Elevation Edits (Heightmap aka .raw)
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Are you saying that it is possible edit terrain elevation by editing simply an image?
Thoretically YES, but not quiete that simple for BMS.
Elevation data can be imported/exported as RAW image. -
How will affect the elevation changes of objects on the map? What about roand and links?
That is the difficult part as you already noticed.
Because if we import REAL data from real-world, that doesnt mean, that this data is matching up with the UNREAL tiles (water, roads, plain basis of objectives etc)…
and this unfortunatly needed to be reworked manually, so that rivers dont flow overy mountains anymore and runways are plain and not zick-zacked broke in elevations. -
Well, been awhile since I’ve programmed but I managed. Makes it easier to play with the numbers now! I’ll tinker a bit sometime and hopefully stumble upon the correct coordinates for Korea.
I don’t know exactly how use full this will be for anyone but I’ll look at adding some extra features (save, load, etc…) that may come in handy and will zip it up when done.
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Sorry I have not gotten around to adding anything else to this simple prog but I’ll upload it just in case some one finds it useful and before I forget about it. If needed and requested than I’ll add to it, however, it did not help me in trying to fine tune my coordinates for the Korea theater. The central meridian height is set to 1023.002km (64 seg theater), and Closter didn’t provide math for that so it’s not adjustable at the moment.
At this point, I’m done trying to figure it out and will stick with what I have, while not 100% accurate, it is accurate enough to redo the elevations on a 1km mesh, even down to the 250m mesh it would still align relatively accurately. I’ve decided that I’ll just import Japan separately since that’s the only area that’s really far off. I have to keep moving forward on other project and I’m sure some of you will understand that.
Program is just an exe, extract it wherever and run. Use the pdf referenced here if you want to see the math @biker:
http://lomac.strasoftware.com/download/misc/Falcon4/Falcon4Projection.pdf
Download->
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If I understood u want to have the same coordinates for Korea theater as they are in real?
In theory and practice is doable… but the workload will be enormous.Where is that Database guy??? right here what u need is an auto coordinates changer for Falcon… like get objectives and their coordinates… export to excel… create the correct ones in excel or download them and make the list whatever then insert them back to Falcon… Next open up Terrain Editor and Falcon Editor and make changes to the terrain so it will be aligned… Monster could also help on this to make it way easier.
like for instance coordinates where x and now are y so do the switch on the tiles…
Problem will be mountains tops so to align them also…And what about the areas that will not be shown cause of the change and the overlapping on some? Well we can’t have it all… either real or Falcon… if u want your GPS to show as in real u must do compromises…
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Not what I was after but that would be good. Do you know where the coordinates are stored? I’ll look to see if I can change corners to what I have and see if that aligns majority of the theater. Again though, Japan is not accurate in my extraction so that area would not match, but, everything else I do in my overhaul project would.
@A.S.,
Oops, it’s currently dependent on visual studios 2010. Will have to re compile it and upload a new one. Forgot about that, thanks.
EDIT: Okay, should work now. Same post #44. Will update first post some time and include it there when I get around to it.
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coordinates r in tacedit. Those are the xy tiles coordinates. every tile 1kmx1km.
I don’t know where they match with the real ones… maybe bottom on the left of the map?
Also in tacedit there are two fields for real coordinates but iirc they don’t work and show the same values in every entry. This is Ram22 field… I will ask him.
IIRC there is no tool to display the Falcon coordinates. What I did lastly to place a TACAN to the correct coordinates: I made a matrix of features in the objective and then went to falcon’s recon page… select target look at coordinates.
Another thing to do is place one feature to the center of a tile then look at its coordinates in falcon and use it as a constant to calculate falcon coordinates as every tile is 1kmx1km and its subdivision on coordinates is based on tiles resolution 512x512 or 1024x1024. now what happens when u have mixed tile resolutions?It would be great if Monster could implement this in Terrain Editor and alongside XY tiles coordinates we could see and the falcon coordinates. Like moving the mouse on the map.
Also from the database guy tiag it would be great if we could import and match real coordinates with falcon coordinates. we could do that selectivly for some major objectines (or all) and then alter the terrain acordingly.
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You can see Falcon coordinates along with X/Y values in F4AWACS. I suppose I could implement the feature in TerrainEditor as well.
I haven’t implemented it all ready because, Falcon calculates the coordinates in a wrong way. It starts with the lower-right corner of the theater, taking the coords stored in the MAP file (you can see it in TerrainEditor) and calculates all the rest according to the X/Y value. Especially for values of X,Y away from the bottom-left corner, the difference from the real life values (WGS84) are significant. That happens because the formula used in Falcon to calculate coordinates assumes earth is a sphere and not an ellipsoid as real life systems do.
So, my opinion is that, using real life coordinates to position objects in Falcon is not a good practice. I would try to match terrain features around my object between real life and my map to get these two as close as possible.
Getting elevation data depending on coordinates only is not a good practice as well for the reasons I stated above. What I did, when I imported real elevation data into emf from DTED (a long time ago), was to start from the coordinates of the bottom-left corner of the theater and interpolate the data I had, according to the resolution of my data (100m for the specific DTED data) and the desired resolution for Falcon (250m for L0). IMHO the dimension of every tile in Falcon (250m for L0 and 1km for L2) is the only parameter that you could match with real life data.
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You can see Falcon coordinates along with X/Y values in F4AWACS. I suppose I could implement the feature in TerrainEditor as well.
Great idea Saki, go ahead with that please ;).
Nikos. -
So, my opinion is that, using real life coordinates to position objects in Falcon is not a good practice. I would try to match terrain features around my object between real life and my map to get these two as close as possible.
MHO as well
BUT unless you have someone as skilled as Nikos for Stations+ILS and NavAids you may get lost……LOL!!!demer
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Still need to update the steps in the first post however, I set up a color index to use inside of Terrain Editor which is proving to be very useful while tiling so figured this thread would be appropriate for it.
Preview of it zoomed all the way out;
Rather then copying all the text into this post I’ve uploaded a txt document. Simply add this to you “TE.ini” file; at the very end of the file you’ll see the stuff to replace.
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In 2015 I was able to get IKAROS raw file to show up in photoshop.
Right now I just can’t. I exported the file via tools make elv file but from l2 file I just can’t.
the exported elv file doesn’t seem right to me. I see the map of Greece Turkey ok but … still