[Grass texture inequality - what!]

16 hours ago, 37mm said:

*An interesting aside, it appears that CM will load 256-colour 8bit BMP's (an interesting feature which could shrink the size of a LOT of mods).

Gave this a shot. Tried several different ways of converting to 256 indexed colours in PS - Local adaptive, Local perceptual, exact for Windows, exact uniform -it produced some weird colouring, a mud texture came out looking like dark blueish coal ... there may be other factors at play that I'm not aware of but I couldn't get naturall colouring to work. 

[kohlenklau's CM Modding Blender adventure]

13 minutes ago, kohlenklau said:

For these Franken-vehicles, I use the following terminology: you have a shell mdr coming in to wrap itself around the host mdr and that host mdr's game code parameters. The shell and host should be the best apples to apples as possible in the main categories such as crew number, speed, armor protection, weapons, wheeled or tracked, turreted, etc.

In Blender you import an mdr and see the naming nomenclature is very consistent. weapon can replace weapon, turret can replace turret. The axis of the shell mdr's turret can be adjusted to match up with what the host is supposed to do. When things are not matched up, as in a STOCK PzIII we got with F&R, the turret will do odd things. Bad QA on BFC's part. Weird oddities with the 3D model. 

Thanks Phil, that's what I thought. Have only messed with the one Panzer IV and that had all sorts of bugginess, mostly textures, to figure out. I doubt I'll be doing many vehicular models but it's good to know this stuff.

[Berlin CMRT Map]

9 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Yes could well be. If pixeltroopers go prone (hide, pinned...) under windows/apertures they´re relatively "safe" from direct small arms fire. But ONLY when beeing directly targeted or area targeted on the building itself. If putting area target fire in front of the building (at 20-40m distance), even prone lying infantry gets slaughtered within few minutes. Allmost all shots do "penetrate" whatever "wall" is taken for these calculations. At least counts for german MG42 where the inbuilt artificial inaccuracy gets most the bullets flying high and thus hitting the building near ground level with grazing fire (and prone lying pixeltroopers behind wall). Counts the same for prone lying infantry at the back of the building (away from enemy small arms fires). Area target method might be less effective for i.e  the cal 30 "sniper" lmg and similar.

So to make a buildings first floor halfway safe again one got to place some +1m ditch locked terrain in front or intersecting with it. Then pixeltroopers can survive the first few minutes under enemy fire, in case they stay mostly prone and pop up for return fires only briefly.

Hehe, or just stay away from buildings and find the nearest ditch/bocage.

[Grass texture inequality - what!]

13 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

I can well imagine. Yep, avoiding hard coded tags is way to go obviously. Or combine it with your own one. And bits of adding dirt&mud to some selected vehicle textures and pixeltroopers. At least I found some dirty german ankle boots over at FGM repository (or GAJ?) Ah... I can drop your texture set in when finished. Or need some tester? In meantime I get along with some my own tweaked ones which do their purpose ATM.

Hehe, will for sure need testing. Reckon I can do a few at a time and slide them your way.

13 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Hm... did you try copying over the shader files (*.vert, *.frag) to the other games already? Might be just some changes in there causing the visual differences. Btw. just managed tweaking the precipitation shader file to have rain look less obtrusive.

I haven't, but I will, it seems to be linked much more to regional variations so doubtful it will work in the other games. Yeah rain is tough, it's too 'big' in game and looks best with a bit of mistiness, the latter is better achieved in ReShade.

Definitely will try puddles, maybe even use that water shader thing which is used for ponds and the like, if I can figure out how to.

Also will try some normal maps on a couple of ground textures, would really boost the mud look. 

[kohlenklau's CM Modding Blender adventure]

57 minutes ago, kohlenklau said:

The Franken-Csaba progress continues thanks to @Lucky_Strike and Mark's superior skills at the PS joystick.

Too kind my man.

This is looking really fine. Did you do the colour for the hull already, do you still want that tweaked? (Your hull that is)

Out of interest how does the turret get its movement, is it just down to the naming and organisation of the various mesh parts in the mdr in Blender, that is to say the Franken AB-41 turret MUST have the same name as the 222 turret so that the game thinks it's a real 222 turret?

57 minutes ago, kohlenklau said:

Am I 100% making it a Csaba? No way man. It aint worth it to me. This is a hobby and I see @NPye staying up until 4am doing stuff. I have to bloody ask where the actual BFC people are. It seems the fans can crank out the content but BFC still has bunkers that shoot wrong for every title. I don't run a business so I guess I work for free here. But BFC must carefully plan the 15 minutes they budget in to have somebody on the clock to do a small 3D change? If SOMEBODY was paid to make those bunkers then it should be warranty work and be done for free and released in a special email. You do not need a big release and activation headache process to give us the corrected files. Very depressing

It's hard to be inspired to keep at this stuff at the best of times. There's so few doing this and to put it mildly, bugger all interest from our creators. It would be beneficial to the community, the game and ultimately BF if things like the bunker bug I just reported in Artkin's thread were acknowledged, and perhaps even farmed out to be fixed by an enthusiastic urchin. We're not here moaning about this stuff because we want attention or because we want to dis the games and their creators, no in fact I'd say the opposite is true. But as Phil says - what's going on, have they just had enough already, made enough wonga to retire on? Got better things to do (huh hum, Ukraine monster thread top poster in topic)? Or are we on then verge of that exciting new version with all the bells and whistles we all desire, so why invest in the old engine - NOT!
 

[Artificial Moonlight]

Or just a bunch of knockers ... sorry OP

[Grass texture inequality - what!]

6 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

I need these for my CMFB autumn battles! Badly!

Man, getting these to work reliably has been a nightmare, I thought I could just use a [muddy] tag and the game would pick up on it, nope! Took me days to work out a tagging system that will work for everything across all the WW2 titles, and mean players don't have to swap mods in and out just to have some mud.

Not sure when I'll get these ready. Ideally I'd have a full set of ground and road textures. Good thing is that with a single mod tag we can update any scenario to look muddy. A few tweaks to the ground and weather and everyone will be in bogging hell.

14 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Bits of darkening down helps a little already.

FI is an interesting game. I hadn't really looked at it closely previously, but the engine seems to handle the FI lighting a little differently. There are more noticeable shifts in the hues of colours depending on weather conditions. The very dark mud texture I've been using varies in colour quite significantly, I suspect that it's down to the massive regional and atmospheric variations that the game has to cope with, near desert to alpine mountains and everything in between. This is what also makes it a vast game to mod.

22 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Would adding puddles beeing an option?

Maybe on some of the roads; what I'm always aware of is the repeat pattern that can happen (think ploughed fields) because of how regular texture tiling is in the game.

28 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Off course they don´t get any shader FX since ground textures don´t apply to them (beside lit and non lit slopes). A Pity. Some the textures would benefit much if a bump/normals map could be applied to them. Another big resource eater I guess.

I don't know if normal maps eat much resource in modern GPUs. They are very simple, quite easy to produce. What I can't remember is whether ground tiles benefit from them, I'm sure I tried them once, but for the life of me can't really remember. I'll have to go and try again. Heck it might even have been back in CMx1 days - did we have normal maps then?

[RT Unofficial Screenshot Thread]

14 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

With George beeing more of the EF armor kind of guy I think forests will still play a minor part. But we´ll see.

I had a sneaky peek last year of one of his other campaigns, the map was staggeringly good and would certainly fulfil your forest desire. Not sure if it's in the new upcoming set, will have to see.

16 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Though nothing to compare with my projected hurtgen forest and ardennes type maps. 

These I look forward to! 

[Getting into more complex builds. Is it worth it?]

14 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

I always do

14 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

...BUT the problem lays with the timber crap beeing part of modular building roof sets. Don´t belong there at all IMHO.

I couldn't believe it the first time I saw them. There's no excuse. Why they didn't simply just delete them and duplicate one of the others is beyond me.

16 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Also it bugs me terribly that mod building roofs change randomnly in game. WTF? You arrange it all nicely in 3D editor (CNTRL click) and then see it all messed up in game again.

Oh yes! There's so much about the editor that is just .... sheesh !

[Grass texture inequality - what!]

1 hour ago, 37mm said:

To make a decent resolution grass texture of that size would require 1.2GB (2.4GB for the green & yellow combined) & that's assuming CM would even load such a huge texture*

Yep, couple of years back I was looking at the grass texture in BN trying to figure out how big it would need to be for parity to some of the more detailed textures. Started scaling it, gave up when I got to about 400MB tiles. They were still not big enough, but besides that I just couldn't find any actual images of grass that were big enough to fill the space - 50m x 50m is about half a football (soccer) pitch. I ended up with a high res image of grass that was repeated multiple times over, looked like a carpet in the end and was no improvement at all.

1 hour ago, 37mm said:

Either way, I can confirm that there's a clear visual difference between how the grass textures are rendered in FI compared with RT.

Here's a 3x3 action square coloured grass texture in RT...

Nicely done ...

1 hour ago, 37mm said:

@BFCElvis is it possible that FI recieved some kind of upgraded graphics as part of the v2.0 engine upgrade of that time?

An upgrade which was forgotten about & subsequently never transferred to the other titles?

It's an odd one, I really thought all the games were using the same engine now. Would be nice to have this applied to all the titles especially as it doesn't seem to affect frame rates etc. 

1 hour ago, 37mm said:

*An interesting aside, it appears that CM will load 256-colour 8bit BMP's (an interesting feature which could shrink the size of a LOT of mods).

Very interesting - there are definitely some textures that would be fine as 256 colours. Wonder what it would do to frame rates etc. Someone needs to convert everything to 8 bit to see what it's like.

[Berlin CMRT Map]

5 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Building cover seems hard coded I believe now. Buildings that don´t have  a window on any the facades is fairly good cover and mostly impentrable vs. small arms fire. But it all changes when there´s at least one window or other opening on same wall. Now every square cm of the wall is crappy cover at once. Wondering what weird cover model is beeing used in the game.

Yeah, you previously said that the window apertures are actually much bigger than what we see (to prevent the pixeltruppen from clustering around the) so from your other observations it seems that by having these enlarged apertures the building walls then provide very poor cover as well. This would explain a lot of other issues that folks have noticed in the past such as vulnerability to HE and being spotted too easily. It's no wonder that BF are having to constantly revise the mechanics of these things. Probably started as a simple solution to the clustering around apertures issue but ended up as a very difficult problem to solve and not easy to unpick once embedded in the game. 

[Berlin CMRT Map]

1 hour ago, NPye said:

I can't get near that and I built it...

LOL Ain't that always the way.

[Berlin CMRT Map]

4 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

Just don't tell the Limeys that Persil originated in Germany. They will mess their whites.

Keeps your whites whiter than white ...

[Berlin CMRT Map]

8 hours ago, NPye said:

This has got to be a CM first a complete map of Anhalter Bahnhof area in Berlin, parts of the station buildings have elements of the original building, we have a goods yard, 2 turnstiles and 20 plus tracks all leading to the station, we have 100s of carriages, opposite the station entrance we have the famous Europahaus on Saarlandstraße which leads to Potsdamer Platz which in turn leads to the New Reichs Chancellery and the Reichstag... The Soviets grand prize. The attacking force will be from Konevs 1st Ukrainian Front, and he is in a hurry to beat Zhukov to the Reichstag. So clearing the station and surrounding area is a must for him and his troops must do it quickly if they are to have any chance of getting to the Reichstag first. The Race is on...

Big thanks to Lucky strike for getting the Train from 3d to in-game. Cheers

Wowwa, that is a real labour of love. Looks fantastic. I think you're right to keep it more intact, the game doesn't really handle railways very well, this looks better without loads of destruction. I think you have excelled yourself this time!!!

[RT Unofficial Screenshot Thread]

5 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

A 2x2 or 2x3 heavily forested map could bring me in troubles again. lol

A few of his newer maps have some good chunks of forest so should stress test us a bit., if we ever get to see them 

8 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Thanks, I´ll do. Anyway I just scratched surface of what´s available re Reshade presets and FX packages. Might find other or better stuff, if I find the time.

Yeah there's no rush, so much to explore in it and they're always coming up with new stuff.

[Getting into more complex builds. Is it worth it?]

21 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Also get rid of their timber frame roof sets which look entirely out of place on most urban maps. Unless it´s mostly middle age type buildings still standing. Lots of old city centers in europe still have them. But one got to find the right combo making it look all good. Considering the fragile nature of most indi buildings I´d limit use of timber frame stuff to them.

We like a bit of mock Tudor over here! 

Seriously though, timber frame buildings were more common in Normandy, though there is a particular vernacular, just like we have a specific style in the UK. And yes they mostly seem to exist in rural locations or medieval city centres. I think that BF have kind of an obsession with them, I wonder if they live in mock Tudor style ranches ...?

[Artificial Moonlight]

3 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

OK so this is Hamburg 1962 rather than the Ardennes in '44. But what the hell?

Which mods are these? 

[Grass texture inequality - what!]

1 minute ago, Vacillator said:

I hope that Elefant isn't stuck in the mud?  There's nowt worse. 

I currently have two otherwise lovely Shermans immobilised at Chaumont (part 2) when they have a lot of work to do.  And the conditions are 'freezing'.  Hmmm...

Yep, well and truly bogged (well immobilised by me actually for artistic effect).

Not sure how much permafrost is simulated by freezing, might need to be extremely cold for iron-like ground conditions. It might also depend on ground conditions as well - freezing with snow, freezing and dry, freezing and muddy could, nay should all be different.

[Grass texture inequality - what!]

3 minutes ago, Vacillator said:

Totally agree Mark.  Now if you can also get rid of those 'hair transplant' lines I would be happy to pay for your next entrance at the Tank Musuem.

Hehe, but they match my receding hairline perfectly ...! 

[Grass texture inequality - what!]

And in case your curiosity was peaked by my mention of mud - this is somewhere in Northern Italy winter '44 ...

.. mud, glorious mud! All other textures stock ... ish!

[Grass texture inequality - what!]

Messing about with trying to create a generic muddy looking landscape for all the WW2 games - I started in RT. Replacing a few textures at a time to try and figure out the mod tags (that's another story ). Anyway I've gotten to a point where I think I can make it work across ALL the WW2 titles for ALL locations and ALL seasons/weather (excepting snow for obvious reasons - though slush might have to be thunk about separately), using one generic set of ground textures to look really muddy - think Spring Awakening in RT, Hürtgen in FB, Anzio bridgeheads in FI ... you know the kind of thing.

So I was just looking at some of the textures in FI, checking how the tags work when I noticed that the generic ground grass (and ground grass yellow) texture tile looked different than in other titles (BN and RT, haven't checked FB). Further investigation shows that the Italian terrain uses a higher perceived resolution of grass tile than the other titles. Grass is one of the worst texture tiles IMHO, it is a complete blurred mess at anything close up, only really resolving into a texture when looking down from quite high up, and it looks really poor next to a nice sharp AFV for example. This may not be an issue for many folks, but I like to play down in the long grass so I find it irksome seeing the ground texture. The reason that grass tiles look so blaah is because each tile is stretch across 50 x 50 m² that's 2500m² - to represent the texture correctly would require a tile of 20480 x 20480 pixels - the existing stock tiles are 2048 x 2048 pixels.

Many modders have tried to improve the grass texture over the years but really there's not a lot of point as they all just end up looking either nasty at low level or weirdly out of scale from up above, this is not a reflection on the modders but rather how the game handles the texture. However, it seems that the game engine is not so equal as I thought, and that with a little tweak from on high we could have a higher resolution. I don't notice any particular hit on my GPU/frame rate with the alternative tiles used in FI so I wonder why this hasn't been implemented across the other titles? It's not like we would need to redraw maps, or anything like that, as it's an engine based change affecting how much each tile is stretched or repeated within a specific area of terrain. Plenty of the other tiles occupy much less relative space, that is, they are stretched less and repeated more often. Here's some images from RT and FI for you consideration. The ground grass tiles have been replaced with a different texture that I was considering for a sodden ground grass texture, the doodads are the same in both games (from my Hedgerow Hell mod )

First RT from ground level, as close as possible ...

Nice grass shame about the boat race ...

Now FI, same distance:

That's better - notice how the blurring doesn't jar so much, it all just melds together better IMHO.

Now at camera Level 1 ... first RT ...

It's all kind of floaty ... Now FI ...

Again, IMHO the grass doodads seem more attached to the ground.

This is a matter of taste for sure. There are plenty who will not care, but for those that do, self included, it would be nice if all the games were created equal in this respect.

 

[Berlin CMRT Map]

13 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Same here. Just found my old Blender files and related notes again. Got to have a look  and maybe I´ll remember what I´d figured out in 2020. Only important thing is most META data seem to relate to some the associated models XYZ coordinates. Then I think the game engine pulls the data for it´s various calculations, i.e apertures (viewports) or hitboxes and the like. One got to see most that data in triplets, defining space coordinates unless there´s some single ones defining something similar to exhaust or individual crew positions.

Hehe, how many times have you gone to look at old notes only to wonder what on earth you were writing about?

Yes, as everything in 3D world is described as XYZ then I think it's very likely the triples describe this. Some may describe HSL or RGB colour values - more triplets - could be related to stuff like transparency and reflectivity which CAN be manipulated to an extent in Blender AND seen in game.

I can't remember if you said - did you try changing the model bounding boxes in Blender to see if these have an impact in game?

[Berlin CMRT Map]

13 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

CM - Train simulator Now what´s yet needed is animated wheels and lots of steam (or smoke).

Animated wheels  this is definitely way above my pay grade ...

[Berlin CMRT Map]

13 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

I like the idea as well. If placement point (center point or however the objects origin for placement is called?) is shifted 1m then maybe one could put it over some wall terrain for bits of its inherent cover and obstacle properties. Then also can be cleared with blast command.

Yes, that should be possible. We move stuff all the time we just need to remember to apply the transforms and rotations, then we should be fine. Wouldn't take a few minutes to test, worst case is it won't export or does something like appear in the map surround, unreachable by anything ...

[RT Unofficial Screenshot Thread]

12 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Yup. Re snow covered trees I think that issue was tried to be solved from modders for various years now. None went beyond with what can be done with stock games geometry and textures. And then came F&R and stuff looks similar to what modders have done before. A little satisfying situation. Maybe one could pull over sort of textured "snow cover" overcoat or umbrella geometry (slightly larger than leaf object) on existing single leaf branches and attach it to them? Jut a fuzzy idea. And there´s hundreds of objects already I would not like messing with, not to forget the likely serious performance hit ingame. In case Blender doesn´t pop errors when try exporting. Oh well...

Hehe it's an idea, we do talk of a blanket of snow ️ I can quite easily redo all the leaf objects/meshes in Blender, trouble is this needs to be handled careful so that we retain features of the game like sway with the wind, leaf branches that stay attached to the tree in windy conditions, leaf branches that don't turn partly transparent at different view points etc. I discovered how to prevent some of these up issues from occurring but there are of course caveats attached which make it doubly difficult to figure out a satisfactory outcome. It may just be that we have to live with the limitation imposed by the engine and just rearrange all the leaf branches so they lay down properly rather than being all at arbitrary angles. This way the undersides would be less visible and therefore less offensive. This really only affects pines and conifers which tend to look more like this anyway.

12 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

You likely need a second life or 48h day, like me.

Ain't that the truth! 

12 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

One can also integrate some info in briefing, intel section to preserve FOW. Or mark stuff on the tactical map.

Absolutely, again makes it more like RL.

12 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Yup. Learned quite a many of things now, but still can´t get DoF working despite my efforts. If it´s a driver and related setting (Nvidia control panel) or something I´ve overlooked I still can´t tell. But the other (working) Reshade filters give me 100% visual improvement already. 

If the DoF FX you are using is anything like the one I use then it will rely on the game's built-in depth map. From my fuzzy understanding, games in a 3D world use a depth-map for various purposes, it's sort of like a visual break down of the near, mid ground and far distance. It can be seen by using some sort of special FX, but for the life of me I really can't remember what or how this is done. I need to go back to my original ReShade stuff, see if I have any notes or links to what one needs to do. It's one of those things one does once and then forgets. I do know that the depth map in CM is very simple. In the meantime have a look at LUTs as well if you get a chance. They are great ways to colour grade your game that use next to nothing in terms of resources. There are plenty of ReShade FX that employ them.