I wrote a program that replaces the block forests with a lot of individual trees.




The combination of faster hardware and the new fast tree object make it possible for this many trees run with a good framerate.

The way the program works is it removes the forest side polygons, lowers the forest canopy polygons to ground level, does a few tweaks, creates a new RGB file with lightened colors to be compatible with the noise maps (allowing gouraud shading), and then plants a bunch of trees on the forest locations now at ground level. It also creates a default-W.rgb and default-W.sec for use with the Winter season. Gotcha put code in the exec. to load these files for Winter but you have to change the option in the mapinfo.txt file for that to happen. Without doing that you'll see greenish looking snow. Maybe a change could be made in the exec. so the winter RGB file is loaded when winter is selected by the user interface .The Winter RGB file is all white colors. I've only tested on the Georgia map so far so I've restricted it to only run for the Georgia terrain.

You need to use "texture_colour=2" in eech.ini.

If you don't have the fast tree object I distributed with More_Puerto_Rico_Trees or GrandCanyon2 then you need the "import_tree_scene_and_object" otherwise you don't. It's the same thing.

Fast Tree

Georgia Tree Mod

Excellent idea Craigmire, however I was kind of a fan of those block forests since they represented a *thick* forest fairly well.

Now if you could triple or quadruple the number of trees involved, I might really like the new forests...

I quite like the look of it, and would like the mod extended into the Thialand map, thanks Craigmire

ps- one day hopfully somebody can fix the river edges as well like they did in EE2



Some more pics in link-

http://img251.imageshack.us/slideshow/webplayer.php?id=1610052009091035.jpg

ps- one day hopfully somebody can fix the river edges as well like they did in EE2

nice! Which folder do these go in?...Thank you

Theres install notes within the DL.

Oh, ok, thank you for the other reply also Colonel....thank you very much.

OK COOL Very cool

Thank you

Doh! Sorry, I forgot one important step in the instructions!

In: ...\Razorworks\cohokum\graphics\textures\terrain\georgia

Edit "texture_scales.txt" and change this line:

TERRAIN_TREE_CANOPY_1 =128 # 512 1024 forest

to this:

TERRAIN_TREE_CANOPY_1 =1024 # 512 1024 forest

change 128 to 1024

Thanks for the pics Colonel. Good thing you posted those or I might have never remembered about the texture scale needing to be changed. That should make it look better.

Cool slide show. When you ran the winter season did you change the option from summer to winter in mapinfo.txt?

Can you post a shot of the river bank you like from EE2?

Looks nice! The only thing left is to make different kinds of trees to appear simultaneously.

Do you want to add the functionality to the exec?

One way might be to use the two tree models already in EECH. The switch between the two is by the map. Yemen gets date-palm and the others get forest. If the switch was made by a new field in the tree structure I think they could be mixed or switched by altitude or slope facing direction.

Another way might be better to use the same or similar code that Gotcha did called extended_textures. It did some random switching of alternate textures for a single texture name. I saw where he removed it from the cvs way back because no one used it. A texture change is all that is really needed since I don't think we really want to use a different model. We'd have to change the date-palm model anyway.

Yes, I agree. You can't get much thicker. There seems to be a limit to the number of objects rendered, too many and things start disappearing. The trees could be thicker if it wasn't for the areas where several adjacent sectors are all solid forest. The one thing I can say about the sparse trees is you can get behind them and they will stop a missile. It might take some tricky flying though.

Hey Craig,

Does this affect hiding? I used to use the edge of a forest for bob ups. And escaping after getting my tail/rotor fried.

tks,
GLB

Hi Craigmire,
this is a very nice Work! Can you make this as well for other maps, Taiwan, Thailand, Cuba etc?

Thanks
transalp43

Yes it will affect hiding. You won't have the solid edge. The taller trees will still hide you but the shorter trees and the gaps won't. I only lowered the edges of the canopy so the central areas of the canopy are still at the same height and with the trees on top the hills are effectively a little taller.

I'll try it out on other maps and start with Thailand.

Thats nice!

Thanks!
transalp43

Ah bummer. Well, that's a no go for me then.

But thanks for the effort anyways.

Hi there. I don't mod for EECH I do lots of modding for NWN1 / NWN2
I have a lot of tree objects i made that are real similar to these. (different tree types)

would you be interested in having them?







I can re size the images and send them to you in whatever format you need.

Hi, I have big grey patch under my trees in geogia winter. I checked and rechecked the tree install but can't figure what i missed? Anyone have an idea what i missed?......thank you

1. When I changed to Winter I just used the GUI ingame. Should I have used mapinfo.txt? To be honest though when I plan on flying winter I usually choose the Antartica map as it has the best winter texture for my taste anyhow.

2. Regards the EECH vs EE2 river GFX take a look here at the SimHQ review picture

Link- http://www.simhq.com/_air10/air_303v.html

Very nice looking scenery. What kind of game is NWN1 / NWN2? I may be interested in that.

The trees look like they may be too complex for EECH. The tree model I'm using now is two polygons.

Do you do 3d modeling? I'd like to get a lightwave model of a bighorn sheep to put on the Grand Canyon map.

If it's a spot under each individual tree then the new tree object isn't being imported. You need the fast_tree installed and EECH version 1.11 or newer. There is an option in eech.ini to turn off the tree shadows but you shouldn't see the shadows no matter what if the fast tree model is being imported.

If the grey patch is a larger area wherever a river runs next to a forest then I'm not sure what that is but it looks to be a shadow effect done by Razorworks. I don't know what produces that but I'm pretty sure it's not coming from the color file. You can see it on the summer map too but it's not so obvious. Maybe I can find it. There's one texture on the winter map that needs some fixing too.

The color file switch to winter is done by the option in mapinfo.txt. I can't say why it was done that way. I don't think it was fully implemented or maybe even used. The alternate winter color file isn't included in the allmods download. I'm not sure about the other homemade maps that have two seasons.

EE2 definitely has better graphics. I think to make EECH look like that would basically be the same project the EE2 guys did. That would be great if someone could do it.

Another argument in mapinfo.txt file describing different regions (rectangles or circles)?
We can add any number of new scenes (new trees).



Should we have the same behavior for all of the hosts in the network game? Simple rand() may fail...



It's called "texture animation" and allows to have a different texture for every instance of the objects in the game. For example, board numbers on tails of choppers are individual.
Thus we must apply such animation to a tree scene.

P.S. For a month I'm out of development. But I'll be back for sure.

I thought it worth mentioning that for multiplay pilots both the client and host require this mod installed to fly Georgia with tree mod.

eg: If you run the mod on your client, and the host is not updated, then the client will CTD with the error

"Entity already in use: ENTITY_TYPE_SECTOR(index=0)"

Ive tested it in multiplay and all is sweet as long as client and server have the mod loaded.

Great! Thanks for checking that out. I thought it might cause a problem but didn't expect it to crash.