This is the most useful mod for WOFF so far. Excellent work!

Just a reminder to all that use this map that if you apply any ODB patch, for example the latest v1.17, you will have to reinstall this map as the official patches will always overwrite this file. That is because a few patches back they did modify the original map dds file and they include that file in all subsequent patches.

This means that any time you patch the game it will overwrite this mod. Not a big deal of course, just something to be aware of.

Madmatt

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Excellent nibbio, and it works very well in the sim. A big improvement over the stock offering. Thank you for putting this together, I can truly appreciate the time it takes to build such a map.



Lou

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Thanks, nibbio!

Thx guys, glad you find it useful!

Of course if the devs wish to include it in the user mods page, or use it in any way they like, maybe even include it in following patches, I have no objections whatsoever. This stuff is to be considered totally public domain.
For me it would be a small contribution to the guys who made this great game and to this fantastic players community.

You're a good guy, nibbio. Sure hope the road drawing didn't give you carpal tunnel.

nibbio, you're an

LOL, my wife wouldn't agree (not to mention my mother-in-law!)

Very nice. Quite an improvement.

MADMATT-

Thanks for the heads up on the map and any new update. I know it would never had occurred to me and probably will prevent numerous post about "what happened to the new map?"

Excellent Nibbio,its a fantastic piece of work.

Thanks a lot nibbio, a very needed and welcomed mod! Stock inflight maps are,...well, yours are better _;)

Nibbio,

Like many here I really like your new map with improved roads and have used it since it was released. I do have a question though. What font did you use for the town/city names?

I ask this because if I were to improve one thing with the map file, it would be to make the fonts a bit darker and easier to read when zoomed in at the maximum rate (map used to allow zoom down to 17nm in release version of the game but I think its 34nm now after one of the post launch patches). At the max zoom the fonts start to show a lot of aliasing and become much fainter. I would like to see (or make my own) a version where the font is darker at this higher level of zoom. I just need to know the font type and sizes you used.

Thanks and again, well done on getting this mod out! It is very appreciated.

Madmatt

Madmatt, at the link below you can download the .pdn (paint.net format) of the file I created.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/11e1ffo5poe6arl/newWOFFmap%20resized%20retouch5.pdn

Place names, roads, etc are all placed on different layers from the base terrain so you can change them to whatever you think best.

Unfortunately the map has to be a 4096x4096 .dds file covering about one million square miles; I tried using double the resolution but it didn't work in WOFF.

Please have a go at it, and I hope you'll be able to get better results. However you will probably find that no matter what font you use it's going to be quite messy once you get at the highest possible zoom.

As you may already know, Paint.net is freeware and can be downloaded at http://www.getpaint.net/

Have fun

Thanks nibbio.!

I found a plugin that allows Paint.net to load and save PSD files so I was able to import it into Photoshop and I tweaked the opacity levels a bit and got it looking the way I wanted. Thanks a lot!

By the way, for those that are about a install the latest WOFF 1.18 patch, just a reminder that it will overwrite the map_background.dds with the one from an earlier patch version. This means this map mod will need to be reapplied after installing any game patch.

Madmatt

Post deleted.

But I must say that I am not happy with the existing WOFF maps especially when going from St. Omer to the front and back. There is a river there that shows differently from the aircraft to what the map shows. ie. when returning to St. Omer, the map shows that I have crossed the river but it only appears in the windscreen a few miles later.

Jim, couldn't read your original post, but let me say that I share your frustration. I was not satisfied with the original map, but I'm also not completely satisfied with my attempts, so far, to try and produce an accurate map.

Let me explain the process I followed.

After consulting the CFS3 terrain SDK documents, I managed to write a little program to read the landclass file and draw the exact number of terrain tiles on a square .png image file 1536x1536 pixels. Each tile/pixel represents a square terrain tile of 1024x1024 m. Then I resized the map file in order to have a 4096x4096 .dds file. In this map, which is basically the inflight map, each pixel represents 1024/4=256 meters.

Then I made numerous test flights, and I found that there were inaccuracies. If I "calibrated" the map (shifting the whole map a couple of pixels up, down, left or right) for a particular location, I found that it became inaccurate for other locations.

Therefore my conclusion is that maybe:
- the algorithm for projecting the terrain data in the CFS3/WOFF 3D world introduces some unknown differences from the simple terrain projection derived from the landclass file (unlikely);
- the position (latitude and longitude) of the aircraft is not reported correctly (unlikely);
- the scale is off by a little bit (most likely, but I wonder why...)

The differences are generally small (in the order of 2 or 3 pixels) but are noticeable, as just 3 pixels means you are off by half a mile.
I will experiment a little more, when I find the time.

To this you may add that the terrain tiles in the landclass file are only half the story. Info on roads, railroads, lakes and coastlines is stored elsewhere. Until we find a way to read such info and plot it on the map we'll never have a really accurate map.

p.s. for simplicity's sake I talked about a single landclass file, actually there are about a dozen, corresponding to different periods in the war and the different positions of the frontlines, which you can see accurately reproduced in the game.

I think I got it.

To be accurate, an inflight map must be transformed by a Mercator projection (or whatever kind of projection CFS3 uses), to take into account the curvature of the Earth.

So with the current maps, both mine and the original, the further you get from the origin (at the center of the map, 3.5°E and 48°N, which is some 120 km SE of Paris) the greater the error.

The original map has the coastlines correctly projected, but everything else is just in the normal x,y plane position, so it suffers from the same problems.

I should add that I have absolutely no idea how to apply such a transformation to the map

Science!

In any case, I've been using your map for a couple of weeks and there's no going back to the stock WOFF map for me. Even without lakes and railroads, it's still a very useful map and much better than the original.

Hi guys!

Nibbio's link for his map
https://www.dropbox.com/s/iw11zpgsnmd6nt5/newWOFFmap.zip
doesn't work for me...

Any help?