Theater developmental notes - The Tile's
-
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 ātilingā 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 itād 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 iircā¦ Fantasy removes lots of constraints too, vs copying something.
Lastly, any tools to go from Max to terrain mesh? Or conversion processes?
Thanks
Dave
-
@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 ātilingā 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 youāre 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 Some things are outdated but thereās enough to get you going.
After that you would want Sakisās Terrain Editor.
Iām 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
-
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.
Iām 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 canāt 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. Iād probably model terrain in max, possibly even paint tiles. The lod0 format is quite basic to script a raw hex output.
Just gutted itās 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 definedā¦ 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
-
@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 itās 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 definedā¦ Is it all x/y coord based in essence?
For more format info and terrain/theater creating info at all, ā¦ 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. Iād 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 itās 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 wouldnāt 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 90ās, it was about 200Nm square I think, so about right for a ~ 500km x 500km 32 segment theatre I thinkā¦
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 itād look 4x more detailed!
Downloading F4 source code now, lets hope it has lots of commenting to see how things work hahaDave
-
@Mr:
A perfect terrain for Tornado would be Europe in 128 hehe, but itās 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 wouldnāt 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 āBaZTā 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 90ās,ā¦
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 texturesā¦
I think there will be a way to get more terrain mesh detail, itās 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 texturesā¦ itād still have LOD and you could bake the distance āfogā into the mip-maps of the texture tilesā¦ at 250m intervals itād 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 etcā¦
Bah.
Back to the editing the source code in my dreams solution hehe.
Dave
-
Again BaZT, we already had 250m terrain in the past, itās just ādeactivatedā 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 placeā¦ 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 readā¦ no wonder F4 worked out so well, and worked so well from a modding perspective!
Thanks
Dave
-
@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 placeā¦ 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 weāve 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. Iām 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.
-
Another thing Iām 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 āFSEarthTilesV1_0ā?)
- 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 thingsā¦
Softwareās are there free and pay u choose.
Scale? Yes u know but 1 tile = 1024 pixelsā¦ so there is your scaleā¦
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 measurementsā¦ this is your reference. than divide it with this mask to tiles of 1024x1024ā¦ Import them with Monsters TE u are done. -
???
Strange from u to ask such thingsā¦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.Itās no problem to get an area of tiles and put them ānearly correctlyā scaled into the sim,
but if youāll put another area beside, then youāll need to get the exactly same scale.Cheers,
LS -
Yes I believe this is they way they do itā¦
Follow the general rule than go with the eyeā¦
U canāt go for realā¦ Real world is not Flat as Falcon world isā¦ So when your tiles are Flat and they represent an area that has elevations inside u get the meaningā¦ Canāt be exactly the sameā¦
So u go nearly correctly. To test it open the theater u want to test with Monsters TE find a city and measure itā¦ (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 Countryā¦ -
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. Iāve 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.
-
Thankās Ghost,
now that sounds interresting.
I think Iāve already found the explaination of how to calculate ground resolution:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb259689.aspxLook like Iāve 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 factorsā¦ so those calculations are proximity also.
-
Another thing Iām 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 āFSEarthTilesV1_0ā?)
- and how do you get the right scale? (yeah, I know 1 Tile is 1 km)
- further tips and tricks?
Cheers,
LSMan, you sure are ācuriousāā¦.LOL!!!
1. We donāt get tileās,we make themā¦ā¦ I have yet to find a Tile Store for Falcon tileās,maybe I should check Home Depot??? Psstā¦hey,you got any Falcon Tileās?? Saleās clerk runs away and callās 911!!!
2. Scale is determined by the Falcon elevation code and yes 1 tile coverās 1 km, this is the mesh that is used
to build the wire frame that the tile is rendered overā¦
3. Iāll stick to tileās here,because that is the topicā¦but,be aware that the mesh is NOT the map grid!!!'Kay some commentās, maybe some insight.
SHE duzānt care what canvas size you use,you can use 32x32 or 4096x4096 or mix and match. As long as they are divisible by 4 SHE will render them to the 1 km mesh.BUT, here is the caveat and remember this.
SHE useās Listās to decide where and when she renderās these imageās(Iāve explained this B4,but here we go again).
Now this list is built when you first start the game and I believe it is still held in RAM in BMSā¦maybe even CPU still(Would like to see it Page Filed if at all possibleā¦hint,hint).This becomeās a great drain on resourceās (read FPS) when it comeās to making her render one tile 10Kās timeās as compared to rendering 10Kās tile once.So the bigger the bytes you put on the list,so to speak,the more time it takeās for her to Recall and send to DX to send to your GFX to send to your monitorā¦Get It???About the Image resolutionā¦she donāt careā¦she just passeās that on to DX If DX can handle it and your GFX card can handle it and your monitor can handle itā¦your 'kewl!!!
-
Does SHE wear thongs?