2022-04-03T16:17:00Z New editing day has started. New editing YEAR actually 
Yes it was november 2021 when I was editing PMC Poland Hulskie terrain last time, actually it was the so called first time when this terrain was created heh.
Today I just released PMC Ukraine Kherson terrain less than half an hour ago and now I'm jumping right next to the next terrain in line to be released and that is hulskie
Just finished reading this whole dev diary, I cannot say how valuable such detailed play-by-play record is, removes all doubts and such things.
As usual after returning to a terrain project after a long time, it will start with arma3 in-game check, I need to get my bearings, well beyond what this dev diary just told me.
Created new arma3 startup bat file for real world data terrain testing: poland. Started arma3 up and first thing I see is that terrain builder mapframe properties surface mask pixel resolution is 512 or maybe 1024 dunno which, that causes the buggy mapview look when zoomed out. Its a known arma3 bug.
Wrote a bug report about it but it would require satellite texture/mask generate layers and new binarization shuffle and I'm not very happy to do that, I mean we have lived with this bug for over a decade and nobody has been complaining, for this first release I don't think its worth the time to fix as it would take a better part of the day to do so counting everything it includes.
Dev diary earlier listed that satellite imagery had so many clouds you can easily see my GIMP clone stamp tool brush editing work in the zoomed out satellite... however, I cant see shit, I'm looking and looking... and cannot spot one single location where there are bad obvious stamping tool work, hmm odd.
The roads.shp is broken now, need to take the global mapper exported roads.shp, import it to terrain builder and then export it out again to save it in such format that arma3 will read it. This really pisses me off.
At this point added that terrain builder roads.shp import/export step into the real world data tool pipeline. Also created the order of releases so all I have to do is to proceed from the list step by step, fix stuff and release. Its like lazy dude's guide to release all PMC terrains hehe.
Its good to have a roadmap so to speak now, nothing has changed I knew these terrains will be released but now there is clear list of edit/release terrain titles to follow, don't need to figure out what to do next, just have to look top of the list and get it done. Life is so easy
Was checking out the terrain in 3D world, immediately noticed how badly the satellite mask ground detail textures (GDT) fits into satellite texture, for example in forest the GDT is brown dry kind of thing but satellite as seen from the space, is all dark-ish green color.
It looks quite bad... but honestly trying to match mask into texture is not a small thing to accomplish. Also in theory, kinda, the green image you see from space (satellite imagery) are the trees, in the forest bottom, in theory, you should not see the trees... but yeah life ain't that simple, heh.
It bothers me that the roads.shp is broken, so I'm going to fix that first before proceeding to do more in-game testing.
Then removed ukraine subst on P:\ drive and substed/mounted poland. Checked out the status of roads.shp and seems like at least proper RoadsLib.cfg has been symlinked, so that is in order. Guess it just needs that arma3 bug fix to terrain builder import/export roads.shp file.
Started terrain builder and loaded hulski project up, inspected satellite texture and I cannot find any airfields in it even though my tool pipeline stopped at airfield runway poly line creation point. Of course you don't need to do what you don't need to do so heh.
Hulski uses 4 x 4 grid tile files for object generation, its funny to see that many object layers
Below screenshot also shows a very bright european woodland type satellite mask.
Then I proceeded to import roads.shp file and export it out right away, this now fixed the broken arma3 roads.shp when its exported from global mapper like hundreds of times before, prior to 2022.
Next pboProject binarized pmc_poland_hulskie_data addon, as that is where the roads.shp are. Then just back to arma3 to take another look with roads fixed now.
I got a little side track and investigated & debugged that roads.shp broken thing... unfortunately I found out that 2017 created PMC Afghanistan Asadabad terrains roads.shp work just fine, no issue there. Of course this is so million years into the past that I cant be sure if those roads.shp were saved out of terrain builder or global mapper but I'd like to think it was global mapper.
Anyways just wanted to get some base line of which is the last PMC terrain that works. Taiwan/poland terrains roads.shp from 2021 don't work, even mexico terrains from 2020 don't work. But 2017 is way too long to the past to make any kind of comparison as I simply cannot remember that far, maybe it was terrain builder, maybe not.
Also back when I created mexico terrains in 2020 I have bug report about narrow dirt silly looking roads, so it looks like the bug appeared the first time in last quarter of 2020, after my current windows 8.1 and global mapper install. Hmm so maybe there is something wrong with the global mapper settings, dunno.
2022-04-03T17:52:00Z Was editing like my hair is on fire and just realized I'm hungry as hell, gotta go cook some food and eat.
2022-04-03T18:47:00Z Feeding time is over, back to editing Hulskie.
Finally got around to that arma3 in-game check and roads.shp is now fixed, good. However there was an issue with the roads, they get carved into the terrain edges like in below screenshot.
That is fairly minor issue right on the terrain edges. I wrote bug/issue report about it, it will be fixed. Other than that I did not see any further issues in arma3 check.
For what it is, this terrain is ready for release, I don't know what else to fix within this context, meaning needing to do huge shuffle for dozens of gigabytes of file processing.
Continue reading page 5, previous page 3 or back to Dev Diary PMC Poland Hulskie root page.
PMC Poland Hulskie: Changelog, Dev Diary, Screenshots. Back to PMC Terrain's page.