zoom controls

[.pablo.]

can you PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE add some box that lets me set the amount of zoom to some numerical amount? i REALLY need this for the map i'm working on, as i'm using a topographical map and aerial photos underneath wrptool (using a 3rd party transparent windows tool) and not being able to choose the exact level of zoom is being a real pain! this doesn't seem like it should be such a hard thing to add; please add it as soon as possible!!

[klavan]

I'm with you!
Klavan

[rvirding]

A "quick" workaround is to convert the map and photos to ground textures and then lay them out in WrpTool. This works well. I have used this a number of times myself. The important thing to remember is that while WrpTool can happily work with more than 512 ground textures it can NOT save with more (limitiations of wrp format). So be sure to REMOVE them before saving if you use many at the same time.

It is a BIG WIN if you can use the aerial photos as ground textures. Check out some pictures in the download area of our sight:

http://www.defencegaming.org/

[Lassudrie]

Rvirding your the boss !

But, im not a boss. I dont have any idea of any sort to convert a map in Wrptool textures ! I know how to create textures. But i dont know how to create right squalled textures with a map.
You should make a little tutorial. Please please please ! It would help the community a lot.


P.S (surry for my ugly english)

[rvirding]

Rvirding your the boss !

But, im not a boss. I dont have any idea of any sort to convert a map in Wrptool textures ! I know how to create textures. But i dont know how to create right squalled textures with a map.
You should make a little tutorial. Please please please ! It would help the community a lot.

Sorry I haven't really been online all summer.

OK, I can do that. It is not difficult really and I got it half-automated. I will try to remember everything and get it down. Remind me if you don't hear anything soon.

[rvirding]

OK, this is pretty much how I went about fixing the ground textures.

You need to split your map/photos into 50x50m squares which OFP/VBS uses. It is important that the photo squares match the OFP cell coordinates as they are placed exactly on top of the cells. This can be a problem depending on where you get your DEM data and photos/maps from.

Each square must be of the right pixel size, 256 I think is pretty reasonable (20cm resolution), although you can also do 512x512 or 1024x1024. Each square must then be mirrored around the vertical axis. (I don't know why they did this) Then save the squares as 32 bit TGA files!

For example in my case the aerial photos were of 500x500m areas each 2500x2500 pixels. Fortunately the photos used the same coordinate system as the DEM data I used. I used Photoshop. I first converted each photo into 2560x2560 pixels, then split them into 100 sections which I then saved as separate files. I then used a macro which reads in a file, mirrors the image and saves it again and ran it on all the files in a directory. If I remember rightly I had to save the sections as separate files to be able to use a macro, but I am no Photoshop guru.

The next problem is converting them into .paa files. Yes you can do that by hand using texview or some other tool but this is mind-numblingly tedious and boring. I found a tool called png2pac which can be run from a batch file; despite its name it works on tga files. My simple batch file is

Code: Select all

rem Convert all the files in this directory
  
FOR %%t in (%~1*.tga) DO png2pac %%t 

rem %%~n1.paa 

So after generating all the tga files I run my script and get some coffee.

Some things to remember:
1. Use some logical scheme to name the terrain sections or you will never find them. I ended up with 2300 files!
2. Don't forget that you can only use 512 terrain textures in a wrp file. Wrptool will happily allow you to use many more but you must remember to remove them or else the wrp file is screwed.

I hope this helps. It is all a bit vague as it was a while back when I did it.