Huge New Map - les Hauts Vents v2 - High Detail

[WillemO]

Here I am posting my 'High Detail' version of the western half of my 16 square kilometer master map for the region around les Hauts Vents and Pont-Hebert. It differs from the "Low Detail" version not in screen resolution but rather by the inclusion of a few hundred flavour objects and a great deal of variation in the base ground tiles. All this of course will only be noticed when the camera is at ground level. As with my former posting, you must use Falaise's 22.5 degree paved road and the stock roads for this to look correct. If you want additional historical flavour, i.e. the buildings looking correct for that location in 1944, then you also need to download my building skins which I have uploaded to Green as Jade's mods repository. The map is pristine, meaning that no buildings are shown with damage and no craters anywhere.

With this map size and detail it can be a slow load on some computers and some may not be able to load it.

Permission is hereby granted to modify or crop the map in any manner you choose and to incorporate it into any scenarios you wish to create, only if doing so, it must remain freely distributable and may not be included in any commercial product without my permission. If you create a scenario with it, it would be very nice if you would email me a copy.

Cheers and enjoy,

Kandu

 

0-les Hauts Vents HD MM.btt

[RockinHarry]

I´d like giving it a try (already downloaded) but I´m fairly sure I´ll get CTD on my system.

can´t hurt to share mod links as well, since you mention them:

http://cmmodsiii.greenasjade.net/?p=8469

http://cmmodsiii.greenasjade.net/?p=8450

Roads:

http://cmmodsiii.greenasjade.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/225-Degree-Roads.zip

Edited June 23, 2019 by RockinHarry

[RockinHarry]

had CTD as expected while at "read data" around 50-60%. Will do some cropping for smaller segments and then it should work.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Surprisingly, on my high end-ish laptop load times for the HD and LD versions are nearly identical.

Edited June 24, 2019 by Vanir Ausf B

[RockinHarry]

5 hours ago, Vanir Ausf B said:

Surprisingly, on my high end-ish laptop load times for the HD and LD versions are nearly identical.

I´d assume that flavors or more varied ground tiles do not matter much. I´d found that a map size beyond say 2x2 or 2x3 km will always CTD my machine, off course also depending on cover terrain, with trees and buildings quite in particular. If that´s from low RAM or graphics card memory, I can´t tell (yet).

[RockinHarry]

So cutting the 4x2km map into 2x 4 square kilometer halves did the trick for me (loaded fine). Really a great looking normandy bocage map with great attention to detail!  Also like the use of the partly 22.5° road layout and I figured moving vehicles along these works perfectly well. Think I´ll use these for my next missions as well.  With regard to the mods, I couldn´t test them all til now. I´d started mod tagging them "* [hautevents).bmp" for more convenient use and this IMO should be the way to go when using the map in parts or as a whole. 

[WillemO]

Very glad to hear its working for you and that you like it. I initially started mod-tagging my new skins as well but I have been gradually drifting towards using Jones Soft Generic Mod Enabler (JSGME) to move mods into and out of CMBN.  I am presently creating an H2H scenario for July 10th, 1944 Panzer Lehr's attack from les Hauts Vents towards le Rocher (en route to Cavigny). This recreates one of Panzer Lehr's four combat commands (two on the eastern flank and two on the western flank) that attempted to punch through to Sainte-Jean-de-Daye. The biggest challenge will be to create a VP balanced game for what was and will be a German military defeat. My plan is to start with the baseline concept that if the 'game' result matches the 'historical' result (i.e. Lehr pushed back to their starting point) then the 'game result' will be a draw, not a German 'player' defeat. And go from there. For this scenario I have cropped about 1 km of the north edge and everyrthing to the west of the farm 'Esglandes' (west of les Hauts Vents).  Once Lehr and US 3/120 Rgt 30 Inf Div start shooting at each other, it will be interesting to see if the game overloads and crashes from the number of computations.

With respect to question of RAM vs Graphics memory, I have both an Alienware desktop and an Alienware laptop with the following specs:

Desktop: Win 10 64 bit, Intel i7-6700K @ 4.00 GHz, two NVidia GeForce GTX 1080 cards in SLI and 16 GB RAM, HD not solid state

Laptop: Win 10 64 bit, Intell i7-8750H @ 2.20 GHz, NVidia GeForce RTX 2070 and 32 GB RAM, HD solid state.

Both are able to load the 2x4 km map and the laptop with its SSHD and 32 GB RAM loads faster. However when I attempt to load the full 4km x 4km map, the desktop is able to do so in 5 minutes but he laptop crashes at 54% with the message "out of memory". Since it has twice the RAM of the desktop I assume that this message either refers to Video memory or that it is not writing overflow to the SSHD. Since I am not a computer techie, I don't know.

And like RockinHarry, I also found that load times differed only a little between my low and high detail maps. Making the maps smaller certainly does.

Strategies for preventing load crashes in order of priority:

1. Crop maps smaller.

2. Remove all trees except forests and apple orchards. In other words the trees that line the edges of the fields and roads. Change all forest trees to just one deciduous tree type. The tall bocage will suffice.

3. Reduce all ground tiles to just grass and hard ground and change all cultivated fields to just one wheat tile type. The hard ground is associated with the buildings.

4. Remove all flavour objects, not forgetting the wheat stooks in the fields.

The object of the foregoing is to reduce the number of objects that the program needs to fetch and the number of tiles it needs to compute for placement. A map that is 2km x 4 km consists of 125,000 tiles. One tile may contain as many as four itmes: ground, bocage, tree and flavour object. One the bullets start flying that's an astronomical number of computations.

Kandu or maybe Kan't du

 

 

 

Edited June 25, 2019 by WillemO
corretions and addtions

[RockinHarry]

1 hour ago, WillemO said:

Very glad to hear its working for you and that you like it. I initially started mod-tagging my new skins as well but I have been gradually drifting towards using Jones Soft Generic Mod Enabler (JSGME) to move mods into and out of CMBN.  I am presently creating an H2H scenario for July 10th, 1944 Panzer Lehr's attack from les Hauts Vents towards le Rocher (en route to Cavigny). This recreates one of Panzer Lehr's four combat commands (two on the eastern flank and two on the western flank) that attempted to punch through to Sainte-Jean-de-Daye. The biggest challenge will be to create a VP balanced game for what was and will be a German military defeat. My plan is to start with the baseline concept that if the 'game' result matches the 'historical' result (i.e. Lehr pushed back to their starting point) then the 'game result' will be a draw, not a German 'player' defeat. And go from there. For this scenario I have cropped about 1 km of the north edge and everyrthing to the west of the farm 'Esglandes' (west of les Hauts Vents).  Once Lehr and US 3/120 Rgt 30 Inf Div start shooting at each other, it will be interesting to see if the game overloads and crashes from the number of computations.

With respect to question of RAM vs Graphics memory, I have both an Alienware desktop and an Alienware laptop with the following specs:

Desktop: Win 10 64 bit, Intel i7-6700K @ 4.00 GHz, two NVidia GeForce GTX 1080 cards in SLI and 16 GB RAM, HD not solid state

Laptop: Win 10 64 bit, Intell i7-8750H @ 2.20 GHz, NVidia GeForce RTX 2070 and 32 GB RAM, HD solid state.

Both are able to load the 2x4 km map and the laptop with its SSHD and 32 GB RAM loads faster. However when I attempt to load the full 4km x 4km map, the desktop is able to do so in 5 minutes but he laptop crashes at 54% with the message "out of memory". Since it has twice the RAM of the desktop I assume that this message either refers to Video memory or that it is not writing overflow to the SSHD. Since I am not a computer techie, I don't know.

And like RockinHarry, I also found that load times differed only a little between my low and high detail maps. Making the maps smaller certainly does.

Strategies for preventing load crashes in order of priority:

1. Crop maps smaller.

2. Remove all trees except forests and apple orchards. In other words the trees that line the edges of the fields and roads. Change all forest trees to just one deciduous tree type. The tall bocage will suffice.

3. Reduce all ground tiles to just grass and hard ground and change all cultivated fields to just one wheat tile type. The hard ground is associated with the buildings.

4. Remove all flavour objects, not forgetting the wheat stooks in the fields.

The object of the foregoing is to reduce the number of objects that the program needs to fetch and the number of tiles it needs to compute for placement. A map that is 2km x 4 km consists of 125,000 tiles. One tile may contain as many as four itmes: ground, bocage, tree and flavour object. One the bullets start flying that's an astronomical number of computations.

Kandu or maybe Kan't du

 

 

 

sounds like that´s going to become quite an interesting battle for sure! If you need some playtester I´ll be ready (in case I still can run that mission). 

Regarding optimizations I found that economizing on texture sizes I can get well along with lots of low Qty textures of 512x512px and similar. I got many my ground tiles shrinked to that size without apparent loss of a good look. Added some "add noise" in my graphic app though, to increase some details. Still got some more work to do on that, but I think I´ll not get beyond heavy cover terrain maps of sizes 3x3km or beyond without CTD with my Nvidia 512 MB and just 4 GB RAM in WinXP. 

[WillemO]

Thanks for the tip about texture sizes. I think I'll have a look at my collection of downloaded and created textures and maybe see if these can be reduced with favourable outcome.

Thank  you for the playtest offer RockinHarry. As soon as the scenario is completed, I will be in touch and we can have a go at it. I have completed my research of the German forces at that location and have added them to the map. Now I need to find out exactly what elements of US armour Z force (or Y force?) from CCB made it as far west as this map and as well, who are the sources referring to when they mention "attached armour" in reference to 30th inf div's 120th regiment. They had reached Pont Hebert before pulling back but 7 tanks didn't get the message and some had struck out towards the west even claiming incorrectly that they had reached les Hauts Vents unopposed.

 

[RockinHarry]

On 6/25/2019 at 9:41 PM, WillemO said:

Thanks for the tip about texture sizes. I think I'll have a look at my collection of downloaded and created textures and maybe see if these can be reduced with favourable outcome.

Thank  you for the playtest offer RockinHarry. As soon as the scenario is completed, I will be in touch and we can have a go at it. I have completed my research of the German forces at that location and have added them to the map. Now I need to find out exactly what elements of US armour Z force (or Y force?) from CCB made it as far west as this map and as well, who are the sources referring to when they mention "attached armour" in reference to 30th inf div's 120th regiment. They had reached Pont Hebert before pulling back but 7 tanks didn't get the message and some had struck out towards the west even claiming incorrectly that they had reached les Hauts Vents unopposed.

 

Thanks! Looking forward to it! I have 2 good books on Panzer Lehr in case they´re still involved in that.

Here´s my "Economy Class" tile set I use for your map (use parts of that for my own map makings), ready for use when mod tag file (included) is imported to the mission file. There´s also a movie shader tweak included, although not necessary for the map, yet I like it.

Hauts Vents Economy Class Tile Set (Dropbox)

[WillemO]

Thank you. Got it and will try it later today. The scenario is now complete. Can we connect by dropbox so I can send it to you and playtest? My email is wim.oudsh@gmail.com

 

[RockinHarry]

On 6/30/2019 at 3:01 PM, WillemO said:

Thank you. Got it and will try it later today. The scenario is now complete. Can we connect by dropbox so I can send it to you and playtest? My email is wim.oudsh@gmail.com

 

ah sorry! I fear I don´t have time ATM for my recent reactivation in a particular wargame beta testing group. I´ll see with DP nonetheless. It might be I couldn´t load or play anyway due to CTD on load.  We´ll see then.

[WillemO]

No Worries. Have gaming friends to test locally. Cheers,

Edited July 5, 2019 by WillemO