Pinetree

On a bit of a hiatus at the moment, Real Life(TM) keeps getting in the way.

Will they show up brighter in thermal viewers?

Lol, more like town, I suppose. Thanks, it's an interesting battle in that it was the 2NZ Div's first major battle with an organic armoured brigade and it was a failure due to the very reasons the brigade was created in the first place, bad coordination of tanks and Infantry. They even sent the tanks in alone twice with predictable results.

It's been a quiet couple of weeks due to other stuff going on but I'm still plugging away at the village buildings. I've been using the grid to help placement.

It's been a quiet couple of weeks due to other stuff going on but I'm still plugging away at the village buildings. I've been using the grid to help placement.

It's been a quiet couple of weeks due to other stuff going on but I'm still plugging away at the village buildings. I've been using the grid to help placement.

Here's one for Italy: http://tinitaly.pi.ingv.it/Download_Area1_1.html
DTM is 10m in Geotiff format and EPSG is 32632. And it's free.

The aerial images I ordered from the Italian archives were made available to me last night. And they're perfect for my needs. The first thing I needed to do was place them into QGIS. Unfortunately, the images are not geotiffs so I would have to manually place them myself. Here I used the Georeferencer tool where you pick points that are common tn the image to the map in QGIS. This enables QGIS to rotate, move and warp the image to the precise location.

and voila! I now have period detail to work from. If you look closely, you can see the tree shadows and pick out the olive groves. I've already adjusted the railway.
While I was waiting for the aerial images, I ran a test of the osm data I had to see how the town would look. I ended up manually selecting the buildings so they would more resemble the actual ones. However I did notice that the slope is too steep, so I may have to manually adjust that as well.

I thought I'd create a thread to document my efforts in creating a map of Orsogna, which was the site of some fierce battles between the 2nd NZ Division and German troops of the 26. Panzer-, 65. Infanterie-, and 1 Fallschirmjager- Divisions in December 1943.
Orsgona is in the province of Chieti in the Abruzzo region, 17km (10 mi) southwest of Ortona. It is situated on the edge of a plateau with a steep drop-off to the south and a large gully to it's north.

For my first attempt, I decided I'd base it on the area of 25 Battalion's attack and subsequent German counter-attack on the 3rd Dec:

I'd trace the contours using a screenshot from Google Maps:


The result wasn't too bad:

I was going to carry on with this, then @Butschi released his tool..
..and it's a game-changer. This is the same area but generated in the CMAutoEditor using data from a geotiff:

Similar shot from Google Earth:

(to be continued)

The aerial images I ordered from the Italian archives were made available to me last night. And they're perfect for my needs. The first thing I needed to do was place them into QGIS. Unfortunately, the images are not geotiffs so I would have to manually place them myself. Here I used the Georeferencer tool where you pick points that are common tn the image to the map in QGIS. This enables QGIS to rotate, move and warp the image to the precise location.

and voila! I now have period detail to work from. If you look closely, you can see the tree shadows and pick out the olive groves. I've already adjusted the railway.
While I was waiting for the aerial images, I ran a test of the osm data I had to see how the town would look. I ended up manually selecting the buildings so they would more resemble the actual ones. However I did notice that the slope is too steep, so I may have to manually adjust that as well.

The aerial images I ordered from the Italian archives were made available to me last night. And they're perfect for my needs. The first thing I needed to do was place them into QGIS. Unfortunately, the images are not geotiffs so I would have to manually place them myself. Here I used the Georeferencer tool where you pick points that are common tn the image to the map in QGIS. This enables QGIS to rotate, move and warp the image to the precise location.

and voila! I now have period detail to work from. If you look closely, you can see the tree shadows and pick out the olive groves. I've already adjusted the railway.
While I was waiting for the aerial images, I ran a test of the osm data I had to see how the town would look. I ended up manually selecting the buildings so they would more resemble the actual ones. However I did notice that the slope is too steep, so I may have to manually adjust that as well.

After downloading the scant Open Street Map data for the area, I've placed it as a layer in QGIS and I've also loaded the 1:50,000 map that was used by the Allied troops at the time. I've found that once I had it properly placed, it's not very accurate; especially the roads, but it's handy for showing the extent of the buildings compared to modern times. I adjusted the railway to match it but I don't think it's accurate either. It was realigned after the war so while you can see traces of the old path on Google Earth it's unclear where how far the top of the S went and where the bottom straight section was. I've ordered a couple of RAF aerial reconnaissance photos taken in Nov. 1943  from the Italian archives and I hope they'll be clear enough to make out those and other period details.

I thought I'd carry on with tracing the buildings that I'm pretty certain were there in 1943 like the school (big green polygon) and houses near it.

I decided to run a test using the autoeditor and see how it generated the roads and buildings. The result wasn't great:

The school, especially, is just a hodgepodge of houses due to the orientation of the map. The streets aren't great either. When you generate the elevations, one of the things that is also generated is the actual grid that will be used in the CM map editor. You can load it up as a layer in QGIS and it will give you good idea on how things are orientated. Looking at this, I think I'll reorient the map in a more anti-clockwise direction so that the school and street are on the north-south axis as that whole area saw some nasty street fighting and I want it looking good.

So my next task is to rerun the autoeditor and try and get the map lined up. Hopefully by then, the aerial photos will be ready too.

I thought I'd create a thread to document my efforts in creating a map of Orsogna, which was the site of some fierce battles between the 2nd NZ Division and German troops of the 26. Panzer-, 65. Infanterie-, and 1 Fallschirmjager- Divisions in December 1943.
Orsgona is in the province of Chieti in the Abruzzo region, 17km (10 mi) southwest of Ortona. It is situated on the edge of a plateau with a steep drop-off to the south and a large gully to it's north.

For my first attempt, I decided I'd base it on the area of 25 Battalion's attack and subsequent German counter-attack on the 3rd Dec:

I'd trace the contours using a screenshot from Google Maps:


The result wasn't too bad:

I was going to carry on with this, then @Butschi released his tool..
..and it's a game-changer. This is the same area but generated in the CMAutoEditor using data from a geotiff:

Similar shot from Google Earth:

(to be continued)

I thought I'd create a thread to document my efforts in creating a map of Orsogna, which was the site of some fierce battles between the 2nd NZ Division and German troops of the 26. Panzer-, 65. Infanterie-, and 1 Fallschirmjager- Divisions in December 1943.
Orsgona is in the province of Chieti in the Abruzzo region, 17km (10 mi) southwest of Ortona. It is situated on the edge of a plateau with a steep drop-off to the south and a large gully to it's north.

For my first attempt, I decided I'd base it on the area of 25 Battalion's attack and subsequent German counter-attack on the 3rd Dec:

I'd trace the contours using a screenshot from Google Maps:


The result wasn't too bad:

I was going to carry on with this, then @Butschi released his tool..
..and it's a game-changer. This is the same area but generated in the CMAutoEditor using data from a geotiff:

Similar shot from Google Earth:

(to be continued)

I think it's roughly 2.8 by 2.2km.

After downloading the scant Open Street Map data for the area, I've placed it as a layer in QGIS and I've also loaded the 1:50,000 map that was used by the Allied troops at the time. I've found that once I had it properly placed, it's not very accurate; especially the roads, but it's handy for showing the extent of the buildings compared to modern times. I adjusted the railway to match it but I don't think it's accurate either. It was realigned after the war so while you can see traces of the old path on Google Earth it's unclear where how far the top of the S went and where the bottom straight section was. I've ordered a couple of RAF aerial reconnaissance photos taken in Nov. 1943  from the Italian archives and I hope they'll be clear enough to make out those and other period details.

I thought I'd carry on with tracing the buildings that I'm pretty certain were there in 1943 like the school (big green polygon) and houses near it.

I decided to run a test using the autoeditor and see how it generated the roads and buildings. The result wasn't great:

The school, especially, is just a hodgepodge of houses due to the orientation of the map. The streets aren't great either. When you generate the elevations, one of the things that is also generated is the actual grid that will be used in the CM map editor. You can load it up as a layer in QGIS and it will give you good idea on how things are orientated. Looking at this, I think I'll reorient the map in a more anti-clockwise direction so that the school and street are on the north-south axis as that whole area saw some nasty street fighting and I want it looking good.

So my next task is to rerun the autoeditor and try and get the map lined up. Hopefully by then, the aerial photos will be ready too.

After downloading the scant Open Street Map data for the area, I've placed it as a layer in QGIS and I've also loaded the 1:50,000 map that was used by the Allied troops at the time. I've found that once I had it properly placed, it's not very accurate; especially the roads, but it's handy for showing the extent of the buildings compared to modern times. I adjusted the railway to match it but I don't think it's accurate either. It was realigned after the war so while you can see traces of the old path on Google Earth it's unclear where how far the top of the S went and where the bottom straight section was. I've ordered a couple of RAF aerial reconnaissance photos taken in Nov. 1943  from the Italian archives and I hope they'll be clear enough to make out those and other period details.

I thought I'd carry on with tracing the buildings that I'm pretty certain were there in 1943 like the school (big green polygon) and houses near it.

I decided to run a test using the autoeditor and see how it generated the roads and buildings. The result wasn't great:

The school, especially, is just a hodgepodge of houses due to the orientation of the map. The streets aren't great either. When you generate the elevations, one of the things that is also generated is the actual grid that will be used in the CM map editor. You can load it up as a layer in QGIS and it will give you good idea on how things are orientated. Looking at this, I think I'll reorient the map in a more anti-clockwise direction so that the school and street are on the north-south axis as that whole area saw some nasty street fighting and I want it looking good.

So my next task is to rerun the autoeditor and try and get the map lined up. Hopefully by then, the aerial photos will be ready too.

Because it's now relatively painless to do elevations, I decided to increase the size and rotate the map a bit to include the cemetery which featured in the later attacks.

The red area is the size I used to generate the map from the geotiff, the orange area is the new size.

The new area:

So with the elevations done, it's time to move onto roads, buildings and other terrain.

I thought I'd create a thread to document my efforts in creating a map of Orsogna, which was the site of some fierce battles between the 2nd NZ Division and German troops of the 26. Panzer-, 65. Infanterie-, and 1 Fallschirmjager- Divisions in December 1943.
Orsgona is in the province of Chieti in the Abruzzo region, 17km (10 mi) southwest of Ortona. It is situated on the edge of a plateau with a steep drop-off to the south and a large gully to it's north.

For my first attempt, I decided I'd base it on the area of 25 Battalion's attack and subsequent German counter-attack on the 3rd Dec:

I'd trace the contours using a screenshot from Google Maps:


The result wasn't too bad:

I was going to carry on with this, then @Butschi released his tool..
..and it's a game-changer. This is the same area but generated in the CMAutoEditor using data from a geotiff:

Similar shot from Google Earth:

(to be continued)

For all of you who want to extract elevation data from geotiffs: I did a short tutorial on how to convert geotiffs to xyz data so you can use the data with dgm2cm.
@Pinetree @Artkin

For topographical data to use with Butschi's tool, there is http://tinitaly.pi.ingv.it/Download_Area1_1.html which gives you DEM data in geotiff format at 10m resolution.

There's also this one for historical topos at different scales. This page makes it very easy to find the location you want :
https://library.mcmaster.ca/maps/ww2/italy-ww2topos/

A little teaser:

The new CMFI profile for CMAutoEditor is almost done.

I decided to create a new topic for this because "tool to set elevation in the editor" is no longer really a good description. Finally (from my perspective 😉) I managed to release version 2.0.0 of CMAutoEditor.

https://github.com/DerButschi/CMAutoEditor
Woah, Butschi, wait a minute CMAutoWhat? What the hell are you talking about? CMAutoEditor is a tool that takes "external" data, like elevation, and automates clicking in the CM scenario editor. This way it kind of works around "missing features" in the editor. Wouldn't it be nice to import something like a heat map instead of clicking elevations in the editor? Of course I can't change the editor but by letting CMAutoEditor do the clicking it does something similar.

 
Version 2 is really a major update as it now includes importing data from OpenStreetMap. This way you can basically use CMAutoEditor to create a whole map for you.
Still, feature creep and being overly ambitious is certain to kill such a small project so I had to triage what makes it into this release and what (maybe, provided there is enough interest on your side and enough time on my side) gets postponed to a later update.

The cut affecting most of you is that for this release only CMCW is really supported. The reason is that there are differences in what is in the scenario editor for each CM title. That means not only are there buttons at different positions but there are also different buildings, roads, flavour objects etc. which need to be programmed as a "profile". I intend to modify CMAutoEditor in a way that the community can help with that but I am not yet sure how best to do it. So, for now CMCW only. CMBS should work for everything but flavour objects.

Another thing I had to cut is support for Windows version older than Windows 10. I know, there are quite a few of you around who still field Windows 7. However, python is only supported up to version 3.7 on Windows 7 and a few of the libraries CMAutoEditor depends on require python 3.10. In addition, I don't have a farm of PCs idling at home where I can test different Windows version so I can really only develop for Windows 10. Sorry for that but maybe this doubles as a friendly reminder that nowadays Windows 7 is a security liability and you should upgrade to Windows 10 or 11. 😉
There is of course a long list of things I'd like to improve eventually and given that this is a rather complex piece of code the chances that it is free of bugs is close to zero. So, feel free to contact me here or on github if you find something!

Now, with all the caveats out of the way let's move on to the more pleasant stuff. 🙂 What's new in version 2? Well, of course OpenStreetMap data. You can import forests, rivers, roads, streams, railways, farmland, grassland, bushes, buildings and even bus stops, wayside crosses and much more. I improved the tools to import DGM data so that now arbitrary rectangles can be extracted. The information from this can be loaded into the OSM data converter so that you don't have to manually enter bounding boxes. (The geotiff tool is unfortunately among the things that didn't make it for this release so you are left with the previous capabilites). CMAutoEditor itself is now also much faster. Please note, that it may be too fast for what your PC can handle. If you experience "holes", e.g. when setting the elevation, that means the CM Editor is not responsive enough. I will make the parameters that determines the rate of clicking selectable from the GUI in a later update. Last but certainly not least there is a GUI for all the tools, so no more going to that evil shell, typing commands - kudos to @Dawntaker for supporting me with GUI making!

One more thing. I won't repeat the mistake and not have a manual or tutorial video ready at release: Since my previous tutorial video is now totally deprecated I am doing a new one. This time, instead of just telling you what the different features do, I'll do a step-by-step tutorial in four parts where I will create an actual map. This way I will certainly miss a few features but you should get a better feeling of how to actually use the tools in reality. Part 1 is finished already and it covers "installing" (i.e. downloading the .exe files) CMAutoEditor, installing other necessary tools, selecting a location for the map in map.army, finding and downloading elevation data, downloading OpenStreetMap data and getting historical aerial imagery and working with it. So, basically the boring stuff, some of you might say, but possibly the most important part. 😉
In the future I'd like to adapt CMAutoEditor to one of the WW2 titles, I think CMFB or CMRT would be best. Obviously present-day OpenStreetMap won't do for that. So, instead I'd like to make another tutorial showing how to use and old map or aerial image to make "OpenStreetMap data" from scratch and feed it into the CM scenario editor. Drawing polygons and tagging them is still - in my view - much more comfortable than clicking in the editor with some semi transparent overlay. So, if you have good material, go ahead and make a suggestion here. 😉
I hope you enjoy this new version of CMAutoEditor and the tutorial video(s)!

As an update, my latest map build:


I (once more) reworked the buildings algorithm and roads/railways/streams. Mostly playing along nicely, although one has to take care not to have a too dense network, because then the algorithm won't be able to find a valid solution.

Now also with fence-like objects...

... and flavour objects.

So basically by now all the necessary functionality is there and working. Some things can be improved but that is more tweaking of cost functions, etc.
I am going to be working on maps for my first Agger Valley campaign, probably consisting of three missions. But afterwards I will go about making the tool available for everyone, I think. 🙂 (Which will involve tyding up, making a tutorial, etc.)