It's taken quite a while after my ISP changed to SFTP and install the program for it but I've finally done it. Have been too busy with things but while we're at it again let's have a look at what's coming next.

First of all, a bridge tile in the middle of a lake was wrong and got fixed near Strassbourg
Then the modded River2 tile, which was used in the lakes instead and only appeared a few times, got it's original function back and appears again many times now
Ofcourse the lakes had to be repaired too
Then I noticed that the BNCOStTR tile had a simmilar issue as it was only used 12 times throughout the EAW world. Since this tile serves no special purpose it was decided to incorparate it into the coastline, thus making it more diverse looking. Some 450 coastal tiles were randomly replaced with this one.

Open City Planning or OCP abreviated.
==============================
A long dream of mine, flollowed by many eperiments, was to replace the cities with fully randomised models to get rid of the repetitious and often boring view they posed in the game. This dream has now come true and the beneficial side effect of this is that the river city tiles can be used anywhere to add small insdustrial villages along the banks. I created two sets, this one and one based on the original Euroblend drawings. Due to the nature of the new drawings, the other city tiles can now be used as extra villages and vice versa.. I plan to do the same with the other natures, without destroying their grouping behaviour from the stock game, simmilarly their tiles can then be incorporated elsewhere, either in groups or as single instances and vice versa.



This is one of 50 new settlements on the riverbanks I've done sofar, 3 or 4 straight tiles wide. More will follow using the curved bend too and 2 to 4 tiles in any possible configuration.

I'll post some more screenies tomorrow as I'm too tired from struggling with WinSCP.

VonBeerhofen-

Which launchpad location is back?

Hi Mark,

my file and photosharing capabillities have been restored, so I can finally combine the EAW upgrade and FXEXE_Latest.ZIP into one and I will be less of a burden to you. Thx for your wonderfull work and for helping me out.



And that is not even been randomised yet!

VonBeerhofen

Alright. Cool. I'll need a link to a page that that file will be on to update the one on my site.
I prefer to link to a page rather than a file directly, if you could appreciate that.

You signature here on SimHQ is cut off BTW. You may want to remake it.

That image looks great. Looks populated around the river, alot.

Thx Mark, as soon as a new EAWPRO will be released I will send you the download URL.
I think my signature was just too long and I don't know how to say ''Home of the virtual pilots community'' in a shorter way so I just left it as it is.

VonBeerhofen

Then there is ''Oasis'', a new semi-arid desert terrain intended for the Suez addon, which still needs a lot of work but is flyable.

These are some of the base tiles which will be further enhanced along the line:







VonBeerhofen

And this old Outback terrain from 2007which needs converting to EAWPRO standards:





VonBeerhofen

Today I overhauled all the cities with the new OCP approach, this is how cities look now:








VonBeerhofen

Speaking as a newbie here, but not to flight sims overall, that terrain looks marvelous!

Thx RIBob, it's merely an experiment in wrecking someone else's creation before implementing the results into my own terrain, like the one's above and the new Harvest tileset I'm currently working on, for which over 500 tiles were created thusfar. Of wich here a small selection:



BTW, SimHQ resizes all displayed pictures, to see the pictures in all their splendour you have to visit the original URL of the photos and open it in it's own window.

VonBeerhofen

The pic is not showing VBH
Are you still using 256x256 tiles?

Sorry about that, quirckyness of Opera browser on an old OS plus a new SFTP program which has it's own peculiarities. The shown terrains are in 8 bit 256 x 256 pixel format, to be able to get highest possible FPS for the Launchpad and other pilots who're all using computers with less powerfull graphics cards and little/less onboard memory then some others. Besides that some of the shown terrains were created some 10 years ago, before UHR was fully implemented.

Only the Harvest set was saved in 24 bit color and a set of 512 tiles in 8 bit is currently being tested. The set comprises of a random selection out of the 500 available and 4 tiles are combined into one, after some additional editing to remove unneeded borders in the tile centre. I don't think a 24 bit set will ever be released though, our machines already have problems with 8 bit textures in 512 format. For Launchpad pilots smooth gameplay has priority over graphics and with all the upgrades allready in use there isn't much left to play with. Besides that I can't see much difference with a tileset which doesn't have the additional information that the Harvest set displays and retains, even in 8 bit color.

It will probably look better in 24 bit, but taking up 12 times more room then a default set in 8 bit it's not hard to contemplate what it will do to FPS, especially for Launchpad members. FPS is controlling AI decisions, the faster the better and more realistic AI behaviour and with 60+ frames they will even start using human flightmodels, which I hope to achieve by sticking to 8 bit graphics.

There's a lot more to take into account, one is the maximum distance visibillity under all circumstances, and the 4 times higher effects drawings in EAWPRO, which makes up for the lesser quality terrain, if that's how you want to look at it, but I think with what my pictures show is you get plenty of quality and much more to look at, at the cost of zero FPS. And that's not even mentioning the improved groundobjects in the Final Cut addon, which all use their own 256 pixel drawing in 8 bit and use all available polygons and nodes in their 3DZ models, but I'll let others decide if it's worth it or not.

BTW, aren't the imported terrains you've showed from the old addons also not all in 256 pixel 8 bit mode? Resizing tiles and saving in 24 bit format isn't really going to cut it without extensive editing, and then it will still not look 1/2 as good as Shawn's 24 bit version. Colors and pixels simply can not change all by themselves from 256 pixels in 8 bit to 512 pixels in 24 bit and usually aren't much of an improvement when done that way.

VonBeerhofen

The forrests underwent the OFP treatment (Open Forest Placement) today and I had some fun restoring an old forgotten snow drawing but also changing the TM to give the mountains a different border. The mountain set now transitions from snowy mountain to grass to a wide random forrest to field. Besides that long ago I put app. 25 small snowpatches on the highest elevations, these transition from Moutntain to Grass to Field. I did find one but forgot to take the screeny but here are some shots of the Bulge:









BTW The previous London screenshots have been replaced with some pictures of cities on the Ruhr valley and the Rhine. I'm sorry for wrecking Saggin' B's terrain so thoroughly but we need a change in the Launchpad.

VonBeerhofen

They look really good
When will you be releasing them?

There's still some work to do. Both OCP and OFP tiles still have to be sown selectively throughout the EAW world and the new Pyrenees left me with some manual cleanup to do as well. I also think that the field tiles will match better if I'd draw a small patch of forest on their borders, many have some rudimentary forest already. Then I still need the lores conversions and draw some missing stuff on some of the tiles I changed. Perhaps in 5 days to a week, maybe sooner, no promises.

VonBeerhofen

Today I've put some roads on 6 of the tiles, which is just a start. This simulated terrain picture shows what you can do with 8 bit drawings in 256 x 256 pixels. Such a tile could have app. 65.000 differeent colors if each pixel was different, but as you can see they're pretty uniform in color most of the time, and the colors aren't to far off from one another.
Since each tile uses 256 colors, 6 tiles will be closer to 1500 different colors and 64 tiles, well you do the math.

Ofcourse 24 bit bit can do the same but besides needing 3 times more memory and taking longer to render, it hardly seems worth it to me. Especially not when overlaying a 24 bit version of the tile on top of it's 8 bit version and trying to spot the differences. Besides that they're often .JPG conversions in low quality, looking blurred and with lots of contaminations and way less colors.Yes there is some loss but it's not very significant, besides that it lends a kind of roughness to the terrain which to me looks more natural then a full color photgraph from Google Earth. There's better control when you create the pictures yourself from scratch and they're usually much more crisp then pictures taken from 35 Miles above the atmosphere.

One of the differences lies in the time needed to design something from scratch or build onto an existing photograph. Hand drawn tiles are more consistent in their colors, they just have to be because you can only use 256 per tile, but that also means they group together real nice with almost unnoticable tileseams, that is if you know how to make that happen. Sudden changes in color make the tile stand out much more and it may no longer look as part of nature, of which there are usually only 6 groups in EAW, Sea, Coast, City, Field, forest and mountain.

The different coloring between natures is supposed to stand out, it's what makes a good terrain look nice. Not saying that mine does but retaining the right colors is given a lot of priority in my work.



VonBeerhofen

After the dreadful non-scalable fonts EAW terrains are a real limiting factor. Close to the ground they lose their appearance because with a 256x256 tile one pixel is a square with a side equivalent to 16 metres of land.
Even with the 512x512 BMP files that is reduced to 8metres x 8metres. This means that the lower you fly the worse the view.
TMods have a very different resolution, that is why they still show up very clearly low down.

It's another reason why I prefer 256 pixel tiles, on the ground it looks more like a grass patch then a forest or bush. It becomes very 2 dimensional on the ground and shading looks more like a dent or a small hill in the terrain. Higher resolutions won't really help anyway, when it's just a flat drawing and not really 3D then even when it is the same resolution as ground objects you effectively just see a two D drawing flat on the ground. Just grass and sand and no fake 3D information also looks wrong, especially higher up.
Computers are still a long way off from realistic looking worlds, but they're getting better at it all the time. Especially with 3D objects. Placing them in the right spots helps but is also very timeconsuming to do.

VonBeerhofen

Hey VB...

Well done my Friend ... Looks fantastic

I must too admire your perseverance and the never give up attitude.. I understand your commitment.
A never die attitude!!!



Cheers
Furby

And I stand by my friend his work is excellent and the only version of EAW I fly

Thx guys, always nice to receive some encouragement. Long time no hear Furbs, hope all is well over there!

I've replaced the previous desert pictures with pictures of the basic OCP designs for it. These are from the pre-finalising test, so not entirely finished but soon will be.

VonBeerhofen

The previous desert pictures were replaced with a more overall view of the tiles, still some work to do on them. And this is a tile mockup of the 6 ruins tiles which will have the same situational placement as the villages in stock EAW:



VonBeerhofen

Here's another mockup of a random selection from the 12 reworked sand tiles with added shading. Mockup means that the set was recalculated as if you're looking perspectively down onto the terrain from a 45 degree angle and horizon fog was added to simulate the ingame view.



Copy the picture's URL into your adress bar to see it in full 1024 x 512 pixels.

VonBeerhofen

Ingame random trial map screens of the above sets:






VonBeerhofen

VBH,
Those images look great. You must have changed some, after I originally read this thread.

Also to note,
there's no filters I don't think in EAW for close up x256 terrain. Only is if the Full screen anti alias is working on your video card and set.
If you think Anti-Alies should blur the terrain up close, it does not. It will only work along each tile outer edge, but not on the texture itself.
Also for the likes of me everytime someone posts a screenshot , I cringe that the AA is not set to at least x2 on there control panel for video. I can tell by the jagged steps on the planes wing lines and body lines.

Thx Mark, I've added these features to EAWPRO already. Remember when we were comparing the view distances of our videocards and game versions, and how smooth it looked in one picture and the other one showing a lot of shimmering? That was the difference in display with my gForce FX500. However most of the tileseems are caused by the terrainsets themselves, so I spend a lot of time designing a way to get rid of them. These tiles are using this new method but my current videosettings have these features switched off for higher FPS in online games.

I can't switch back and forth between these modes just to take a screenshot but when it's active it should hide the seams even better.

VonBeerhofen