Would anybody else (besides me ) be interested in a slightly more detailed inflight map, where major roads and railways are (alas rather faintly) marked? It would make real navigation possible without a paper map or a second monitor.

This is what I'm working on:



It's obtained by overlaying CFS3 roads and railways on WOFF map. I did some tests and it seems quite accurate.

Looking good Nibbio...im definitely interested

Hmmm... don't know if I can make dropbox work... I'm getting old and the world is getting more and more complicated...

Anyway here's the link https://www.dropbox.com/s/75kn2l8ldie7sy5/map_background.dds hope that you can see it and that you can download it.

Backup and replace the file with the same name (map_background.dds) that you find in WOFF\OBDWWI Over Flanders Fields\ and you are good to go.

As I said I made 3 or 4 flights on time acceleration and it seems the roads and railways are in the right place. I'm going to test it some more, we'll see if it was just a useless exercise

It seems to be working ok. Maybe off by a couple hundred meters.

Bertangle area; this is a railway bridge, heading NW:



and this is a road bridge, heading ESE:



of course the grey/black lines are railways, the brown lines are roads. The original CFS3 map is low-res so the lines are blurry and appear dotted on the map, but it would take forever to redraw them...

Looks good, I'll give it a go.

Once a modder always a modder.
Looking good sir!

Good one Nibbio.

The reason you can be out 100m or so easily is because you are zoomed in to a small area on a huge map so map pixels count.
So when you zoom in to your small current area of course then you zoom in very close on a small part of the giant map texture. So 1 pixel off can be a large way off as you see.

The map covers right across Europe as the theatre is that big in one go. Most sims just put you on a much smaller chunk of terrain and fence you in so you cannot "escape".

About that, Devs, Amiens is not at its exact location :It is (if not corrected since december)at the place of Albert IIRC in the game: it should be on the Somme (flowing in the middle of the town) and in a more westernly location just south of the Bertangles airfields in fact...and I've found another Amiens a bit south of the first, beyond the Somme river.

Albert is Albert. It just seems that the Albert-Cathedral is wrongly labeled as Amiens-Cathedral.

Map was updated recently in a patch.

WM

In fact the map covers most of western Europe on a square about 1500x1500 km (1 million square miles!) represented by "just" 4096x4096 pixels. I tried to be as careful as possible overlaying the roads over the WOFF map, but of course being just one pixel off means being off by 1500/4096=.37 km, almost a quarter of a mile.

Everything considered it's amazing how well it turned out

Maybe there's a feasible way to extract the vector information about roads and railways in order to make a bitmap overlay that looks a little better, with neat continuous lines rather than broken pixelated ones. We'll see; I love flying along roads, can't get lost that way

I taught navigation for years... the main thing required to know your position whilst navigating is an accurate map that actually corresponds to the ground you are looking at.
Prominent features on the ground that can be located on the map.
1. Roads/railways/rivers.
2. Prominent features, high ground and corresponding shape to the map.
3. Road/track/railway junctions.
4. Shapes of easily recognizable woods, lakes etc.
These are just a few pointers...

None of the above work without an accurate map.
For general direction, a rough rule of thumb is to use the sun... if it's to your left rear on your outward journey, make sure it's to your front right on return.

I found that towns are generally in their right location.
In this case is the Somme river that's a bit off. Should run some 5 miles further south, passing through Amiens and Abbeville and then flow into the sea at the estuary NW of Abbeville. See below a quick overlay with google maps.

But what I'm most interested in is not real world accuracy, rather to provide a map that's accurate and detailed enough to allow visual navigation in the 3D world. For that you need at least roads and railways besides waterways and wooded areas.



By the way, if one can make out something out of this messy overlay, it's nice to see that the main roads are very close to the real ones
Actually this gives me an idea...

Good work! It's absolutely true that the map would be more useful if you could also see roads and railroads there.

"Map was updated recently in a patch."

Good ! thank you WM !

@ Nibbio : Sure the ingame terrain provides such similarities with the real one that we can fly following most of the important roads and any ideas to improve the feeling of a realistic navigation are welcome !

and Chateau Thierry is written with an "h" (not Chateau Tierry) and Sedan with an "a" (not Seden)

I've come to the conclusion that the modified map posted above is the best I can do, under the circumstances.

Roads and railways as they appear in the 3D world of WOFF are marked, albeit roughly, and appear in the correct position, with minor approximations.

I would have liked to improve the graphical look, but I found no other way than painstakingly re-drawing all the lines, which may look prettier but would add a further approximation error. Besides it would take a couple of lifetimes

So this version is going to be the final one, at least for the time being... Laterz all

Nah, the bug has bitten me hard.
Still working on an accurate map... might even pull it off. Even had to learn that new fangled Python thing...
This below is a test on the old CFS3 landclass file. WOFF is otw, and then maybe roads and railways vectors

Coming along nicely... generated directly from WOFF landclass file.



butt ugly but dead accurate