Peregrine
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My words exactly, my words!
I am not sure if I understood your tool correctly - is it “just” map-map of, in this case, Iraq Theater (I mean flat, 2D picture of Iraq Theatre for GUI) od map-world (3D, textured world ready-to-fly)?
3D world ready to fly. It’s not textured further than just some base tiles but elevation and l2/o2 export works along with capturing all the data necessary from a Lat/Long bounds.
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:woohoo:
Can you please make some screenshot from 3D?:-) From north-east, mountainous terrain?
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Wow… just wow! That’s fast. I will follow this thread closely.
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Wow Prerring looks like a wet dream… (sorry for using slang and no disrespect at all but if you know what I am saying )
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How do we get this wonderful tool, and would you be able to write up a guide on its usage (say, here’s what you need to do to build a small theatre)
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Just when I think I’m out of the business they suck me back in!
Seriously, that looks way cool. There are some uber-smart people on this forum…glad we have you all around to make the world better for the rest of us!
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There’s still a bit of work to do. Mainly on the tiling side of the house. Being limited to 4096 textures is proving to be quite the challenge. Marching squares algorithm is the only thing I can think of to auto tile the map at this point. I’ll have to do some kind of “satellite tile tool” to make it easy to add sat photo’s to a 9x9 grid to add to the textures.bin Who knows, I may make it so that they are brushes and you can “paint” 9x9 templates and things like that. Frankly the straight tile export of satellite photography isn’t going to happen unless the BMS dev team can come up with an alternative. I’m still hammering away at it though. Keep everyone posted.
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There’s still a bit of work to do. Mainly on the tiling side of the house. Being limited to 4096 textures is proving to be quite the challenge. Marching squares algorithm is the only thing I can think of to auto tile the map at this point. I’ll have to do some kind of “satellite tile tool” to make it easy to add sat photo’s to a 9x9 grid to add to the textures.bin Who knows, I may make it so that they are brushes and you can “paint” 9x9 templates and things like that. Frankly the straight tile export of satellite photography isn’t going to happen unless the BMS dev team can come up with an alternative. I’m still hammering away at it though. Keep everyone posted.
Any desired changes could take BMS years to implement (if at all) and unless you get direct confirmation from the team, you won’t know what to expect and when to expect it.
I would recommend you stick with your strategy and perhaps enable auto-satellite tiling of some important areas only - like airbases and city regions. You can then upgrade peregrine as more features become available.
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I may make it so that they are brushes and you can “paint” 9x9 templates and things like that
Yes, 4096 tile limit in current Falcon/BMS is rather a significant barrier for any attempt to use sat photos all over. It is for a certain reason and as far as I know, because of the impact on performance, when in 3D, it is (to my knowledge) for now to stay. Not to mention task of restructuring of texture.bin where all information impacting ground movement (and other info pertaining to 3D and campaign) is stored.
This in “one breath”, what I perceive are your immediate challenges for now.
Not to discourage you from bold attempts to change the terrain concept entirely, but maybe to channel your abilities to more practical application and use, I would strongly suggest further discussion what could be done here. There are many things, which indeed could be done and for a starter concept of “brush” catches my attention right away. However, I do not quite understand how 9x9 template can work in ^2 world.
Again, I would like to repeat, yours is great initiative, but like ZELEGEND suggests above, close coordination with what is currently available in terms of terrain tools and how things currently working in FBMS - may save a lots of time, effort and work.
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Yes, 4096 tile limit in current Falcon/BMS is rather a significant barrier for any attempt to use sat photos all over. It is for a certain reason and as far as I know, because of the impact on performance, when in 3D, it is (to my knowledge) for now to stay. Not to mention task of restructuring of texture.bin where all information impacting ground movement (and other info pertaining to 3D and campaign) is stored.
This in “one breath”, what I perceive are your immediate challenges for now.
Not to discourage you from bold attempts to change the terrain concept entirely, but maybe to channel your abilities to more practical application and use, I would strongly suggest further discussion what could be done here. There are many things, which indeed could be done and for a starter concept of “brush” catches my attention right away. However, I do not quite understand how 9x9 template can work in ^2 world.
Again, I would like to repeat, yours is great initiative, but like ZELEGEND suggests above, close coordination with what is currently available in terms of terrain tools and how things currently working in FBMS - may save a lots of time, effort and work.
The 9x9 brush idea is so when you have a central tile, you can form borders, 3x3, 5x5, 7x7, 9x9, etc.
I’m working around these things and will let you all know when the tiling part is done.
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Thanks, this is one of many things we may need indeed. :headb:
Perhaps this is well known to you, but would you care take a look at this:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/game/Autotiles_Algorithm.aspx?display=Print
There is a link with source code within the article.This is what I understand as a concept of brush. What is also necessary is feature of “fill” of closed contour.
(FYI making all transitions could be also automated and always consistently identical as far as configurations and its sequence of naming). -
The 9x9 brush idea is so when you have a central tile, you can form borders, 3x3, 5x5, 7x7, 9x9, etc.
I’m working around these things and will let you all know when the tiling part is done.
Maybe brush and use of synthetic textures?
Satelite textures are always not so good in down low
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I can see an European Theater appearing on the horizon and a late Cold War campaign
This horizon is much, much closer than you might think
http://www.weapondeliveryplanner.nl/CET/index.htmlThis looks very promising, however… tiles and terrain is one part.
Getting all the objectives in and correct is something differentGr Falcas
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This horizon is much, much closer than you might think
http://www.weapondeliveryplanner.nl/CET/index.htmlThis looks very promising, however… tiles and terrain is one part.
Getting all the objectives in and correct is something differentGr Falcas
Maybe would be pointless to create Korea '80s theater? Where can I join to development of this theater?
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Thanks, this is one of many things we may need indeed. :headb:
Perhaps this is well known to you, but would you care take a look at this:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/game/Autotiles_Algorithm.aspx?display=Print
There is a link with source code within the article.This is what I understand as a concept of brush. What is also necessary is feature of “fill” of closed contour.
(FYI making all transitions could be also automated and always consistently identical as far as configurations and its sequence of naming).I’ve implemented something similar before in a game engine but what I was referring to was marching squares algorithm where you trace an outline of a shape, building a “corner bit mask” for the edges which will be your transition tiles. It’s a good algorithm for quantifying procedural dungeons and things like that from other genres.
The manual “brush” idea is basically that though. Have a tool where you define a base and the edge transitions and when you paint the tiles we can apply tiles additively and have the transition tiles along the edges. I’m currently working on marching squares to trace the shapes provided by openstreetmap data.
Define a few base tiles, let it generate the base tiles across the map, apply auto tiling for roads, city polygon areas, rivers, and airbases.
Now, what I need to find is, in order to do comparisons, a good base rule set for the old dem2terrain tool to generate feature TDF’s and CSV’s. That way I can compare my tools output with what is known good data.
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Just in case you would like to know:
- on the very onset of theater creating process dem2Terrain toll is used, but that you know
Define a few base tiles, let it generate the base tiles across the map, apply auto tiling for roads, city polygon areas, rivers, and airbases.
-the above describes precisely what CATE tool does.
-CATE is available for quite long time, pretty well documented, even with source code (for those more adventurous), however CATE is pretty hard to use (again this just maybe requires being more familiar at scripting there) but end results are not fool proofed as they still require quite of hand editing in the end.- and then, even then, all looks pretty much repetitious to the degree that it is even ugly, so this is where Monster’s Terrain Editor can give a help with many work modes and modules programmed in into this tool. Among many features not mentioned for brevity: it can manipulate and edit L2 by export and import its data, can work with tiles/sets, has texture.bin editor for paths, areas and now autogen ,*.map editor, has 3D preview and objective editor. It is really most versatile tool to post edit any theater already created.
- finally there is BMS Editor which handles editing and placement of 3D Features (elements) within Objectives.
There are also other important tools for editing stats in Campaigns and Database like: TacEdit, Pit and FM editing tools, but this is where my familiarity ends.
What I have described above is pretty much what was being used from the advent of this great simulation to create and edit Terrain/Objectives for Theaters. It is rather time and work consuming process and giving sometimes “clunky” results, specially by today’s standards. I have been around for long enough to realize what can, or cannot be accomplished @ current FBMS state of the terrain concept and its available tools. Yet, I am of the opinion that there are some room of improvement to the existing process, where I and I am sure many others gladly offer you our help and information sharing.
Changing and revolutionizing of the entire model of Terrain would be,not perhaps IMPOSSIBLE, but sadly IMHO, truly gargantuan task far beyond scope of anybody free time and possibility to properly coordinate all that with the coders. my 2c.
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Changing and revolutionizing of the entire model of Terrain would be,not perhaps IMPOSSIBLE, but sadly IMHO, truly gargantuan task far beyond scope of anybody free time and possibility to properly coordinate all that with the coders. my 2c.
This is the same as 15 years ago saying Falcon would never be what it is today.
Not even BMS has become something totally different than what is was when it was released in 1998, also the tools have been hugely improved. Making a theater today has become already so much easier (although time consuming) than many years ago.
Think about what Monsters TerrainEditor and MC is doing for you today what you didn’t have 5 years ago.This is just a new progress that makes new things possible (if you get it working 100% )
Keep the progress going.Gr Falcas
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Falcas,
I don’t disagree with you necessarily. You have a 2007 profile date, so perhaps you’re much more “in the know” than most of us.However, Polak is perhaps the best “terrain guy” on these forums, and has worked closely with the developers on what I presume was the iteration of Korea we have now. So with all respect to everyone, I think there is some value to listening very closely to what he is saying, and take his advice to heart.
I’m not saying we should stifle innovation….not at all. And I’m all for anything that makes building things easier in Falcon.
But Polak knows what he’s talking about. So, for reiser or whomever, there is value to coordinating efforts with the developers.
I didn’t understand much of this conversation, but I understood that much anyway!
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All I am saying its worth someones free time no matter how large the task may be.
As long as the person who is doing it is having fun in what he is doing.
Thats what BMS deveploment has been all about all these years.gr Falcas