Sky Backgrounds If Interested

[kingcone]

Hey Guys:

I come from the Grand Prix Legends (GPL) community. It's a 1967 Formula One simulation that came out in 1998. We've been editing this sim ever since, and I have been in contact with Tanks-A-Lot, Junk2Drive, and I beilve Juju, in the past. These guys have been a great help, and have allowed me to use some of their great graphics in some modifications that I've done to several of the tracks.

Well, I'm now tweaking the Skies and backgrounds for our sim, and have come across a large selection of panoramas. These are 6144x512 pixels.

I believe that you guys in CM also use this same size backgrounds. (6 backgrounds that are 1024x512)

Anyway, I thought I might be able to give "something" back to your community by seeing if any of you guys might want some of these. They come in the full 6144x512 size, and would have to be cut into 1024 chunks. (or, I could do that if you need it)

The following screens are just a small sample of the skies\backgrounds that are available. They're also layered so that the land can be raised or lowered.

Let me know if you can use any.

(Really gotta try CM one of these days. Looks like a blast! No pun intended )

Thanks Guys!

[Bogdan]

Hello Kingcone,

Your backgrounds are really nice and, I can tell you, look like actual Normandy sceneries

Hills, bocages, village, overall aspect are good, in my humble opinion. I would suggest to one our fellow modders to take this into consideration !

By the way, when looking at the 4th pictures, I noticed that the fences look like CMBB ones, is that coincidence ? :confused:

[Captain Pies]

These would be perfect for the "Panzers gone Weald" mod that Andreas has in the works. I'm pretty certain that they are all UK scenery.

[Philippe]

As it happens I have been working on a set of geography-specific horizons that cover different parts of Northern Europe for CMBO.

So far the biggest problem that I have had is with the skies. It may not seem like an issue, but infuriating things happen where the two edges meet, making the conversion (even from CMAK or CMBB skies) a maddening process. I've refined my technique a bit, but still never know what's going to happen when I load in a sky -- I've had to throw out most of the high resolution photographs that I've used because the cure tends to be worse than the disease (doubling and reversing a second version of the image eliminates the line in the sky but tends to produce a cloud pattern that looks a bit like the holes in a pelvic bone). CMBO skies are very unforgiving because the same panel repeats four time -- that means four suns or moons in the sky, and cloud patterns can't be too distinctive or you'll notice the repetition.

So in answer to your post, yes, please post or send me all of your skies, and no, don't alter them at all I need the raw material because I've learned from painful experience that skies that look like they'll work in the bitmap tend not to once you have them mounted in the game. I particularly need overcast cloudy skies for bad racing weather.

[Philippe]

And a silly question about GPL. Does it work on Windows 2000 and do you need anything besides mouse and keyboard ? (I think you can fly Il-2 from the keyboard but I wouldn't want to try it).

And isn't that Juju's wooden fence in the bottom screenshot ?

[GJK]

Wait a minute! What other Combat Mission mods are being used here?

[junk2drive]

I tried to use some terrain tiles from GPL. IIRC 16 color bitmaps that didn't want to go away when I converted them to 24 bit and copied into my folder. I had to delete the GPL bmp, and use the BFC bmp to get things right.

[Juju]

That game sure looks good, Kingcone. Skies too are a treat. Let's see who bites.

[Juju]

Originally posted by Bogdan:

By the way, when looking at the 4th pictures, I noticed that the fences look like CMBB ones, is that coincidence ? :confused:

Nope, those are indeed CM:BB/AK ones. There's probably some more of my own and Tanksalot's mods in there too. Kingcone, can you post some screenshots of what you did with some of Ed's work?

[kingcone]

Junk2drive.....Juju!

Good to see you guys!

Yes, I believe that fence is Juju's. Most realistic fence on the net. Tweaked with grass at the base to match ground tiles.

@Philippe:

I'm using Terragen to create the actual sky. This gives me a perfect edge to edge fit in 360 degrees. I'm concerned with your comment that the sky panels repeat themselves 4 or 5 times. that wouldn't be good.

Please forgive my ignorance, but does CMBO, CMAK, and CMBB all handle sky graphics differently?

In other words, can you use a sky from CMAK in CMBB?

I'd be happy to upload a sky, to see if it'd work for you. Would you need it chopped into 1024 sections?

And Yes, you "should" be able to run GPL in W2K. Be aware, GPL is VERY finicky about the use of certain drivers.(graphics & sound)

@GJK:

If only I could incorporate that tank into GPL..... :eek:

@Junk2drive:

These skies are all 24 bit. Uncertain as to whether you need 16 or 24 bit to work in CM.

@Juju:

Hey! Where is Ed by the way? :confused:

The following screen is, I believe, the first one I sent to Ed months ago. A building 3Do using his textures on it. This brings up a point.

The bottom picture shows a 3Do used in GPL. Any way that you can think of to insert houses like this into CM? I can send you some buildings to play with if you'd like.

Scott

[ November 15, 2004, 12:57 AM: Message edited by: kingcone ]

[junk2drive]

I now remember trying to use a building or two from GPL. They were like lo res CMBO.

Maybe a better graphics person than I could do something with them.

[Philippe]

CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK use four bitmaps for the entire sky. CMBO uses the same bitmap four times, CMBB and CMAK uses three different bitmaps and repeats one of them twice. As a result the problem with lines in the sky from colors not matching or repeating cloud patterns tends to be more pronounced in CMBO than in CMBB/CMAK. Some skies can be ported back from CMBB/CMAK to CMBO and some can't, but you can't go the other way.

Please upload a sky, or two, if it's not too much trouble. A plain sky (i.e. lots of blue, few clouds) to get the general feel for how things work, and a heavily overcast sky. Or something from sunrise or sunset without a sun in it.

Please don't cut the bmp's up. The larger size is better, since I may have to double the bitmap by copying it with image reversed and then shrink down to the right size (sounds weird but it works).

I'm not familiar with Terragen. I've heard that there is something in Photoshop CS (or whatever it's called) that creates panorama shots by somehow smoothing the joins together of separate photographs. That would really make my life easier -- I've done a bit of that manually (pixel by pixel at 800x magnification) and it's a real pain.

Will you be uploading to CMMODS, or do you have a favorite GPL location ?

That house looks really good. The balcony won't carry over, but I look forward to what Juju or Ed can do with it. Please post it somewhere soon because I could deconstruct the wooden planking and make a great minefield marker out of it (I want those three planks just above the door) .

[Tanks a Lot]

Hey Scott, really nice looking skies. If I weren't so darned busy with another building mod, I'd consider taking a shot at them.

CMBB and CMAK use three textures for each sky, with one of them mirrored on the opposite side to make the fourth side. Really tough to get them all to blend together smoothly.

@Phillipe:

That house is made up pieces of my previous building mods, and even my tree mod. There's not much I can do with it since the CM models can't be changed.

[kingcone]

Hi Ed!

"Another" building Mod? How about those trees and stuff from that link I sent you. Any help? I was able to extract all the trees and bushes from that program, and they do look good.

So, CMBB & CMAK use 3 sky textures, and the end one is flipped and put at the other end. (to make a total of 4)

CMBO uses the same sky texture 4 times.....

Oh Boy......

I can see what you guys mean when you say it's a real pain, getting these right.

Anyway, I uploaded a sky texture, 6144x512. This is just the sky as per your request Philippe.

http://members.cox.net/snowtwister/sky.zip

[Philippe]

Thank you so much for your sky. You're making a great contribution.

This is an alpha version of one of my CMBO experimental horizons mounted against your sky:

I think it's supposed to represent a nice day with lots of clouds in an agricultural part of the Ruhr, if there is such a thing.

The wheat field in the foreground is Ed's and is part of the playing area. If you look closely, just beyond the near wheatfield is the still-blurry middle horizon. The wheatfields beyond that are also Ed's, but they're part of the far horizon. The idea is to create a seamless vista from the battlefield to the sky.

I really like your sky. I didn't do anything fancy to it beyond shrinking it to 2048x512 and the seam at the join between the left and right sides of the two adjacent bitmaps is invisible. Another annoying thing that could have cropped up (but didn't) is the u-shaped warping that occurs between the two edges of the bit-map when you mount them in-game. To see what I mean drop the sky by fifty or so pixels before you mount it and you'll get a v-shaped white area.

I suspect that GPL uses a fairly high horizon, which makes sense since the eye is looking at it from something like three feet or less above the tarmac. As a result there seems to be an almost colorlous haze area that isn't really as pink as it looks in the jpeg. I don't mind a little haze on the horizon, and my Ardennes/Hurtgen horizons have much taller hills. In a final version I would see how much I could stretch the image vertically without damaging it (i.e. cut blank area from the bottom and stretch the rest of the image down to fill the gap). I'm assuming that the bottoms of the GPL skies tend to be a little blank because GPL horizons are probably location specific.

This looks like it was good racing weather. Do you have anything that is in nasty weather ? Nurenburgring in the rain, perhaps ? And do you have any Monaco street horizons that aren't too pretty or obviously from Monte Carlo ?

[kingcone]

Hiya Philippe!

Wow! Looks great!

You had mentioned that the center looks blurry, but I can't see it on this end.

As per your request, here's a nastier sky. Alot more dark clouds. Some blue near the bottom, but you could cut the entire sky, then paste and stretch the blue out.

Once again, 6144x512. Be aware, it's just over 6 meg.

http://members.cox.net/snowtwister/cloudysky.zip

Now, you asked for a Monaco street type background? You mean something with a village in it, as in that 3rd screenshot? Please clarity, as I'm sure I could dig something up for you.

Have fun!

Scott

[Philippe]

What I had in mind when I mentioned the Monaco street was a horizon for an urban battle -- something with lots of non-rural buildings. Monaco is a bit on the Mediterranean side (what I'm really looking for is something NW European), but it's a start. I haven't tried making my own urban horizon from scratch yet, and am not sure what kind of results I'll get.

[kingcone]

Philippe:

I believe I have what your talking about.

Can you open and work with files saved as .cpt's?

I use Corel 11 for editing. Saving as a .psd, makes a file that's approx 32 meg.

What layered file formats can you manage?

[benpark]

That game looks pretty amazing. Please do upload!

[Philippe]

Get ready for a good laugh.

I'm essentially a computer graphics primitive. I do as much as I can in Paint, but supplement it with Photoshop when I have to. Took me forever to figure out how to make a rippling flag. (And the real joke of it is that I think I may have been the first person to make successful mods of marching soldiers in EUII simply by repainting the animation strips one pixel at a time).

So with that in mind, I've heard of Corel 11 but am not sure I know what it is, and am ignorant of cpt's and psd's. Please expound on that last post a bit, because there are several other games out there that don't use the open bmp system that would be great sources of images. I'm never embarassed to declare my ignorance in public. That's how you learn.

Essentially I'm going to need to be on the receiving end of something that's pretty close to a bitmap, or on the receiving end of something that I can be taught to convert into a bitmap (or that I can extract a bitmap out of).

I'm not sure if this is of any use in this situation, but would it be possible to make a mod of GPL where the sky was white and everything else except the horizon was white or transparent ? You could then take screenshots of the horizon by rotating the camera (assuming that you can do that). You would end up with five or six large bmp's showing horizon and nothing else. I could take those bmp's and manipulate them. When I do that in Combat Mission the individual bmp's are only about 2000 pixels wide, so though the files are large they aren't enormous. As you may have guessed, this is part of the method that I use to make horizon templates such as the one a few posts up.

32 megabytes is unreasonably large. The size issue will need to be addressed. I think I have a file splitter somewhere in my hard drive -- I've only used it a couple of times, but it might come in handy here. As you have probably guessed, I have a dial-up.

[kingcone]

Philippe:

N/P what so ever.

The following files are setup like this.....

The entire format is 2950 x 512 .BMP . Largest file is just over 1.5 meg.

The background is a neutral grey. (104,104,104)

The actual graphics now just need to be cut out, and then you can resize them.

The first D/L (industry1.zip) has the ribs of a large water/fuel tank. I left that the way it is, as I wasn't sure if you would want that cutout of your scene. Masking all the steel girdiers would be a job and a half.

Anyway, here's the files.

http://members.cox.net/snowtwister/industry1.zip

http://members.cox.net/snowtwister/industry2.zip

http://members.cox.net/snowtwister/industry3.zip

Scott