One of the great strengths of UAW160 is the ability to switch theatres instantly, and we have really enjoyed flying over the terrain in Moggy's Iraq.
Yesterday I downloaded "CBI" (China, Burma, India) and the Poland campaign from Sandbaggers, setting them up with OAW to run with 1.26e.
Once again the terrains were interesting, but as I expected there was a problem in terms of what I really wanted to do.
Remove the "Europe1.pic" so the default is used and you can see that the default 1.2 "eaw.tm" file is being used.
This is not a criticism, because there was little available in those days that modders could use to create a tilemap which resembled the geographical area of the campaign.
However, it is impossible to build a "convoys.dat" file for ship convoys, or a realistic "EAW_RRD.DAT" for locomotives.
So my question is this
Which campaigns other than ETO are out there with a genuine "eaw.tm" tilemap?
Obviously I am aware of the ones we use in 160, such as DAW, SPAW, FAW, SAW and IRAQ. There is also VBH's PTIII, and the Burma one I got from Pobs which does not have a height map file.
I have a China one, but the tilemap is dodgy in places.
So are there are some others that you know about?

Jel

SPAW is built on one of the New Guinea campaigns so I suppose that one could be added. There are two New Guinea campaigns available but I forget which one was the basis for SPAW. Probably wouldn't be too hard to figure out.

The General's War and the ModSquad's BOB use the standard European map so that's two easy additions.

Come to think of it, both could be used with the European Target upgrade package too.

I made a Korea elevation map for Shreck but to fit it on a TM it had to be rotated 90 degrees. I also found an elevationmap for Burma for Shreck and may have used it to start the initial Burma TM. I still have the original map I found which can be fitted to any Burma addon with a bit of extra work, what I've seen from the TM suggests it was made from the same map. I found Neira's New Guinea 2 which has got all of New guinea on it and what surrounds it. I have Japan TM created originally by Stratos I believe and finished by me with an added HM. I have Italy/MedTer TM and HM, build by me from scratch, with a bit of African coastline and Malta as starting base for the Allied invasion of Sicilly and Italy plus all mediterranean countries up to Switzerland and Czechoslovakia..
I think I also created the start of the Phillipines TM and made an elevationmap for Shreck. I may have more but I can't get to my working computer as it has died, the drive is fine though, these I found backed up on this computer and it may be all I have.

Scales of theatres aren't always close to realism, it depends on what map was used and where it was found. These are all prior to Google Earth.

Ooops, nearly forgot I also have a near finished map of Egypt, Suez and Palestine, but it was withdrawn due to the resemblance of Moggy's Iraq, it can still be used for El Alamein or something.

VonBeerhofen

Great to hear Jel. I did spend a lot of time on that map and terrain. You might find the hidden stuff like the Arab rebels on their camels in one town, or the sand dunes in the desert.

I'm about 1/2 way through a Ju90 model to go along with the Iraq scenario.

Hi Jell,

There is a basic tile map of the terrain from Berlin to Moscow but no real detailing done on it yet. I think Lolo was working on it too so he may have a more advanced version than the one I have.

cheers,



pobs

I have the Korea/Japan and the china/Japan theatres worhing in UAW160.



I like this terrain from the Korea d/l

I wrote two new utilities today.
One checks if any files are missing from a terrain set. I did this because some are incomplete, but OK with the tilemap they were made for because the missing ones are not used.
However, they may not work with other tilemaps whiwch reference the missing ones.
The other one allows tiles to be switched. The China theatre is dreadful because in some areas the tiles are in appropriate for the heightmap.
What the switcher does is to allow a tile to be copied and the copy re-named as a replacement for another tile. With this the China theatre retained costal tiles of similar colours, and land tile which matched the coastal ones.
The land ones I used were forest tiles, so there were no glaring discrepancies with the height map.

China theatre, same height map, original tiles:


..tiles produced using the two pieces of software I wrote today:

The utilities:


The tile switcher

Copies of the tile in the box above the lists will be made, and then renamed with the names in each list
The lists were made by clicking on the pictures.

The tileset checker- I did not tart this one up


BNCOAST7.TER is missing from this tileset

Mr. Jelly,

modern tilemaps may contain 64 tiles, your grid only displays 63. Those Chinese tiles look a bit strange, so you replaced them with the tiles from the original PacTide. which uses copies of the same tile in nearly all slots?

Wouldn't it be much more interesting to finish the tiles and the map instead of using a single tile all over the Japanese and Chinese continent, and give it it's own flavour then the strong resemblance with PacTide? Perhaps a bit more like this:






I know, I know, it's not what some codegroup members found a good likeness to Japanese fields, some who had actually visited Japan, did you know? Maybe that's why they made such sneering remarks about the creation. I must admit that I've never been there but still, it's not half bad in comparison with what you are showing, Yes, it did take a tremendous amount of work.

VonBeerhofen

What we have in UAW160Special is a means to switch between planesets, and a means to switch between theatres. The theatres and planesets are independent of each other, and the system works very well.
So I am looking for additional theatres. I am also investigating the possibility of terrain switching.
Yesterday's experiments were due to the problems with the China terrain in the download and the "eaw16.hm" file.
This prompted the adaption of my tilemap editor to make the tile switcher.
It stuck me that with the coastal tiles working properly there was the possibility of further editing the interior tiles to produce a better result
However, when I used it there were some strange tiles showing when I flew, and I knew they were not from the tiles in the loaded set.
This suggested that the loaded set was incomplete, hence the checker, which found the name of the missing tile.

The China theare is much better with your PT III terrain. In a quick test there were no glaring height map anomalies, but there are a few areas where the coastline is incorrect.




I will try to edit the tilemap to fix that

Made a start



One of them fixed with a 57 being replaced by a 44
Since then I have done the lot plus a few more anomalies

PTIII uses the full tileset but not in a standard way, it was the first try to get all 64 tiles in, that will definately look much better. But you may have noticed that the China/Japan map is far from finished, in fact all it had was coastlines and a very rudimentary road and city layout. The map I finished has got everything in the right place, rivers were added, cities and villages and forrest, fields and grass. Those are the main things which make for a good and interesting theatre.

As is immediately visible from your pictures, the PTIII tiles came out too dark, due to the standard brightness setting of my Dell monitor. Not a big deal if you can control contrast, but it's better to slightly enhance each tile individually, as I have done. Like some of the other tilesets you show, the tiles don't follow standard EAW rules, to get a standard set missing tiles should be created, but that still doesn't fix the .TM.

Fixing the TM is a very labour intensive manual operation and there's no algorythm which can do it for you, no matter which tileset you throw in there it won't look as good a what I have and that goes for every unfinished theatre out there, it's not the tiles which makes the terrain , it's the finished TM with every road, river, forrest, city, village, mountain and grass, preferrably build from a real map of the location. Turning grass in to mountains and mountains into grass is an easy operation and can even be accomplished by renaming the consequetive tiles without changing the TM, but the map would immediately become unrealistic and any carefull programming of the EAW_TTD to set houses and treelines in the right locations will also be destroyed.

Still the program could be of use when incorporated into the tile editor, in that this terrain I show didn't stop there. Multiple coastlines, riversets, city and village drawings were created for it and it began to take on a life of it's own. Multiple mountainsets, grass sets and over 500 field tiles can now be swapped on the fly. Ofcourse it would help when people see what they're doing when they construct something with a tileset which offers more then 1000 tiles and other sets could be incorporated too. The pictures shown were only the beginning of it all and since then other sets were created, like the Harvest and Benelux sets and the land of Oz, which are a try to cram as much detail onto a 256 tile as possible with the abillity to use 4 tiles to construct UHR sets with ease and great diversity..

I'm sorry to say that I can't see any other use for your program, but just like anything else it's the TM editing which makes it all fit, swapping in bits and pieces by renaming tiles is easy, especially when a set is inside it's own folder. You just throw it in and overwrite the old set and the game changes appeareance. Ofcourse the lack of ricefields in Japan was duely noted, so it became another nature which can replace something else. Sets were made for anything I could think of, a kind of construction database to create new theatres the way they should be created, without any shortcuts.

VonBeerhofen

I forgot to mention that I also created a new true elevationmap for DAW, since I found the original not to be very challenging. If you don't have it in it's available here:

https://rabartel.home.xs4all.nl/LPDLindexD.html

Elevation data came from a terrain surveying website and was converted to fit the EAW.TM precisely.
My excuses if you are already using it.

VonBeerhofen

Thanks VBH

Just a quick check in host only MP:





It looks good so far, so we will give it a test online

I made some new hills with a new heightmap maker/editor



This was a quick test using a totally flat terrain originally, but I am very happy with the result.

The editor does not yet show target placement, or coastal tiles.
I will make it do this to make life easier

Looking good Mr. Jelly. How about riverbeds?

VonBeerhofen

Just working on it, identifying both coastal tiles and riverbed tiles.
I just finished getting the targets in. If you pick a target of a separate map the editor goes to the tiles around it

Very usefull, doing the same here, with airfields too. Airfields are important to have flattened terrain.

VonBeerhofen

Getting somewhere

The top pic is the height map with just my mountains as the rest is flat
The bottom one is the tilemap with coasts and river tiles marked


The pics are grids containing colours and text. They can be resized to do editing
These are small to see the map clearly, size 24.

As you're mucking about with real theatres, is the work I did on updating Midway and CAW of any use?