good, SP2a really kicks ass in theater sense. It is shamelessly easy to click on the theater menu to select new theaters, simply awesome.

I can vision that from year or two from now, you can have screen full of theaters in your Falcon 4 theater menu. You will definitely not run out of "Wars to fight" I tell you that much!

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[ccc]

thanx.. all read this thread should have a clear picture about theater progress!

cant wait the release of FINAL SP2x, then we can move on the release for SP2-compatible theaters.

alright, guess Balkan will be the first, then ODS or Afghanstan..

Asides from 512 res tiles, i also worry about the "mutiple-skinsets-for-squadrons" issue. how can 150+ set of texture be created and applied flawlessly(in ODS)?

[T Bone]

Right now we are looking for some quality assurance tilers for the Iran theater. QAP tiling will commence next month once I get all the tutorials online. QAP team will also help ODS terrain later on. We're planning for a public release in Q3-Q4 this year.

T-Bone
F4ME: Iran Theater

[Snake Man]

Here is the update as of today

OPERATION DESERT STORM
no really, we must let ODS fuzz seddle down first (few days at least) before putting more stuff out.

NEVADA

I can feed you rumours though; Balkans is doing good progress for the 3-4 weeks after SP3 release. Widow is making new tiles for Iceland (I guess one snowflake is not enough heh), Quebec guys are making good progress, they even have alpha installer done etc. For others... I don't have any relevant info sorry.

---
Now we would need MIRROR sites to spread these existing and upcoming theaters. So if you are running a web site or you know some cool site you visit, please contact us that we can arrange the installers to be downloaded someplace to support our DL page.

Tile makers / Texture artists / Paintprogram users.
If you could help us making new tiles, it would mean so much in theater development. It amazing what can be done with tiles and how would the atmosphere change in theater when we got unique/new tiles to use. So if you are texture artist, know how to use paintprogram like PaintShopPro or PhotoShop... please contact us.

uhm I think thats enough for now, I already forgot what I wrote in the beginning of this post

http://www.pmctactical.org/f4/theaters.php

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[ccc]

hmmmmm... nice writing

After we achieved lots automation in theater-making, we need artists BADLY!!

PS: be sure to post this on other falcon4 forums!

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by ccc:
PS: be sure to post this on other falcon4 forums!

Nah, this post will do just fine.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[87th_striker]

Hi guys !

Nordic was put on ice for 2 reasons. The developement of F4 had so much speed, that putting a lot of effort into manual tiling would be a waste. There was made an early installer of it, and TE's was flown from Tromsø to Kirkenes, with a lot of nice rides through Lyngen

The second reason for icing it was that all DEM data was in Lambert projection for the russian part. That meens even more manual labour.....
Miran Clemenc stopped developing Dem2L, so nothing could be done there. Julian.. Codec is now working on implementing (I think) this function into his eminent program Dem2Terrain.

So...a possible way to reopen the project would be to talk to a certain Lennart in Sweden about some tiles, convert them into F4 doables, use CATE to autotile and TACEDIT to generate new campaigns.

But maybe we should do a poll of wich theaters to create first, and then put all our joint effort into each one of them, to lower production time ? I been helping a bit with tiling in Iran, and beta testing ODS, so I think a joint theater program would be the way to go. Opinions ?

[Guard]

Striker, that most be the best idea I`ve ever heard from you )
But I think that was an realy good idea!

[twaelti]

quote:Originally posted by Snake Man:
uhm I think thats enough for now, I already forgot what I wrote in the beginning of this post

You want ARTISTS

I just wanted to thank you guys from PMC heartily. Snakeman, your work is outstanding! (who else is there in PMC doing theatre stuff??? I'm loosing the overview)

My promise: I'll restart Euro-Tiles work as soon as I have my new notebook [so I can be around the wifey - otherwise she get's angry with me hiding in my computerroom :-]