Theater developmental notes - The Tile's
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well sorry but PMC is a chaotic place also it is for many flavors. To find your way there u need months just looking around… and why is that sure there is the wiki but some stuff are old and lot’s of tips and tricks and discussions are on threads on specific theaters. So for some even old guys here those things are unknown as it is proven to be.
Also lot’s of attempts are one man show… well one man can’t do and remember and know everything on the subject.
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Thank’s Guy’s & Gal’s…
Post #1 updated again…;) (Old\New info from some Falcon Coder’s…HEHEHE)
@ALL…Please feel FREE to ask question’s or contribute answer’s to the thread…but,please no EGO antic’s here.
Just share what we may or may not know.That is the only Correct way to do it…demer
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Nice thread so far, but I have questions
Can a set contain mixed res tiles, or do they all have to be the same res?
If not can different sets use different res?
If we use different res is the actual ‘tiling’ in world space still a pure equal sized square grid? Ie the higher res tiles just appear crisper as you fly over them?
Is there a common grid density people adhere to? Ie 500m per tile for instance?
Are there any polygonal mesh constraints to think about, or is uv mapping of the main terrain all handled by the engine?
Do we build terrain meshes and let a tool chop that up too into manageable chunks?
I was a big fan of Tornado back in the day and it’d be cool to make a little map with similar campaign style, but richly packed with lots of details etc. They were only about 100nm square iirc… Fantasy removes lots of constraints too, vs copying something.
Lastly, any tools to go from Max to terrain mesh? Or conversion processes?
Thanks
Dave
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@Mr:
Nice thread so far, but I have questions
Can a set contain mixed res tiles, or do they all have to be the same res?
If you mean can they be different resolution sizes, yes they can be different/mixed.
@Mr:
If we use different res is the actual ‘tiling’ in world space still a pure equal sized square grid? Ie the higher res tiles just appear crisper as you fly over them?
Normally, the higher the res, the better the quality. BUT, that all depends on IF the tile artist does good work. You could essentially have higher res tiles but they could look bad, depending on whether they are sloppy or not, if you know what I mean
@Mr:
Is there a common grid density people adhere to? Ie 500m per tile for instance?
1KM
@Mr:
Are there any polygonal mesh constraints to think about, or is uv mapping of the main terrain all handled by the engine?
Do we build terrain meshes and let a tool chop that up too into manageable chunks?
Not sure exactly what you’re asking. Terrain tilers build the tiles at whatever res they want, say 512x512, so he/they determine the size of the tile artwork
@Mr:
Lastly, any tools to go from Max to terrain mesh? Or conversion processes?
To get started and build a mesh, you need to get Dem2Terrain. You need to get the Geo Data and also the country E00 data, roads, water, etc and build the mesh with Dem2Terrain. You may want to go to PMC and check out the tutorial on theater building. Some things are outdated but there’s enough to get you going.
After that you would want Sakis’s Terrain Editor.
I’m in a rush, so I hope I understood what you are asking. Making a theater, the terrain mesh, the terrain tile art work is a very huge job.
RAM22
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Hmmm, had a read over at Monsters Tools site, the format makes sense now.
64/128 Segment theatre size options, possibly even 256.
A segment = how many tiles? 16 by my calcs, makes Korea theatre 1024km x 1024km.
It looks like the height field data is 16bit and hard coded to feet, so 0-65536ft!
It also appears the grid is a pure square grid with each tile uv mapped to fill it, so a tile per polygon basically.
I’m guessing the grid size is hard coded at 1km which is pretty wide, that is the biggest shame overall. Even Tornado had higher poly density hehe
Such a shame that we can’t increase poly count since getting nicer hills would be niceSo it seems like we will be stuck with mainly updating textures.
PS I have a 3ds max script that pretty much makes the Topo map format from a mesh. Not sure how useful it might be. I’d probably model terrain in max, possibly even paint tiles. The lod0 format is quite basic to script a raw hex output.
Just gutted it’s only 1km res, but such were the limitations back in the 90s. Im certainly not gonna get tight low-level flying looking nice (ie Mach Loop) Time to see how rivers/bridges and buildings etc are defined… Is it all x/y coord based in essence?
Looks like a fairly flat inland area is best if you want it to all feel as realistic as possible
Perfect for a Tornado mini map
Thanks
Dave
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@Mr:
Hmmm, had a read over at Monsters Tools site, the format makes sense now.
64/128 Segment theatre size options, possibly even 256.
A segment = how many tiles? 16 by my calcs, makes Korea theatre 1024km x 1024km.
It looks like the height field data is 16bit and hard coded to feet, so 0-65536ft!
It also appears the grid is a pure square grid with each tile uv mapped to fill it, so a tile per polygon basically.
Just gutted it’s only 1km res, but such were the limitations back in the 90s. Im certainly not gonna get tight low-level flying looking nice (ie Mach Loop) Time to see how rivers/bridges and buildings etc are defined… Is it all x/y coord based in essence?
For more format info and terrain/theater creating info at all, … look at the PMC WIKI
(already suggested by RAM22)
http://tactical.nekromantix.com/tactical/wiki/doku.php?id=falcon4@Mr:
PS I have a 3ds max script that pretty much makes the Topo map format from a mesh. Not sure how useful it might be. I’d probably model terrain in max, possibly even paint tiles. The lod0 format is quite basic to script a raw hex output.
I would be interested in that 3ds max script, if it works with max 2011.
@Mr:
Looks like a fairly flat inland area is best if you want it to all feel as realistic as possible
Take a look at the GUAM theater.
https://www.benchmarksims.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?63-Pacific@Mr:
Perfect for a Tornado mini map
For a mini map, uhmm maybe.
BTW. what was the area for Tornado (I guess Tornado was also a jetsimulation???)And BTW. again, a perfect terrain for a Tornado would only be a europe 128 segmented theater, IMHO.
Cheers,
LS -
A perfect terrain for Tornado would be Europe in 128 hehe, but it’s just so gutting that the 1km terrain limits you so much to doing the tight valleys and fairly hilly terrain the Tornado was designed to ingress and egress through. Well, you could make them still, but it wouldn’t look so appealing without some seriously well made tiles with lots of shading in them to try fool your eye as much as possible, I might give it a try just in 3DS Max to see how 512px tiles might look on a bit of UK valley I have modelled.
Tornado was a sim back in the early 90’s, it was about 200Nm square I think, so about right for a ~ 500km x 500km 32 segment theatre I think…
It was pretty basic. Pretty much flat for anything that was positioned, and then the hills were about 500m grid mesh (so not great), and only vehicles could traverse onto them. The end result was kinda odd but it worked really well in my view. The campaigns were certainly the strength of Tornado too, but the small maps made it relatively fast to play.
Uhhh there really has to be a way to get the grid size down. Even 500m would be amazing (even if the tile texture was spread over the 4 squares, 512px per 1km feels ok) as it’d look 4x more detailed!
Downloading F4 source code now, lets hope it has lots of commenting to see how things work hahaDave
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@Mr:
A perfect terrain for Tornado would be Europe in 128 hehe, but it’s just so gutting that the 1km terrain limits you so much to doing the tight valleys and fairly hilly terrain the Tornado was designed to ingress and egress through. Well, you could make them still, but it wouldn’t look so appealing without some seriously well made tiles with lots of shading in them to try fool your eye as much as possible, I might give it a try just in 3DS Max to see how 512px tiles might look on a bit of UK valley I have modelled.
I agree regarding the mesh, but we can just sit and wait unitl there would be something new.
BUT I think If there will be a new/ changed terrain engine someday, then the already available theaters
could be converted, similar to “BaZT” back in 2004/2005/2006.512px tiles should be minimum standart these days AFAIK, IIRC and IMHO.
Some theater devs are even using tiles up to 2048px for airbase tiles.@Mr:
Tornado was a sim back in the early 90’s,…
Copy
@Mr:
Downloading F4 source code now, lets hope it has lots of commenting to see how things work haha
Keep in mind that you in fact download outdated code. (either originally Falcon4 1.06 or Falcon4 SP3)
Many things have changed I guess.Cheers,
LS -
Yeah the 512px tiles look quite ok by todays standards as a default size. From my readings it seems that texture memory has not THAT much impact vs geometry, and the terrain is as light as can be in that regard, so the only way we can make it any good for now is textures…
I think there will be a way to get more terrain mesh detail, it’s just how hard it is to make it work haha. 250m would be a big game-changer, even with 512 or 1024px textures per 1km still!
I even wonder if you could just run the terrain flat and blank (apply one set with one texture in it, with nothing on it and 1px x 1px in size. Then place your own new higher poly meshes over the top. Ie, imagine that building is now a 5km x 5km mesh referencing the same old tile textures… it’d still have LOD and you could bake the distance ‘fog’ into the mip-maps of the texture tiles… at 250m intervals it’d be what, about 20x20 squares, 1600 tris?
Hmmm, has anyone ever tried that?
Hmmm I guess the issue then is the whole AI and all that stuff, and trying to have vehicles drive on it etc etc…
Bah.
Back to the editing the source code in my dreams solution hehe.
Dave
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Again BaZT, we already had 250m terrain in the past, it’s just “deactivated” for BMS (atm. ???)
here is an old, but informative thread: http://tactical.nekromantix.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=20922&hilit=baztI hope the BMS devs are cooking someting up regarding the mesh and that actually 256 tilesets limit.
Uhmm, if you want to discuss more about the mesh, i suggest to start a new thread,
because we are OT on a sticky thread here.Or even better, do a search here on BMS- forums, on good old GlobalFalcon- forums and on PMC- forums first.
Cheers,
LS -
Good links, thanks for those!
I noticed Iceland was done using a 250m grid.
I suppose then, to slew the thread back onto topic a bit, the GFX engine does support 250m grids natively relatively easily. The issue will be that tile textures themselves cover only 250m rather than 1km, but with 256px textures we also get around 1px/metre of visual quality too. However it does mean that 250m grids will probably mean totally new tile development will have to take place… unless there would be an elegant way to paste one texture over a few grid squares.
But obviously only ideal for smaller theatres (for now)
PS, the src code is very well commented and fairly easy to read… no wonder F4 worked out so well, and worked so well from a modding perspective!
Thanks
Dave
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@Mr:
The issue will be that tile textures themselves cover only 250m rather than 1km, but with 256px textures we also get around 1px/metre of visual quality too. However it does mean that 250m grids will probably mean totally new tile development will have to take place… unless there would be an elegant way to paste one texture over a few grid squares.
But obviously only ideal for smaller theatres (for now)
With BaZT we’ve still used 1km tiles.Cheers,
LS -
That sounds great.
1km textures (at 512px) with a 250m mesh underneath.
I have been reading that FF offers many more tiles. I’m not sure how much having so many tiles at high res would slow things down, but in theory with the above grid size AND a lot of tiles you could probably start to map whole small countries with almost fully unique ground tiles and a decent res terrain mesh too!
Nice.
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Another thing I’m curious about tiles is how do you guys get G##gle Earth tiles for reference?
To be more exactly:
- which software do you use to get the tiles? (is anybody using “FSEarthTilesV1_0”?)
- and how do you get the right scale? (yeah, I know 1 Tile is 1 km)
- further tips and tricks?
Cheers,
LS -
???
Strange from u to ask such things…
Software’s are there free and pay u choose.
Scale? Yes u know but 1 tile = 1024 pixels… so there is your scale…
Photoshop and Monsters TE. U download - get as detailed Ultra large areas. In photoshop u choose Mask on predefined size guess what 1024. Before that put a rectangle in GE with the measurements… this is your reference. than divide it with this mask to tiles of 1024x1024… Import them with Monsters TE u are done. -
???
Strange from u to ask such things…Yeah, I wanted to know what software the theater devs use to get the tiles
and how they scale them correctly to get reproducible results.It’s no problem to get an area of tiles and put them “nearly correctly” scaled into the sim,
but if you’ll put another area beside, then you’ll need to get the exactly same scale.Cheers,
LS -
Yes I believe this is they way they do it…
Follow the general rule than go with the eye…
U can’t go for real… Real world is not Flat as Falcon world is… So when your tiles are Flat and they represent an area that has elevations inside u get the meaning… Can’t be exactly the same…
So u go nearly correctly. To test it open the theater u want to test with Monsters TE find a city and measure it… (approximately with tiles size and exactly with photoshop) than open Google Earth and measure it see the differences. Same u can do with the whole Country… -
I use Ultimate Maps Downloader. It allows you to capture maps from different sources. It lets you select zoom levels. Also it will combine the seperate textures into one big map which you can cut to pieces later.
http://www.lizard-labs.net/ultimate_maps_downloader.aspxI mainly extract sat images from Bing Maps. On the bing maps site you have an explaination of how to calculate ground resolution. I’ve put this in an excel file and just fill in latitude, zoom factor and required tile texture resolution and excel will calculate the appropriate scale factor which I apply in photoshop.
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Thank’s Ghost,
now that sounds interresting.
I think I’ve already found the explaination of how to calculate ground resolution:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb259689.aspxLook like I’ve to study it well to be able to create an working excel file.
@Arty
you see there are differently possibilities. (like always.)Cheers,
LS -
He forgot 2 major factors… so those calculations are proximity also.