Offering help

[smangs]

Hi,

someone from the F4UT team told me that you guys could need some help. Well, here I am, what can I do?

Conan

[smangs]

ah, I kinda meant to help you out wherever help is needed and not really tech support. I am a newbie to terrain construction.

Conan

[kinggeorge]

I'm sure snakeman or other responsibles drop in sooner or later
As for now just d/l a theater of your liking - i'd say ODS or Europe read the fora, or some faq afaik if you want activly help developing or else just report errors/bugs you see in the theaters with the coordinates

[ccc]

tile placed in right folder and named correctly, run Tinstall.exe ? then?

[kinggeorge]

thread deraillers

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by smangs:
Well, here I am, what can I do?

ODS, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Europe needs quality assurance tiling. This means that we used CATE to auto tile the terrain, but there is like generally 10-20% (just a wild quess) errors in the landscape which need to be fixed by hand using terrainview.

In campaign part we need help to LINK the objectives so ground units can move. This is wise to do AFTER the tiling is 100% complete.

Basically on all theaters we need new textures/tiles. Meaning we need texture artists who knows how to use paint program like paintshopro or photoshop.

Thats for starters. Ok so if we cut the BS and get right down to it, what does this MEAN for anyone who wants to help?
It means that for quality assurance tiling I prepare THEATER.L2, H TILES and TEXTURE.BIN which the tilers use fix the auto-tiling errors.

After tiling is complete, the campaign objectives linking commences using tacedit. The actual linking is fast due awesome features Codec implemented into tacedit, but the calculation of the queued links takes hours to complete depending on computer speed. This time the computer is rather lagged, but normal net operations are OK (just don't plan to play falcon or burn cd's on the background).

I'll look into the ODS texture.bin of what kind of mess it contains, who knows the quality assurance tiling pack could be easy to set-up.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[kinggeorge]

Maybe snakeman you can get in contact with sascha directly via email etc. to explain it in detail...
@Sascha I suggest you look into the faq's here...
BTW - are you good at paintshop pro?
I'm doing the transition from the 512 water to the 128 coastal tiles in the balkans...

Snakeman I guess you can use those new 512 transition tiles then for every theater...
http://wuw.stusta.mhn.de/~u001907a/SPstuff/diff.jpg

I don't match the exact water color... but Chris said it looks better than the original even if you clearly see where the water tiles end..
http://wuw.stusta.mhn.de/~u001907a/SPst ... _35_36.bmp

[smangs]

I will look at the info this weekend. Thanks for letting me know. I do not own paintshop pro but I own photoshop 6.5, is that enough?

Conan

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by smangs:
I own photoshop 6.5, is that enough?

Yes if you want to create tiles. If you want to fix the auto tiling errors, then it requires no software you cant download from this web page.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[kinggeorge]

Can't give you instructions on photoshop but maybe you try to help tiling first lie snakeman suggested. Choose a cool theater (ODS or Europe woul dI choose
Just reporting tiling errors (textures not matchin, buildings or whatever) will also be much help i guess

[ccc]

If you own PSP, the first priority should be creating new tiles. It's new tiles that make theater unique. Guess the starting point could be variants of coastline and farm tiles..phew, i simply can't squiz new tiles for theater..Zaggy has posted nice tutorial but..wont work on my side. i "FEEL" the creation of new tile set should work on a larger, say 4x4 tile layout, then cut them into seperate ones, hard to maintain the pattern continuity at all four sides.

[kinggeorge]

how do you cut a pic into 4x4 exact 512x512 pics?

[ccc]

the idea is:

1. get a good aerial shot. divide it with grids of 1km x 1km size, according to the scale of aerial shot.

2. tweak/pick those can be used for replacing default tiles.

The aforementioned Reek.zip files from MSFS resources, are really hard to be converted for use.

[Romolus]

quote:Originally posted by kinggeorge:
how do you cut a pic into 4x4 exact 512x512 pics?

Just set your Grid to a spacing of 512 pixels and then cut your image with the cutting tool snapping to the grid.
There is a tutorial on this site I wrote about working on a 3x3 tileset at once and getting the border right (scroll down at the "Zaggy's Tile Meistering Tutorial" page).
This method can easily applied to any number of tiles.

If there is something unclear about any of the tutorials I wrote, then feel free to ask

[Romolus]

quote:Originally posted by ccc:
the idea is:

1. get a good aerial shot. divide it with grids of 1km x 1km size, according to the scale of aerial shot.

2. tweak/pick those can be used for replacing default tiles.

The aforementioned Reek.zip files from MSFS resources, are really hard to be converted for use.

The problem with areal shots is that there aren't many that are taken perpendicular to the earth. When the angle is too small the perspective and shadows of things are not right. If you take such pictures directly for tiles, the eye is highly trained for spotting perspective things and notices that "something" is wrong.
Sometimes you can't even take parts of a picture to texture forest for example without adding good visible fake perspective with drop shadows and other things to trick the eye.

This is why photos from satelites are much better but unfortunately you rarely get such photos with enough detail to use them directly.

Another thing is that in the real world the perspective changes with the altitude, but since you only can use one texture for both high and low altitudes in F4 a texture that is good looking from high alt may look really flat at low alt.
So you have to find a compromise between those two extremes to get a texture that looks ok at high alt and has enough perspective and depth for low alt.

In my opinion the best you can do is to take a photo taken by a satellite to get the scale and the look of the landscape and make yourself a basic framwork based on that.
Then texture it with forest, grassland, etc. taken from lower alt aerial shot or paint them by yourself to get a nice perspective when flying low (especially when you want to use higher resolution tiles is F4).

But any suggestions to make it less work are really wellcome, since this process depends heavily on getting the right photos which is often impossible.

[Zaggy]

As for Tiles, all i can say these days is forget about painting them... Get your hands on some colour aerial imagery and get stuck into learning how to manipulate that stuff.. Its pretty easy once you get over the inital cuvre... Any one really keen can talk to me about it... Widmak and SM know how to reach me...

And of course get a hold of Photoshop 6.0 or 7.0... Always remember, Photoshop is your friend!!! Its a bitch to learn for a while, but it will reward you!!!

[Zaggy]

[kinggeorge]

I will limit myself on drawing the 128 512 transitions for now - as there are awfully many of themand one takes a couple'a minutes..

[kinggeorge]

The only improvement that makes sense is moving to 512 - as the sense of speed gets much better. Also 128 is a indignity for every modern gfx card
I'm interested in textures only for the high res stuff...
About the water tiles what do you mean? In the balkans there is one texture for all the water and that is already done and implemented... I'm just trying to make the coastal transitions.

If you mean the green water - yes I consider making the green water also high res - but i'm not so sure yet. I think i will stick to just the normal water for now...

[kinggeorge]

Í didn't do the water tiles - they were already at 512 with a defined palette. Every transition has a bit of a color offset no matter what color the water is - i cannot copy paste the water in the coastal tiles 1:1
256 looks good too but there's not enough sense of speed - even in 512 - lookin forward to wids Icelands which will have 1024 effective resolution...

(BTW: Most games use 256-1024 nowadays iirc)

[kinggeorge]

Well i never did any art related stuff in f4 (except the doghouse icons hrhr) so I'm a n00b there

[shaunman]

here is a link where you can get arial photos http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/

just add a colour filter

[kinggeorge]

kewl link but too bad it's b/w

edzim: yes they are really bad - especially the one tzhat calls himself windowmaker - he's really really nasty and always just plays with his own theater hehehe

[Widowmaker]

quote:Originally posted by kinggeorge:
kewl link but too bad it's b/w

edzim: yes they are really bad - especially the one tzhat calls himself windowmaker - he's really really nasty and always just plays with his own theater hehehe

ehmm..
well I also play with other theaters
so..

/widmak

[Widowmaker]

quote:Originally posted by edzim:
This is true.The tutorials needs a serious update.

what is your problem?
perhaps I am inclined to help./

/widmak

[Widowmaker]

quote:Originally posted by edzim:
I'm trying to make new tiles and have a problem that some of them are not properly displayed in game. No idea what I'm doing wrong.

ok you screwed up the paletta's

all tiles in Falcon are ordered in groups
each group needs same paletta for ALL H M L tiles (leave Ttiles alone for testing you don't need to worrie about them for now )

if they don't have the same paletta the will show up strangly.

all is in this manual http://www.pmctactical.org/f4/docs/texture.php

/widmak

[Widowmaker]

quote:Originally posted by kinggeorge:
how do you cut a pic into 4x4 exact 512x512 pics?

if you got photoshop Imageready is delivered with it and cuts up images very well.
I use these on airbases and stuff.

(or all other non-genrically tiled subregions wich can be placed by CATE)

/widmak

[kinggeorge]

No I was too lazy to install Photoshop and then im used to PSP...

Anyway right now i don't need it but maybe i will! thx

[kinggeorge]

You see that on the numbers in the file names - but thats an easy one (from 00 to 0F sometimes some numbers are missing) - i found it out myself - just look at the textures...

[Snake Man]

Guys, this area is about OFFERING TO HELP, now we (you) are moving into techics of Falcon textures.

Please use/start other area about textures, lets stick to the topic; Offer to help in theater development.

ODS v0.4 beta is out for testers/developers by private request. I hope you guys who want to help, can track down the missing tiles in v0.4b so we can create them and move into quality assurance tiling.

Stick to the topic.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[Widowmaker]

quote:Originally posted by edzim:
Well O.K Windowmaker I understand that but it seems for me that I can not use colors thta I want. They must be predefined somewehre.Is it right?
And what is a group?

seems I cannot answer your question here.. pff
so start a other thread about it to please Snakeman, I'll answer there

/widmak

[kinggeorge]

Hows the weather up there wids?
oops sorry snakeman