ReadL2 Util

T_Rex · Post by **T_Rex** » 2002-03-15 16:37:00

On algorithms:

First, my math skills suck.

Algorithms seem like math, so this probably won't be helpful at all.

However, I'm pretty good with logic (believe it or not!)

Sorry if some of this is oversimplified - I'm kinda a simple guy.

Second, let's define the "mess." Multiple river/road crossing in a single block are bad, right? But, in reality, chances are there will be at least one crossing in any given block. So the issue is finding the balance, right?

Ok, we start with a block that has rivers and roads on it. It sounds like CATE knows if there's an E-W orientation or N-S. I think the problem comes where there's a N-S road and a N-S river - too many tiles are right next to each other. So first, I think we need to figure out where the river is in relation to the road on each edge. So, if the river is E of the road on the N edge and E of the river on the S edge, then no crossing at all - they parallel each other. If the river is W of the road on the N edge but E of the road on the S edge, then there should be one crossing, maybe right in the middle.

Is this kinda what we need to work out?

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-15 16:50:00

Yes, maybe, but the problem is that I have (at this time) tiles with road OR river (not both at the same time), or bridges N-S or E-W.

I don't know if there are other tile types that could help us here.

Regards.

T_Rex · Post by **T_Rex** » 2002-03-15 17:00:00

quote:Originally posted by Skyfire76:
Yes, maybe, but the problem is that I have (at this time) tiles with road OR river (not both at the same time), or bridges N-S or E-W.

I don't know if there are other tile types that could help us here.

Regards.

Ok, now I'm confused. With bridges, it sounds like you plot the path of the features. If the river is E-W, then where it crosses with a road, the bridge should be oriented N-S. But I think I'm missing something big about this discussion....

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-15 17:15:00

OK, I was not clear, I think

What I have for each tile is some "flags" that will tell me where (E-S-W-N) a river or road will enter the tile.

Now, if I see that I have a tile with an E-W river and N-S road, I'll put a tile with the correct bridge. (same thing for N-S river and E-W road).

But I don't know what to do (other than choose the road only), if I have, for example, a river T junction (N-S-W) and a road E-W.

Moreover, if you look at SnakeMan's screenshots, I think that problems are the most obvious when we have several tiles river/road next to each other.

Was I clear this time ?

Regards.

T_Rex · Post by **T_Rex** » 2002-03-15 17:24:00

Oui, tres bien... je pense.

[Wife's relatives will be visiting soon, and I'm trying to "brush up" on the whole French thing.]

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that any time a road parallels a river, there should really be at least one "regular" tile separating them. This allows for bends in the river so you can have it cross the road and have a bridge.

Getting back to your example, though, I think it'll be helpful to start with a simple example, then get more complicated. So, you have a river with three forks that go N-S-W and a road that goes E-W. Well, I guess the first thing would be to decide if the road is N or S of the river on the W side. Then, one way would be to force the road to come straight until it hit the N-S portion of the river, put a E-W bridge, then proceed to wherever it leaves the tile on the E side. Now, that can be a bit more complicated if the road enters at the far S of the W side and leaves in the far N of the E side. Then we might need to figure out if it crosses the river twice.

Does this make some sense?

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-15 17:30:00

I think that what you don't understand (unless it is me LOL

) is that I don't put bridges wherever I want.

I just put such or such tile number.

So, OK, for example, if there's a tile with a road and a river parallel, I could use this tile, but the problem would then be that I would have to know which one (river or road) was more to the, say, north than the other in the previous tile.

To be clear, let's say that we have two tiles, the second being to the east of the first. You surely wouldn't want to have the 1st one with a road to the north and a river to the south, and in the second one, the other way round

Regards.

T_Rex · Post by **T_Rex** » 2002-03-15 17:37:00

Dangit! I feel like a real idiot (again). I see what you're saying now. I'm getting two different (but related) situations confused.

I'm going to do more thinking and less talking...err posting.

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-15 17:39:00

Hehe, you have the whole week-end to come up with a good idea (I'm leaving now).

I'm counting on you, don't disappoint me

Regards.

PMC Youtube channel · Post by **Snake Man** » 2002-03-15 20:23:00

Ok guys we have the weekend here to come up with good auto tiling algorithm/system for Skyfire.

Anything?

PMC TFW
Snake Man

Widowmaker · Post by **Widowmaker** » 2002-03-17 10:07:00

hmm
I'm thinking..

right now as always i'm using CATE diffent
then intended.. by doing that i cam up with this one..

When rivvers are a mess it is usually becuase rivers are Wide there
or because there is a Lake

insted of tiling 2 parelel rivers
it shouls tile 2 Seatile(or any other full watertiles)(specific offset)(Xtile).
later we have to place coasttiles in a transition pass

so basically
2 paralel tiles become 2 Xtiles
horizontally or vertically
as slanted

corner tiles are always to be considered paralel to any other tile

(as far as i can see now)
perhaps SM can ilustrate this with some TV screenies

Widmak

Zaggy · Post by **Zaggy** » 2002-03-17 10:34:00

I have nothing to add, just wanted to make the 250th post to this thread...

Heheheheheheee

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-18 09:41:00

Not many ideas, I see

Meanwhile, another version is out, for autotiling and autoleveling airbases

Regards.

PMC Youtube channel · Post by **Snake Man** » 2002-03-18 09:59:00

Airbase Tiling & Leveling is reality in CATE v3.20 !

Check out these screenshots, the airbases are done with CATE - no human work needed.

All we need to do is to export airbases from Tacedit into the CSV file, then CATE reads the L2 and this airbase CSV file and by the user configured airbase lists it will tile the appropriate tiles and levels it to be totally functional airbase without any "stairs effect" as we seen on untiled bases. Simply beautiful.

Another salute to Skyfire!

PMC TFW
Snake Man

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-18 10:14:00

SnakeMan : can you confirm what WidowMaker says in the above post (about river mess) ?

Maybe he has a point, but somewhat I think that there are more problems than just this.

SnakeMan again : can you try to define airbases larger than 6 tiles and test that ? And can you send me the CSV file for Vietnam ?

At last, what is left to do with CATE ?

- Clean the river mess (I have few hopes left for this

)

- Transition tiling : I have the basic idea in mind, I think, but what bothers me is that if I do that before autotiling, features autotiling could break transitions, and vice-versa (transitions could break features autotiling).

- Full tests by as many people as possible, to find bugs ...

- Other features ?

Regards.

PMC Youtube channel · Post by **Snake Man** » 2002-03-18 10:41:00

quote:Originally posted by Skyfire76:
can you confirm what WidowMaker says in the above post (about river mess) ?

Yes and no. I'd say the river mess is mostly just because rivers get messy with road, if we leave roads out then the rivers are mostly OK. But yes its true that there are some lakes which will be projected as rivers.

quote:can you try to define airbases larger than 6 tiles and test that ?

Yeah will be adding the 505 Wonsan there to see how I can get it tiled etc.

quote:And can you send me the CSV file for Vietnam ?

All right, I'm on it.

quote:At last, what is left to do with CATE ?
- Clean the river mess (I have few hopes left for this

We need to put our heads together and crack this son of a river mess.

Its just a good algorithm to sort out the things. I'll be digging my directories if there is anything useful, I remember seeing some experimental auto tiling perl from Julian back in the early theater days. Hopefully that gives some additional ideas.

quote:- Transition tiling

This would be the last after the auto tiling is fully working. Of course we could cheat and fix this now, to leave the rivers still messy... it would be quite nice on the overall terrain. But I'd like to get river mess first then transitions/coasts.

quote:- Full tests by as many people as possible, to find bugs

After few other tests on airbase leveling, the v3.20 will arrive to our downloads section. Then we can have more people working on it.

Btw you might want to add some (this?) forum link into the readme file, maybe the file spreads to some forgotten soul who has not visited here yet.

quote:- Other features ?

Nah we are just calmly waiting the river mess (ultimate achievement award for CATE) to be completed. Then we might think of something.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

T_Rex · Post by **T_Rex** » 2002-03-19 16:33:00

I had another idea. (Not sure if its a good one or not....)

Any way to have CATE load the texture.zip and .bin so we can look at the textures as we're deciding how to arrange them within CATE? I s'pose we could open TV and the PCX pallette that way, but it might be easier to do it within CATE.

But then, I don't have to code it, so I don't know what's easy and what's not.

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-19 16:36:00

Sorry, but as I already said before (maybe not here though), I've no way of loading that with VB ...

Regards.

T_Rex · Post by **T_Rex** » 2002-03-19 16:45:00

Hmmm...then maybe we can get whomever (Miran? Julian?) did TV to split off the pcx viewer portion into another little utility. Its not that big of a deal - I can either use TV or the browse feature in PaintShop.

One of these days I'll have a good idea!

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-19 16:52:00

This was a good idea. As I said to you at Frugal's, this was an idea for an UI (in order to generate the conf file) ...

Regards.

T_Rex · Post by **T_Rex** » 2002-03-19 16:56:00

You expect to 1) read every one of your posts and 2) remember them!

What next? That I pay attention to my boss?! Sheesh - you French are awfully demanding!

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-19 16:59:00

I thought you already knew that (with a french wife and, most of all, a french mother-in-law)

Regards.

PMC Youtube channel · Post by **Snake Man** » 2002-03-19 18:29:00

quote:Originally posted by T_Rex:
I had another idea. (Not sure if its a good one or not....)
Any way to have CATE load the texture.zip and .bin so we can look at the textures as we're deciding how to arrange them within CATE?

Sorry to be blunt here but... bad idea.

quote:I s'pose we could open TV and the PCX pallette that way, but it might be easier to do it within CATE.

Yes this is the way. Its just as easy to open terrainview pcx view than open/configure texture.bin with CATE. It just complicates CATE too much in the code side and we don't need that.

Its very much the same I asked Skyfire earlier today: Can we have 4 byte L2 saving option... it would just make users mouse hand one move/click easier and make Skyfires coding fingers 100x sorer & CATE source longer

PMC TFW
Snake Man

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-20 09:22:00

LOL ! In fact, I wonder how I'm still able to post messages here

)

regards.

PMC Youtube channel · Post by **Snake Man** » 2002-03-20 22:25:00

News on Auto Tiling at CATE v3.23

I suggested that we make a compromise with the feature (road/river/city) auto tiling and end all rivers that have no connection.

No connection you say? Yes meaning that if we have river "mess" which leaves lot of rivers with tiles ending to road without a bridge or in some generic mess area. Okay time for screenshots as I cannot speak.

This is the example segment here:

Okay now this was it before:

That red tile is just my configuration and korean tileset MISSING error, never mind that. But yes you can also blame it on the old tiling routine. Now
Here is the new "leave no rivers un-connected" idea:

Unbelievable, huh!

PMC TFW
Snake Man

PMC Youtube channel · Post by **Snake Man** » 2002-03-22 10:47:00

The good stuff just keeps coming.

Let me introduce you into a wonderful world of Transition Auto Tiling.

Coastline before:

Another bow to Skyfire, we have a winner here!

PMC TFW
Snake Man

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-22 10:59:00

Thanks, SnakeMan

Some precisions :

- It works great, except on the borders of the terrain (i.e. the first and last two rows and columns around the terrain). I don't know why, yet at least.

- It works great as long as you apply that on simple terrains. I think that if you try to do this on some areas where you have three of more types of terrain close together, it will probably result in a mess because CATE won't know which transition to apply.

Regards.

Widowmaker · Post by **Widowmaker** » 2002-03-22 11:41:00

Skyfire for president..

Really good job

Widmak

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-22 13:26:00

ROFL !

You're aware that in a little more than one month, France will elect its new president ?

Maybe I should apply ?

Regards.

T_Rex · Post by **T_Rex** » 2002-03-22 14:50:00

NO! Don't get elected President!! They won't let you work on CATE if that happens!! Or, since you'd be the ruler of the country, maybe you could have a Presidential Order that makes it France's National Objective to make F4 Terrain making as easy as possible....

Hmmm...maybe this President thing isn't so bad after all....

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-22 17:03:00

Yeah, good idea

First new law will be : "Falcon4 will be available for everyone for free".

Regards.

T_Rex · Post by **T_Rex** » 2002-03-22 17:09:00

I just remembered InfoGrames is a French company, non?

I'm starting to see a plan!

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-03-22 17:21:00

Hehe, you're right

Regards.

PMC Youtube channel · Post by **Snake Man** » 2002-03-23 04:39:00

Version 3.31 have been added into the downloads page. Be prepared to be overwhelmed the rules and power of CATE!

First theater to see CATE power was Europe and it looks rather good considering it took whole 5 minutes to process.

There are still some work to be done on few items, but we are now moving into the "fine tuning" part as all major features are in.

If I only would have CATE back in the early Vietnam days... sheesh.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

87th_striker · Post by **87th_striker** » 2002-03-23 22:35:00

Lake issue not solved, I guess ?

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-04-03 07:03:00

No lake issue not solved (sorry for the late answer), and until someone comes up with some idea about how to solve it, this won't change : the idea, I suppose, would be to say if there is a river here on this tile and here on this other tile then tile a lake. I'm opened to suggestions

BTW : I may have another idea for rivers. This won't solve the mess, probably add some. Anyway, I could try, between two waypoints of a path to see if there is a path where altitude always goes down from one tile to another. Without analysing the whole path, I can at least easily choose, for each step, the tile where altitude is the lowest. Would it be interesting ?

Last thing : SnakeMan, could you test saving a BMP on a 128 theater ? There are two parameters in the BMP header that are hardcoded (I don't know how they are calculated), and I'd like to know if they're correct for a 2048x2048 bitmap.

Regards.

PMC Youtube channel · Post by **Snake Man** » 2002-04-03 11:16:00

quote:Originally posted by Skyfire76:
if there is a river here on this tile and here on this other tile then tile a lake.

Sounds good to me. In that case you should tile coastal tiles into the two river tile coordinates, facing each other.

Another thing worth to try is to reduce the roads, I can send you some screenshots for example road clutters but basically its the same thing as the just mentioned river example... where we earlier tile coastal tiles for two rivers, in roads we kill the other road.

In falcon there is no use for having two roads parallel to each other. they are just clutter.

quote:the tile where altitude is the lowest. Would it be interesting ?

Definitely, lets test that but not make it as permanent code yet, how about that?

quote:saving a BMP on a 128 theater ? There are two parameters in the BMP header that are hardcoded (I don't know how they are calculated), and I'd like to know if they're correct for a 2048x2048 bitmap.

Well I did not have ODS 128 theater conf file made yet so I used the default file, it created the bitmap ok but the colors were kind of black or dark blue. But all features were in correct places and altitudes too, so I'd say it works perfectly if we just configure new rule file for ODS terrain.

If you need more testing, just let me know.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

87th_striker · Post by **87th_striker** » 2002-04-03 11:38:00

Solving the lake issue can be tried, but we definately need more lake tiles. (Zaggy ?) I guess we have to run a lake river solver several times to get a good cleanup. I guess the problem is somewhat similar to the paralell roads issue.

So the rule has to be that a river should follow a direction, merge with another river, a lake or the sea. If you try to do Snake Man's home country, you'll find that everything is very flat and has thousands of loose ends on the rivers.

Sooooo, if several river tiles are placed close in an unstructural way, a lake should replace them. That might solve 75 % of the issues.

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-04-03 11:44:00

quote:Originally posted by SnakeMan
Sounds good to me. In that case you should tile coastal tiles into the two river tile coordinates, facing each other.

Erm, yes, but I need more conditions than just there is a river on this tile ! Ideally, something like there is a river to the E on this tile, a river on the W on this tile, then tile a lake (or something like that). At this time, I don't have these basic conditions to start trying tiling lakes.

quote:Another thing worth to try is to reduce the roads, I can send you some screenshots for example road clutters but basically its the same thing as the just mentioned river example... where we earlier tile coastal tiles for two rivers, in roads we kill the other road.

Again, I need more rules, or at least examples to see if I can figure out rules.

quote:Definitely, lets test that but not make it as permanent code yet, how about that?

LOL, that's a new concept to me : non permanent code

Seriously, what should take precedence : try to avoid roads, or try to more or less follow slopes ?

quote:Well I did not have ODS 128 theater conf file made yet so I used the default file, it created the bitmap ok but the colors were kind of black or dark blue. But all features were in correct places and altitudes too, so I'd say it works perfectly if we just configure new rule file for ODS terrain.

If you need more testing, just let me know.

No, it's OK, I just wanted to know if a correct BMP was created. BTW : the default color for all undefined tiles is black ...

Regards.

Skyfire76 · Post by **Skyfire76** » 2002-04-03 11:47:00

quote:Originally posted by 87th_striker:
Sooooo, if several river tiles are placed close in an unstructural way, a lake should replace them. That might solve 75 % of the issues.

I hear you but "several tiles close in an unstructural way" is far from being a strict rule I can follow or code ...

Regards.

PMC Youtube channel · Post by **Snake Man** » 2002-04-03 14:13:00

All of these are cosmetics, true fix need to be made for the transition and feature mess.

Unfortunately I don't have quick solution to offer

PMC TFW
Snake Man