2022-03-31T07:15:00Z New editing day has started. Yesterday ran out of motivation again and at least last quarter of the day was just spent idling and reading Ukraine war news etc.
Todays plan is to fix the terrible looking heightmap ocean 0m elevations, including patching in the actual GIMP painted dnieper river depth. This includes importing new satellite texture/mask of course. If all that goes well, then generate new vegetation objects and import them. If all of the above is done, who knows maybe Kherson is ready for release today.
But just after writing the above ran into some Linux issue, I got PMC web hosting Linux server upgraded today and rTorrent is again seeding torrents as usual. Just ran into issue of MySQL running out of ram which I got sorted out.
2022-03-31T07:58:00Z Alright NOW we begin todays arma3 addon editing session 
For the first time I GIMP opened Sat_Mask_*.XCF image which was painted to simple two colors, ocean seabed bottom and grass (I think) mask colors, then copy pasted the water aka ocean seabed bottom color into my actual satellite mask tile PNG image. Reason to merge them like this is the XCF has only single color (grass?) for rest of the area while water is carefully selected coastline. I needed to do this for each GIMP painted coastline mask tile. Hopefully in the future I could come up with some more automated way, hmm maybe ImageMagick XCF something... we'll see.
After got the XCF mask tiles merged and saved to PNG, then ran graphicsmagick mask tile convert bat. This is _run_graphicsmagick_convert_Sat_Mask_PNG_to_BMP_with_white_fix_4x4.bat filename. Then ran the other one, for satellite textures, _run_graphicsmagick_darken_and_picturemap_tiles_4x4_green.bat filename and finally did the L3DT_texture_map.png converting with _run_graphicsmagick_l3dt_8192_texture_map_tiles_4x4.bat filename as well.
Enuff with the fucking file names 
I did ran the satellite texture bat yesterday, but cant recall if I still edited some tiles after that so no big deal re-running the graphicsmagic bat now, just to be sure. Nuke from the orbit, only way to be sure...
Then created global mapper map catalog for the Sat_Mask_??.png images. Then did the long winded create area-something out of images.
And more ...
2022-03-31T08:53:00Z Then leaped forward big time again. Got the final heightmap.asc done, imported it to L3DT and leveled the airfield runways, yes again because this is now a brand new heightmap with the proper dnieper water elevations fixed. Then copied latest Terrain Processor TPP template files for that cool CUP chernarus forest with bushes and rocks. Started terrain processor while I added Ukraine war startDate to config.cpp file.
Terrain processor finished, generated 1,336,571 objects total.
Not much, but guess its 40km terrain with very thin forest tree line coverage, so yeah. Hey, at least it was over a million 
Then deleted objects layer file, loaded pmc_ukraine_kherson terrain builder project up, deleted all raster layers for satellite mask and texture, imported new heightmap and went to mapframe properties ... when I realized that uh oh! p:\pmc\ is symlinked to TAIWAN terrains, yikes! 
Well I switched the symlinks to Ukraine once again and went to mapframe properties again and now it was all OK, rebuilt terrain, saved project and restarted terrain builder, just in case.
2022-03-31T09:16:00Z Started terrain builder import satellite mask.
2022-03-31T09:20:00Z Finished importing mask, heh that was fast, these cute little 40km terrains 
2022-03-31T09:27:00Z After importing satellite texture, terrain builder started importing new vegetation objects.
2022-03-31T09:38:00Z Terrain builder started generate layers. Getting it done.
2022-03-31T10:11:00Z Finished generating layers.
Used convert layers PNG to PAA fast bat to convert some imagery.
Then (just in case) did the roads.shp saving, this dev diary says nothing about it and I had bugs/issue report about it, but I think it got done yesterday already, oh well now for sure its done.
Also noticed that RoadsLib.cfg was not symlinked, who knows maybe this was the issue with the roads in-game test heh.
Then ran all the WRP and Data separating stuff, moveObject re-pathing layers RVMATs etc.
2022-03-31T10:25:00Z Started pboProject binarizing, almost done.
2022-03-31T10:38:00Z And done, yeah time for arma3 in-game test...
Unfortunately I messed one step up on the ocean bottom seabed heightmap editing process, all the flooded areas water creeping to land is still there, nothing really changed. Hmm I need to debug what went wrong in the initial tool pipeline I came up with just day or so ago.
A little bit bummed out about this kind of feeling like aww, blah, I'm off to do something more interesting
Continue reading page 5, previous page 3 or back to Dev Diary PMC Ukraine Kherson root page.
PMC Ukraine Kherson: Changelog, Dev Diary, Screenshots. Back to PMC Terrain's page.