I have tried many times to modify the map background.dds file (inflight map) so that we can get a quality map, not a pixellated, blurry one (I always thought WOFF deserves it). The task is quite difficult but I have succeeded just to be stopped in the last step, that is, bmp to DDS conversion (which reduces size in graphic files but creates low res, really bad looking textures...). I am working with Adobe Illustrator which has a great potential to mod the inflight map texture, but even after many headaches due to the huge size of the file to be exported (even an Intel i7 with 16GB of Ram can´t handle it!!!) I have managed to get a great .AI file (Adobe Illustrator file, where fonts are vector based and look gorgeous even when zoomed to the max)and then lose quality when exported to BMP (at this point the quality is much better than the stock map though), but when porting it to dds format,...well,game over. Would it be possible or the game engine t recognize and use a bmp instead of a dds for this map texture? It would make possible to have a very good looking inflight map.

Thanks for reading

Check the difference by yourselves...( I have used the very same Rise of Flight Font in the modified names, even the coast lines and rivers are easily improved if we can get a bmp accepted by the game engine instead of a dds)

Aris, that would be a really great improvement to have. Best of luck with that!

We know it looks better when saved high res, high quality and bmp or whatever - of course, the problem with no compression is it's a huge file then.

You would need this large chunk of texture memory to have that all loaded. There would need to be a fair bit of code to slice the map and display a correct map wherever you fly (switch to new map loading off disk as you fly to another area seamlessly and so on).

Currently a large size texture is needed to cover all of Europe - as the sim covers most of Europe all at once. Not in small "world chunks" as most sims.

I am sure now you see it's a bit trickier than making a high res texture.

What size is the BMP I think it was pretty big when we last looked.

The size is 48 MB.

I want to experiment with map rendering someday.
There are some techniques which may allow to store the map with good resolution without taking too much memory.

Isn't ROF font copyrighted? I'm not sure it can be used here.

It's called Lilienthal Grotesk and I found a link for a free download in ROF forums quite long time ago...

when i need to drastically dump a file size, without loss of quality i use 'save for web' in photoshop ...

not sure if that is an option here but just tossing it out there as it may help or give ideas??

it somehow pulls extra info re colors out of an image - you can set all parameters and it works with many file types so maybe you can do that before converting and going back into the woff program?

i have had it reduce file sizes by over 10x

would be great to get a real map image in the game!

The main quality loss comes from DDS conversion.

yeah 48Mb is a fair size. You could maybe make an even higher res map then save to dds may help?
or try B&W ? I know WM tried many variations.

I have come to the conclusion that as long as DDS format is used for such a huge file, text , shapes, curves,...will always be blurry. So if WOFF engine only works with DDS format for this map we have the best we can have I am afraid. Of course it may well be that my artistic and programming skills are limiting me for finding the proper way to create a beautiful map for WOFF, if so I would love someone else giving it a try as I think it would be a GREAT addition for WOFF.

Aris, Lou makes wonderful offline maps that are from ingame screen caps. If only there was some way to use those as in game maps. You could PM Lou and dialogue with him in a green light sessio to see if you both could come up with some suggestions. It's just a thought!

I would love to have Lou' s magnific maps used as an inflight map believe me , that would be great, but I am afraid that Lous maps would have to be resized and fitted to the main HUGE global european map, what would make them unusable even before porting them to DDS.

I understand. I don't have much skill in this area myself but I've been following this thread with interest. I did try scaling Lou's map and overlaying it to the inscreen map but as you said it became un-readable. I was hopeful that you were on to something. Maybe some day someone will figure out how to do this.

Best Regards;

Ok, now that I've got some time to explain.
WARNING: A lot of technical mumbo jumbo

There is a technique - Signed Distance Field - introduced into the gaming world by Valve in 2007, which allows to downscale black and white bitmaps in a way that they can be upscaled again to any reasonable size without becoming pixelated or blurred.

The world map is not B/W but it can be separated into single color layers - ground, water, forests, black labels and red circles. There are in fact labels of 3 colors - black, dark green and dark blue, but ideally they all should be of one color so we will get one background color and 4 single color layers to be stored in a single file.

The benefit here is that instead of storing 4K DXT1 compressed image which sill doesn't look good due to compression artifacts, we can store 2K RGBA uncompressed bitmap created using SDF algorithm which will most likely look superior (though it will be 16Mb instead of current 8Mb). We can probably even go as low as 1K texture (4Mb size).

All of this is quite simple to implement, but I don't have time to experiment right now.

Here is how labels from above image look after being downsampled to 25% of their original size using SDF and then upscaled back to the original size:

Note the font looks a bit more rounded (the algorithm doesn't preserve sharp corners), but it is not blurred at all.

Ankor, thanks for the post. There may be light at the end of the tunnel it seems!!

Um, Ankor, you never cease to amaze me, you sure have some programming magic! I would love to start working on a inflight bitmap that could then be rescaled accordingly...DDS format is a hate/love for me,...

ArisFuser,
What I need to create a SDF image is 4 monochrome bitmaps of large size (perhaps 8192*8192, saved as PNG): water, forests, labels and red circles (cities). Although I will be downsampling them the algorithm needs high res source images to get the best results.

I suppose it shouldn't be a problem to separate these layers and produce bitmaps of required size if you work with vector graphics.

Just don't be in a hurry, I still need to check whether this approach really works "as advertised" and I won't have much free time until the New Year

By the way, maybe devs already have a good high res source for inflight map?

Finally, an obvious note is that the map prepared in this way won't work without my shaders.

Awesome thread guys

In which case it would be best developed as a JSGME mod.