Ok we all know the terrain 'seams" issue in EAW terrains, and here is part1 of how to fix:

To illustrate

seams


no seams


seam


no seam


no seams on right -> where my matrix is



overview


How is first horizontal mirror copy the water tile, then lay the tiles in a matrix in the eaw.tm like this:

n - s - n - s ..(etc) then next row:
ss- ns- ss- ns ..(etc)

where;
n= the water tile
s= the horizontal mirror copy
ss = the horizontal mirror copy placed in a 180 rotation (i.e south) in the eaw.tm
ns = the water tile placed in a 180 rotation (i.e south) in the eaw.tm
ex;


here's an example of using the BNBase.ter file for the mirror copy:
first the codes for the tiles in orientations:

Tiles - North East South West
BNWATER 02 42 82 C2
BNBASE 3C 7C BC FC

so ex; 4 tile matrix:

02 3C
BC 82

a 16 tile matrix would be:
02 3C 02 3C
BC 82 BC 82
02 3C 02 3C
BC 82 BC 82


That's it, your seams will be virtual none

More coming next days..

The waves make a nice pretty Butterfly effect from my water tile, not so good for a war sim.. lol.. but that can be fixed later, the important thing is the seams can be fixed this way (at least for the most part).. more details will emerge..

btw; the seams will never totaly disappear, at least on one side, no matter what without recoding the .exe because EAW does have some tile overlap, and frankly at this point it is elusive to understand it. It has to do with the way tiles are placed by the code and seams to vary (lol..pun :O ) with the tile resolution (which I believe is referred to as height in the code) .. anyway I don't want to sidetrack this thread by going into that, I did make a note some months ago about it in the code forum naafi..
Just want to save you tearing hair out..
This present fix requires no exe coding.. just the easy eaw.tm file coding to place the tiles locations in the EAW world.

Hi Roy.

Nice bit of info.

Are you seeing the distance tiles switching in and out? That might be what is causing the effect your seeing, as it's only the 4 directly below you which are BN. I've hacked a 1.28d exe so it does not switch tiles LR BN LR tiles.

Roy, the method is flawed. This only works when tiles have all the same orientation, like the skies. When they're all orientated in the same direction it also leads to visible pattern forming. With just a single tile pattern forming just can't be helped, 4 or 5 would be much better.
The coastal tiles can not be oriented at will but need to follow the contours of the continent, therefore this type of tile will cause perpendicular waves and bad seams, as can be seen in previous simmilar attempts from others.
In EAW the tiles have 4 random orientations to prevent this from happening, to put em into a fixed grid is also very timeconsuming in terms of TM tiling.
I think fully randomised and no fixed grid is a better approach and randomisation of the TM will only take a second with an appropiate algorythm, as shown in this quickly designed tile (not the best one I made):



It's probably OK for a single island though and the picture itself is very nice.

VonBeerhofen

Anyone is entitled to their opinion. This is what I'm doing, and more is coming.

This pic above really proves that the simple post of this overlooked matter is one of the biggest breakthroughs in EAW history.


rgr that Col.G that is not what I'm refering to.
Basically this is the issue:

closeup:


here's the tile:
http://webspace.webring.com/people/kr/raf_roy/egrid.pcx

On second though you may be right Col G. something I overlooked, will have to check that.

But more pressing what I am concerned with is here:

you see the very thin line at that seam?
this pic is diagonally, the thin line stretches
(bottom left to top right)


That is what I don't like.

Still it is IMO 1000 times better than the ugly seams that now we can defeat.

OK here getting out butterlies; have copied the water 252 pixels only without mirror, from xy 2,2, to 254,254 pix, and pasted on the Base ter file, which is a mirrored copy of the water just as shown before.
In other words to be clear; only the outside 2 pixel strip is remaining mirrored from the water, the rest is just like the water tile normaly.
Now I would have to use a minimun of 4 tiles to really do this right doing it this way.
The second row below would have to recieve the same paste the non-mirror the same to reduce the seam more, an match the pixels to the upper team but even so it is not bad..

The test I'm using BN .ter , and at high or medium res looks the same. You cab see the line persist, but better than seams just as before.
The altitude is fairly low, as you can see. So I don't believe the overlap line comes from switching BN and LR at this point at least.

That's a default skin in 1.28 b.
I'm running at 1024 x 768 res the default for 1.28 series.
Now anyone has to admit this is kind of a nice scenery, and sort of realistic looking is it not?

You see when you look at this satellite tile you have to realise this copy is just a quick one I made of a screenshot of the actual photo, zoomed a bit to what I wanted, not a copy.With no special treatment and saving and you notice that the waves and details are fairly nice, it is a bit 'digitized' with those squares? Well if I did this better, more like a pro that "digitizing' look could be removed and the waves more detailed, sharp, etc.
Now I did replace some pixels by 'cloning' and copying, and I'm not very good really in graphics handling.

You see this is really just a rough example of what we could attain for EAW if more effort put into the terrain using satellite / photos, which is extremely important in a Sim / Game.
That's something I've been trying to point out over past years.
We have thousands of skins for planes but not really 1 good terrain even.
I mean look at what I've done so far with the water here with very little time and skills put into it.
And this is just a start, I'm not even hardly started at all on what at least I can do

I know almost nothing about graphics, pixels, colors all that stuff skinners know. I prevoiusly worked with PSP8 and hardly know it. Now I use GIMP. It is far superior so far as I see, a rival to photoshop (about which I am not about to try) but a bit hard to figured out, but it has extensive help files online (which niow can be downloaded also).

Now I've practically proven we can almost eliminate the tile seams and if we can get these tiny lines removed, it will be totaly realized.

So my advise if anyone thinking about improving EAW significantly to compare to other sims (other than flying model and plane skins which we have very good) and really live up to the signature marquee I have on this forum, please spare some time and put a bit of effort into the bones of this sim which is needed.
Plane skins are nice hobby, but how would you like to have no one ever see them except yourself?
That's what could eventually come of this sim if no one puts a bit more concern into the vital needs of terrain, and other objects besides plane skins.
I mean it is what people see 90 something % of the time.

Actually I should rephrase that.
Not one really good all- around terrain, or Euro terrain.
We have some nice winter, and recently you see Flyright did some nice additions never seen before.
There is part nice also Flying Tigers, there is some desert / med that's good, and IMO Pobs Russian summer great, but personally I don't see any of these overall comparing to realistic newer sims, except some small portions.(Yah, I know we don't have the programming , shading, blah blah, that's not what is need what is needed) mainly what is needed is good photos, (not paintings) retouched to simulate real looks.
That's what looks realest IMHO (or Not so Humble.. lol) Opinion.
And that's what we need. At least one overall Really Great Terrain. That looks real, at various alts not painted but like it could in real life, not just at 30,00 feet.
Frankly EAW is a bit off. It is not about the main part of the war flying at 30,000 feet or more.
Most of our planes you hardly ever even catch the bombers, I mean really, I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one, and most people who fly this game hardly ever go to 30,000 feet. Its just not for that, so the terrains should not be.
Now it is more like BoB, DAW, Pacific, Russian front, DAW etc.
low to mid alts.

I'm sure you can correct me, but I think I'm probaly not far off about who will fly this game and how, not so much what reality was in WWII in a specific theatre.

Oh sorry my point being, Paul Wilson's, Serb's, etc terrain yah nice painting from high alt but I don't think they look real that is why I do not use them.
They look like EAW world, not Like Real world. No offense, they are great for what they are, but they are IMO dated, and not anything compared to what could be achieved. Well except of course maybe Winter, but hey, winter is not all year and is the easiest to cover the flaws with.

If I could say one thing to clue you in to what I see, it is we need the real texture and colors, not the painted / kind of nostalgia look to the terrains.

Roy,
Panzer Elite suffers from the same "feature" of DirectX. In Panzer Elite we had 2 options. Disable texture filtering in the video card settings, or eliminate large color differences along the seam.

Our landscape tiles are 64x64 but they are broken into 16x16 chuncks when sent through the pipeline. By color matching every 16th pixal we eliminated all seams. The filter can not blurr pixals at the edge of textures.

This images shows 3 types of ground tiles (grass 1, grass 2, and rough terrain). The top 64 pixals have been color matched to eliminate the seams. They are also tweaked to minimize any repeating patern caused by this tweaking.

The bottom 64 pixals are the original artwork.

It took me 2 months to color match a 1024x1600 bmp every 16 pixals. ') that is why modern software changed the way it is done.

Roy,
To do what you want, the ONLY way is to increase the maximum texture size from 256x256. 1024x1024 seamless tiles would do the trick.

Well I just hope people are not all offended by what I said.
I'm just giving an honest opinion of what I sum up is the realistic looking simulation direction to go in vs. the old gamey look.

Yes that is needed I'm sure you know your stuff there, and one area you could help in Aldo, maybe you could work with Wil on a few things because my guess is we also need some memory buffer rearranging to do holding larger textures if we can get those sizes don't we?
I mean even if Wil can work the code with Syd and Tony, Ralf, don't we need a lot of work on how to handle increase in these textures if they can eventually be written in the code?
If you don't like the code group forum itself maybe just work independently with Wil in areas you guys know about and he can interface in the code forum.

btw; a bit OT Wil last I gathered was real close to making it so we can have ability to increase the tm and so forth so we can have thousands or millions of possible terrain tiles use options and also the height model map so terrain can be rendered better.

A larger TM is useless, I've allready had it working and I think so had someone else. It was 640*640 with a mirrored Europe on the other 1/2. In EAW distances it can only be covered by modern jets, but noone in his right mind will create a detailed TM for it and place 409.600 tiles in their appropiate orientation to create the map, not even if our mapeditor could handle it.
The EAW tileset is just enough to handle allready and a full working theatre TM will cost between 1 and 3 years to create. I'd rather see the CFS2 approach where all tiles are used to create a small battle area with a few well defined targets on it. Easy swappable with a selection from a large number of well defined targets.
I've created 5 full tilesets up to now and a 6th practically finnished with about 3 full sparesets to create 3 more, none of which took less then 6 months to create, working 8 to 12 hours a day on it and it's still not flawless. Seamless tiles simply will never work with 8 bit palettes but they will in 24 bit or higher. There's no need to increase tilesize as with denser monitors the tiles get denser too, but it would be nice to have it. It would cost FPS to render such large textures, no problem though for machines with 4GB of video memory and 8 core computers.
one 8 bit 256*256 texture = 64KB
one 24 bit 256*256 texture = 192KB
one 24 bit 1024*1024 texture = 768KB
64 texture (current EAW tileset) in this resolution = 49.152KB and so on.
Multiply your current FPS with 64/49152 and you'll get an idea when you can run it and at which speed (give or take a few). It won't hurt to try it but I think it will be a dead borne child.
just my 2 cts.
Create a full terrain Roy, as I think everyone who created a full set allready has extensively been where you are and found out for themselves. Even if it wouldn't be perfect you'd learn a lot more then how to create a watertile. It's a start but it's not a terrain and therefore it proofs nothing except that it's a nice looking tile, simmilar to your nice looking lake, your nice looking island and your nice looking city, no offense meant. New theatres is what is really needed, with new objects and new targets, new tiles and new planes. 1024 or 256 pixels, 8 bit or 2400 bit makes no real difference in gameplay, it just looks a bit nicer, but these things never attracted me to play any other game but EAW, inspite of practically having every modern flightsim here.
Some advice, Google tiles or satelite tiles are a lot harder to use due to their differences in lighting, cloudcover, shadows and blurred surfaces, it's much easier to create them manually from scratch and you're much more in control. It's easier to start with a well designed border and create reusable templates, wether it's sea, roads, fields, beaches, mountains, rivers or forrests and use cutouts from satellite to improve your templates.
Perhaps you should first start with converting an existing terrain like the Gunship terrain I did. The Falcon set still has about 5000 unconverted and great looking tiles and can be a nice basis to start from. Why not use your nice looking tiles as a basis and build a new set from it?

VonBeerhofen

You can combine both ideas, larger and varied. You need the first to have the second.

First you need 1024x1024 textures. Larger textures are a matter of ensuring the video card can handle the size and ensuring you use the proper size buffer each time you call or store it.

Once you have that you can place 4 512x512 tile textures in one 1024x1024 texture. When you render the poly, use a 'logical and 3' to a random number (random() & 3 ). This random number of 0 through 3 would be used to grab one of the 4 tiles. You are allowed to take smaller portions of a texture.

The reason you want to do it this way rather then have 4 seperate textures is that every time you change textures, you must stop the rendering sequence and upload the polygons to the buffer.

If you don't mind the perfomance loss, you can use the same idea as the multi skin code and use a random to change the name of the texture called.

I think larger textures aren't the best option. You can do much more with 4 times more tiles in 256*256 in a 4 times larger grid, squeezed into the same area as EAW, then with 1/4 this amount but 4 times larger textures. Graphically the result is the same but with more freedom for 4 times as many tiles and you'd have 4 times as many elevation nodes too and if you'd stick to 8 bit tiling you'd still have 4 times as many colors then the default game.

VonBeerhofen

TM2 is under way.

And, can I remind world makers to support WG in trying out the new TM system, which will give you every possibility you've ever wanted.

Texture size has less impact on rendering performance then the number of individual textures. A 4 times larger grid, using individual textures would require 16 times more rendering interuptions. X number of vertex transformations times X number of render state changes

Nvidia has a nice white paper discussing the subject http://download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/Atlas_Tools/Texture_Atlas_Whitepaper.pdf

See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_atlas
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060126/ivanov_01.shtml

The ony advantage to 8 bit ground textures is decreased HDD space. EAW converts all textures to 16 bit unless you are using software rendering.