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Lucky_Strike

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  1. Lucky_Strike
    Thanks Sgt. I get your drift, I might have to give it a quick try out, I guess flavour objects are a bit more straightforward than vehicles so I'll see what I can rustle up at some point. I like the idea of a campaign for the poor old 21st Panzer Div. I read some good accounts of their actions on day one and beyond that should make for some interesting scenarios. Just another little project!
  2. Lucky_Strike
    Thanks Slippy. This is going to take some thought to make sure we can get something that works on a couple of levels - supporting both old and future maps - it's probably going to involve tags and maybe some file swapping by the player per map. I personally would rather it was just the former. From a player point of view, and with a likely influx on new blood eventually thanks to Steam, it's much easier if we can just plonk a folder of mods in our z or mod folder and be done, letting the game engine and scenario designers take the strain. I think we can easily have two or three representative road surfaces, there are enough types to produce most of what folks expect, at least for Normandy. It may prove different for MG, and I have no idea how these ideas may translate across the other titles, but we can still give it a shot. Yes, it should be possible, though how it would look is another question. What I've done is to use a parallel, adjacent, double ditch-locked row of tiles. That is producing a very wide ditch with steep banks on either side. The tall bocage runs along the length of each row of ditch (as would a wall) and, because of how it's implemented in game, has it's own built-in earth bank to sit on (a wall doesn't so I would only use tall wall as an experiment). This results in a very heavily deformed landscape kind of like the letters UMU in profile which works okay in a NSWE orientation, have yet to try it at other angles. The depth can be altered in the elevations to create some extreme sunken lanes. This all came about from messing with the trenches previously. What also happens is that the ditch extends on either side of the bocage so that the field next to it also has a deep ditch at the edge along the bocage. This is not strictly how the bocage appears but the ditch does then kinda function like a trench line along the bocage giving any troops using it a more dug in look. I'll do some more images and a sample map, so that folks can see what's happening for themselves, when I get to my desktop later. Now I'm supposed to be chopping wood ...
  3. Lucky_Strike
    Yes they are great textures. Very high res but surprisingly easy on the eye. I think they make a great basis for these projects. I do wonder what happened to Aris, I guess he just moved on to other things. We will need lots of different textures 'cos most of this stuff won't work with old maps. What you've made so far will work with the existing stock which is absolutely important. Unless there's someone willing to retrofit a few hundred maps ... anyone? I know, I thought of your wrecked vehicles when I was making this. I think we can make this quite convincing looking. The BF wrecks are a bit sad looking surrounded by all that charred earth, so we need some fantastic wrecked flavour objects. Can flavour objects be stacked onto each other? If so we could have the scorched road tile with an invisible burning vehicle - maybe one of the flak half-tracks; then a pile of twisted, burnt debris (flavour object); then a wrecked vehicle or tank (second flavour object) all stacked up. Google translate didn't help, something about being a smart arse I think, you'll have to enlighten me I can let you have the Photoshop document and all the textures for the burnt road, so you can have a play around with it. I only made a quick version to demonstrate what I think is possible, nt masking just a bunch of bits of layered images. It might be an idea to also look for a ground tile that could be a donor for burnt ground so we're not restricted to just burnt wrecks on roads. Alternatively maybe a flavour object of a burnt patch would be the way forward, if we can stack flavour objects. You have much better knowledge of this than I do JM.
  4. Lucky_Strike
    Yes, dirt or whatever helps to blend in the paved road with the road joining it. I have a chalk road surface which looks great in place of gravel roads so it'll be interesting to see how that fares with these experiments. I need to take a look at some of the other hard road surfaces to see how they blend. Overall I'd happily lose one of the road textures to gain a more cohesive look to the overall roads, AND get a bunch of spare donor tiles into the bargain. I know this is all a bit late for so many of the great maps we have but I feel we still have years of entertainment left in these games, especially if BF can deliver on the performance enhancements that have been touted.
  5. Lucky_Strike
    Just realised this is what you guys probably want ...
  6. Lucky_Strike
    I think there is somewhere, I shall see what I have ... otherwise you can just ask anywhere on here, there's who'll offer help.
  7. Lucky_Strike
    As the saying goes if the cap fits ...
  8. Lucky_Strike
    Encouraging us is helping. And don't be shy with critique, we are all grown ups here, so long as it's constructive it's all grist for the mill ... So, the issue of hard edges at transitions from one road type to another, eg paved to dirt, and how we can overcome them? If we don't mind losing one type of paved surface we can do all sorts of nice stuff. This junction with original, or modded, texture tile presents a problem - the paved surface into dirt road transition, even with good dirt road paved textures is still visible because of the way the edges are feathered and blended on the dirt road texture ... The editor ... produces this... ... nice textures still hard edged, and damn near impossible to get rid of entirely. We can sort of get around this by NOT using the paved road t-junction tile ... ... a passable result ... ... there's an edge but not too bad aided by a feathered edge to both the textures, might be alright for field entrances but no track marks going off the side. Alternatively if we used paved road 2 and retexture the tiles we then have a set of donor tiles to allow us to make nice things ... ... it even shows in the editor ... the edited texture is the one with the tree on it (the editor places the single tree in the middle though on map it's off to the side) ... ... as you can see it's much less hard (these original road textures by the way are Aris's, so credit to him, I've just tweaked the colour a little for my own personal taste). A little more work could perfect this. The donor is the paved road 2a straight section. the alpha channel looks like this ... ... and it can be oriented to face NSWE. Looks good at field entrances etc ... And we can then go further, if we say okay no paved road 2 textures on map we have a lot of donor tiles to mess with - @Falaise has already shown how to do a 22.5 degree road section. We can also try other things ... burn baby, burn ... something I've fancied doing for a while, a bit rough and ready but you get the idea I hope ... battlefields are very messy places, lets keep them that way! Oh, and I have been tampering with sunken lanes, this is a new attempt to get as close as I can with a little texture swapping ... it's about a car's width and very sunken/hidden ... ... but that's for another thread.
  9. Lucky_Strike
  10. Lucky_Strike
    Well, there is definitely a way we can make a workaround for this if we are willing to lose one type of road - I am - for some this might be a compromise to far (as opposed to a bridge ... ) and it will be a royal (interesting that my spell checker capitalised Royal, must be a fan of the inbreds) pain in the rear for older maps. I did some experiments last night and will update later when I can get to my desktop.
  11. Lucky_Strike
    This is certainly one of the most difficult aspects to overcome. Yes, it's a shame that we can't live preview in the game as we update colour etc in our image editors, would save a lot of time. One way to kinda get around this is to import the bmps into a page layout application - something like InDesign - laying them out to create a 'road' network then to refresh the subscribed images as they are edited, quite a quick and dirty solution but does allow for live editing of sorts with all the edges and colours refreshed simultaneously. I suspect that this could also be done in Blender if a more 3D look was required ... I'll have to give it a go ...
  12. Lucky_Strike
    Yes, still to look at them all, lots to think about, but the download does work.
  13. Lucky_Strike
    Thanks Slippy, it's good to bounce these ideas around, encourage JM to make more mods for us It's possible to give most of the roads the same texture, but there may still be issues where they join. The problem with many of the textures used in the games is that choices were made early on, back in version 1 days, which were meant to save resources in much less powerful PCs and no doubt man-hours. We have inherited much of this and, though it mostly works, there are obvious occasions where extra textures would help, but it's unlikely to be changed going forward. There are some tiles that scale badly - grass is the worst - and there are others that are just used too ubiquitously, dirt roads only has one texture tile - there are no bends or junctions or anything, it's just one dirt roads for every which way, which is why JM can't make a specific dirt road texture with tracks and ruts. BUT what can be done is to replace all the other road tiles with the same, or similar, textures and not use the dirt road texture for dirt roads ... does that make sense? Still not sure how they would transition into each other, but with JMs work it should be possible to experiment and see if an homogenised road surface is possible. For personal use and making ones own maps etc it would be easyish, for use in maps for the community it might have to be done with mod tags as not everyone likes mods. And as you noted, it can only work in new maps or mod-tagged maps. I do think that with the roads we have, at least perhaps for most of Normandy, we could have a system whereby all the country roads could be very similar and have smoother transitions into village streets with perhaps cobbles or Falaise's surfaces, so long as we are prepared to forego larger roads. Certainly food for thought ... As for dust, not sure how the amount is controlled, I guess it's hard-coded in the game engine, probably something we can't alter sadly. All the games have a smoke dust texture which I think is the same and what is probably used to generate the dust textures for vehicle movement. It may be influenced by a shader but really I don't know.
  14. Lucky_Strike
    Great stuff, we have another modder! For the distant tiles you have to make a minimap - I think that's what they're called. In the game's original Data folder there should be a folder somewhere with ground mini tiles, one for each of the equivalent terrain textures. They are basically tiny versions of your ground textures used in place of the large version when you zoom out. You can replace these with the same tile as the large version but that makes extra work for the engine, so it's best to make a scaled down one in PhotoShop. You know what I've never made one in all the mods I've done so am not sure what resolution they are, but you have PhotoShop so you can open the existing one, see what size it is and take it from there. Hah, that'll teach me to read ahead in the thread, as 37mm points out the mini tiles are 64px squares. Mud or dirt cliffs would work well for some of your jungle type terrains. The dirt ones work well for desert and dry regions. They do blend in better with other terrain types and don't have such annoying repeat pattern issues. I like the idea of using tags for terrain types.
  15. Lucky_Strike
    You're welcome Sgt. Those tenements wouldn't look out of place in many a modern city. Great work!
  16. Lucky_Strike
    Transitions are always a problem on roads. Put simply it's near impossible to manage because there are no textures for it in the base game. The only, maybe, way around it would be to limit the type of roads used to just one and then to utilise the "spare" texture slots from the other road type to create the transition tiles/textures. This would mostly be fine by me, but the problem would be that all maps with more than one road type would need to be adapted to use the modded tiles. It's a big project, whom ever took it on could easily produce both mod tagged and mod folders once the textures were done. Good thing is that the textures should work across all the games not just Normandy, though colour may be an issue for parts of FI and SF
  17. Lucky_Strike
    I'm free!
  18. Lucky_Strike
    Some cliff textures for you to try Sgt. just remove the appended _number from the file name before adding to your z folder. Here
  19. Lucky_Strike
    Should be doable, rename ground heavy rocks to ground deep marsh then deploy deep marsh where you want the "heavy rocks" to appear ... he says confidently, teaching his granny to suck some proverbial eggs ... That's a surprise, I have no idea why this doesn't work as expected, never seen the like of it before ... it seems that the game doesn't allow more than one mod for ground deep marsh in your mod folder. I had another texture mod present which was all that showed up. Removed it and suddenly the ground deep marsh/ground heavy rocks appear. Check your mod folder for other ground deep marsh mods ... Once it's sorted the rocks appear but have reeds amongst them ... (this is from CMRT but same applies I suspect ...) Our little convoy wnts to drive along a mountain road in the rain ... notice the reeds can see them on top of the cliff ... ... nope can't go there, not even by foot ... ... won't even try it with a waypoint on the far side, would rather sit in the rain ... ... or circle a sink hole for fun ... this is what you want to prevent I guess. The reeds could be got rid of by using an alpha channel to obliterate them, but you'll lose them in your normal marsh as well.
  20. Lucky_Strike
    I'll stick them in a folder on DropBox, you can give them a go in H&E. The screenshots were all from CMBN with various other mods, trying out some different ground textures as well to see if I can avoid using the stock grass texture which is very over stretched. All the cliff textures were 2048 x 2048px Can't remember what size the stock texture is but TBH I don't think the resolution makes a huge different to the game render of it.
  21. Lucky_Strike
    Hah, love the fact that a small girl has a dress made of this fabric, does make one wonder where other camo fabrics might turn up ...
  22. Lucky_Strike
    Love it! This is my favourite AAR video ever - road safety CM style, thanks JM What ever happened to public information films ...?
  23. Lucky_Strike
    Is this like a kind of aggregate stuck onto a tarred surface rolled flat with a large steamroller? I'd imagine it was simply applied every couple of years or so straight on top of the old surface. Again, was this compacted with a heavy steamroller? I'd imagine it acts like a big sponge in the rain, not very waterproof but rather soaking up the rain and allowing it to drain through. Would probably get full of pot holes after a few seasons, bit like our roads (take note Hampshire CC ) I do think we need a rain mod ...
  24. Lucky_Strike
    So the problem with cliffs is that the repeat is very obvious with heavier textures. My standard textures look nice close up ... but drop back a few hundred meters ... .. and we get something like those great big wire gabions full of rocks used for sidings. Playing down the texture helps ... ... and still looks alright close up ... What can work is a very dark texture - more like basalt cliffs, volcanic etc ... ... this one is nice, even the repeat is not too bad as it looks like strata ... Basically, the simpler and less contrasty the texture then the less obvious the repeat ... Volcanic colour might suite the SE Asian area. I don't know what colours you might be aiming for but lighter is more problematic unless you reduce the texture/contrast, but then they can end up looking like mud slips or sand dunes or Welsh slag heaps ... Or you can go all Dame Vera Lynn, Battle of Britain ... Or this ... Anyway, that was a fun experiment ...
  25. Lucky_Strike
    I'm with @Warts 'n' all on this one. The roads in JMs videos are about two Sherman's wide which is what both pictured town roads appear to be, the first is probably a bit wider still. I don't think that we should see paved roads very often in Normandy, cobbled town and village streets for sure, but 30-odd tons of AFV is going to wreak havoc with your cobbles. I much prefer to see hard dirt roads or something like what JM has produced. I have toyed around with a compacted chalky surface for roads but I think these are only good for very dry conditions. What I think would be good are mod tagged roads that can be employed with different atmospheric conditions - dusty for hot weather, muddy for wet, with puddles for raining ... this should be possible with the current texture system. We could also then deploy weather shaders to change the overall tone of the landscape to reflect the colour of the weather - darken greens and browns for wet weather etc, etc. I don't know if shaders can be tagged, not tried ... The game does seem to do this to a certain extent, but roads always seem to remain too light in damp or wet conditions. It's quite a bit of work though, another project in itself.
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