Edit : no post BMS 4.32 material

If you make SU-22, you should make “Ahab” as well:

GJ all involved.
I briefly tried it yesterday (without joystick yet) and was curioust to check F-2 loadout. I am still thrilled when remember F-2 Harpoons in Falcon 3.0 Kurile theater (perhaps not realistic). I saw it has 2 US J-type missiles and L-Maverick version or something for antiship roles (IIRC) in your theater. I guess this theater will probably evolve, so for fun:



I am sure you already know this

@ccc1tw
I use fake sea tiles (with water areas for splashes) for PT boats and small corvettes in my theater - these coastal shallow water routes are independent and disconnected from legacy road system.

But I was thinking about amphibious operations a lot. I would suggest to use rather fake bridge tile for it (road + bridge paths there).
I already prepared such an amphibious areas in Berdyansk, Odessa and Crimea.
My idea was to place invisible bridge objects (with transparent icon or just spot icon)…then place LSTs in predefined spots overlapping bridge geometry.
If LST killed, no amphibious landing for reinforcements possible.

Units can be spawned via reinforcement script/trigger in proper time imo.

I wanted to make it even more story dependent as…flota/fleet reach objective x,y (fleet not destroyed) - it triggers reinforcement in landing area, spawning LSTs over invisible bridges - defender have limited time to kill LSTs/bridges -> units stacked in fake water then - easy target…

I was able to generate new Hawai files matching your old theater
Size (L2 segments): 64 x 64
Centered on: Lat 20 Long -157,
unfortunaly old e00s seems to be corrupted, thats why I was able to generate only populated point (no labels), + drainage and road data (without big island)…but it is usefull:

You can combine it with your old TDFs, these old files will be a bit off, but there is an offset feature in TE - so you can match big island and move for example ABs according island you are working at…

@Maru
I considered it at first, but it means LSTs would be visible in the beginning…good if campaign starts with amphibious landing.

On the other hand if it starts as invisible/destroyed and there will be engeneer unit spawned/triggered at certain point…
I will reconsider it

I really dont get this “we don’t allow older version mod policy” of free addon…built on the work of many forgotten people BTW

I smell some progress here (compared to goodoldtimes).

Kuz before Harpoon:

FSX Harpoon!

after Harpoon (aka Qeen Elizabeth upgrade):

ROAR!

hope Mozilla Godzilla will be your next model…

Its easy. U need F4ResManager. Open campmap from art (i think Intel or so) folder, extract current map (watch if it is 256 indexed), edit it as true color, put back to 256 indexed and put it back with mentioned util…

I write it from top of my head - general Falcon 4.0.

@Crossup No, that Arty’s post about mesh resolution was a bit misleading…DEM is for highmap, e00 are vectors - coastline, river, road, town-outline, town-point+name, airport point+name…

So DEM2terr loads DEM and E00, then palette file (if not, no problem) and generates desired theater “skeleton/frame” - highmesh (L2 O2 pair), map file (basic definition and far palette), mea file (planning rough highmash), TDFs - vectors from e00, but now for theater canvas only and in L2 resolution, (XY local lower left corner)…these are readable for terrainview or CATE or TE and can be used as reference or for autotiling.

@oakdesign
I simply dont belive. Even the new terrain is highmap + various other maps (satmap, water etc.), so exact proj + export square in QGIS can help update the terrain.
Well original idea was to make nice artifical terrain, later appearance phototexture over tiled terrain…perhaps tiles were completely abandoned later, but it is still DATA job.

@alexwin
I am not sure about latest BMS ver., but Monsters Terrain Editor should work with current terrain.
Modding BMS terrain is quite easy, there is only one resolution texture (+ night and water/opacity), so it should be few clicks work.

BTW Max if you are dedicated to 4.38 generaly, its nice, but if u are dedicated to Baltic for 4.38, I can provide some help about Baltic exact ccordinates and projection. Its not so hard to make Qgis exact square and projection for any datatype update (I saw few day ago, there was discussion about it somewhere, esp. projection).
https://forum.falcon-bms.com/post/311090

Baltic is 64 seg. sinusoidal (so much better than original Korea, Balkan or Izrael) and center is near…so it is well projected. Just its center is not in exact Baltic square center as it was export.

I did the original theater from scratch. Then exported 64 segment area for Tom. I used “AF hitiles (256x256px at the time) pack” replenished with some own custom textures like 1 tile lakes in various compositions (normaly small lake is composed by 4 corner tiles in F4).
I told to Tom he can do what he want with it. He reduced number of tiles and made new really high resolution textures for some tiles, messed with highs (Scandinavia elevations are really off with his update) and scattered some fake patterns on fileds, which did not exist in original terrain (my woods were all placed according real positions).

Later I sent original files to RAM22/Cloud9, he continued something when Tom left, perhaps he made something with them before he passed away. It was on old forum, I have files backup in old laptop probably.

I guess these square sea tiles are the missing tiles from my original layout (he did not substitute).
You can make generic field there or put back some lake with new texture - I can try to find it and see what exactly was there, but…

@Kye-Polehoyki
And other sims and apps are OK with the same LCD monitor?

I found in tha past, my LCD has own blurr/sharpness ect. setting in HW menu…but not sure if screenshots are affected.

Yep power manegemant attracted my attention in first sight too.

I set it always to maximum.
Then using bilinear or trilinear filtering can result in a blurrier image than anisotropic filtering.
IMO anisotropic is not problem even on lowend GPUs, bilinear and trilinear are from ancient times.

I am quite old AMD GPU ATM, but I allways set my sons NVIDia GPUs (my RX570 too) without vertical sync because vertsync makes FPS in multiples of 60,30,15 IMO, better turn it off and set FPS restriction to 58 or so (perhaps 118/120 in your case if your monitor does not tear). This is my experience, but with lower spec GPUs. Its because FPS is bounded with monitor refresh rate with vertsyncON and if GPU is for example unable to render 60 it drops to 30, if unable to render 30 it can drop to 15 even it can render 29 FPS IIRC…

I believe you have not problem with performance, but I always set bios to turn off all processor C-states (important) and turn off hyper threading for i-7 and similar…it makes single core performance better IMO…just saying.

I would also recomend to check DSR smoothness:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/7nkh8z/best_dsr_smoothness/?rdt=40488

@Maru
I considered it at first, but it means LSTs would be visible in the beginning…good if campaign starts with amphibious landing.

On the other hand if it starts as invisible/destroyed and there will be engeneer unit spawned/triggered at certain point…
I will reconsider it

@ccc1tw
I use fake sea tiles (with water areas for splashes) for PT boats and small corvettes in my theater - these coastal shallow water routes are independent and disconnected from legacy road system.

But I was thinking about amphibious operations a lot. I would suggest to use rather fake bridge tile for it (road + bridge paths there).
I already prepared such an amphibious areas in Berdyansk, Odessa and Crimea.
My idea was to place invisible bridge objects (with transparent icon or just spot icon)…then place LSTs in predefined spots overlapping bridge geometry.
If LST killed, no amphibious landing for reinforcements possible.

Units can be spawned via reinforcement script/trigger in proper time imo.

I wanted to make it even more story dependent as…flota/fleet reach objective x,y (fleet not destroyed) - it triggers reinforcement in landing area, spawning LSTs over invisible bridges - defender have limited time to kill LSTs/bridges -> units stacked in fake water then - easy target…

@Foxtrot701
Thay said molnibalege’s hints were included in database few years ago - i think he moaned about Aim7 performance a lot. Just guess…

@Arty
Well Arty, I wrote about what do we have now - objectives are x,y (no digits), features for CATE/terrainview autotile are x,y (no digits). Just open any TDF file, its childish DUPLO. Tile system is rough minecraft puzzle, you even cant have river and road on the same 1km tile paralely, you must go on 2km in narrow walley…

My projections works on cm, mm…its a math. But yes, DEM2terrains (sinusoidal) are rough, based on 1km tiles…you dont need centimeters to work with them. But you can update them to be accurate…but why…in AF terrain I work with 250m now, new 4.38 engine will be 32m or so…Arma is from around 2m to 6,25 m and 7,5m usually…
For example I have many flares (these chimneys with fire u see in rafineries) exported from QGIS for my theater, I will use them as landmarks…but probably just one landmark objective in DB, so It will match 1km tile
Well I thaught about to make 5 types of landmark churches (SW, SE, NE, NW, central - on L1 resolution), but not sure I will do it, the same for flares…I am even happy I was able to kill fences around airbases without Falcon crashes…I am happy with small steps

old Falcon terrain engine, IMO does not deserve better textures than this

Its area around Bel’bek’…is it accurate enough…yes imo

BTW I thaught I was able to change objective names in Terrain editor in the past, but perhaps I am wrong…now I am unable …did I changed them in taceditor…?..ouch holes in mind

@Arty
The only official Falcon4 projection is - L2 tile=1km, define 0 in map file and all is counted from that point, thats all, no science. Well there is probably some code in exe howto show it like you r flying in GPS world, nice fake.
For small equator map its quite accurate, for anything else…
Falcon 4 use local coordinates, as well our tools.
This Falcon approach is a bit compatibile with ESPG and Sinusoidal proj (these have proper N-S, E-W), but not very accurate for bigger areas…but we do not guide real Tomahawks here, just enjoying sim.

Chosen geographics projection is up to theater creator. You can use what you want. Well, good is to have East on tha right side and North on the upper side. But its not necessary.

BTW I was able to make local coord system in about 2-3 ways in QGis IIRC. One aproach was via printer/paperspace local coord system, second was via local ortho grid placed over map…then tried yet something else…I also set roundings. It worked, I was even able to make transition formula to count and round from one projection into another one (strangely with problems in Madeira, but OK in Pritzren - its that 5 point transition, where you get nasty long formula for very stupid thing).
But IMO it was unnecessarily complicated, because we need really extremely stupid thing like rounding things 1000x on very rough checker…
So frankly I do not need it really. I am playing with bitmaps…bitmaps are local, good enough for me. Easy for simple man like me. As my bitmaps are matched (my projection formulas work), it would be cool to have Seipher`s bmp2csv tool updated with modern libraries to run on W10…I must run W98 emulator now just for this old small utility.

Dont get me wrong, would be cool to have reliable and stable QGIS export for rounded X,Y (no digit), ignoring many fields, just X,Y, name…like in DEM2terr…but then we are facing whch file overflow, so…it’s probably better to cuddle it in intuitive way…with a lot of love

BTW did you really try to select EPSG:4326 for your project, place vector square (1024km x 1024 km, but I recommend to enhance edges according for example highmap picture of theater) with the same center as for example Izrael theater and export that square area out of QGIS…if yes it matched ITO.