I forgot I should put this notice up here as well:

I have made a substantial update, with corrections and expansion, of my tutorial on modifying the BoBII terrain. Among other things, it provides information on doing height modifications using high res Space Shuttle Radar Topographical data (SRTM), using all freeware tools. Anyone who has the previous versions will want to update. You can find it here, thanks to the fine folks at airwarfare:
http://airwarfare.com/simnetwork/index.php?name=Downloads&file=details&id=5

Edit: I suspect that link won't work any more, but no matter, check the next post...

It's been a long time coming, but here is a link to the

ALL NEW UPDATED Terrain Tutorial:

http://www3.telus.net/v1ncent/bob/BoB-Terrain-TutorialV2.10.zip

A fair bit of new material, lots of extra help for the modding neophyte.

Folks,

Gentle friends:

The soundtrack of our lives is varied according to circumstance and taste. And taste varies over time. Last year all I listened to was a classical music radio station. Now I have assembled my own play lists from various sources. I have 400 songs at the moment on my flash drive. Today I listen exclusively to the music I remember from days long past in the 50's, 60's and several good tunes from more recent times.

I grew tired of frequent pledge drives and hourly pleading on my favorite classical station. They deserve help of course but it got tiresome especially when their signal strength in our direction seemed to weaken and on occasion another station playing the sounds of old cars being crushed and cats being skinned alive by screaming, tone deaf savages being attacked by screaming, spitting wild cats competed rather too successfully for my attention.

LOL!I'm good with Photoshop but I'm no modder so I would need quite a bit of help. I'm sure none of the new terrains or any other improvements would work with my old version of BoB2. I think the last time I could upgrade was V.9. My system cannot make use of all the features of DX 9C. I was advised by the boys over at A2A that my system was not completely supported even in v. 9. No shading support for one thing. Regardless lads I'm happy with the way it looks and plays.

JRT,

Have a go! It is very satisfying to have a little project accepted no matter how small and insignificant it may be. I had a lot of help with the bomb craters about 8 years ago, by mauseman i think it was. Forgotten his exact sigi.

Folks,

Dux:

Maybe if I held my mouth just right and followed the instructions to the letter and if I applied every single one of my little gray cells to the project I might; and I do say might, end up with a rather better grade of poor than otherwise. Once I built large model sailing craft such as the Frigate "Constitution" and the schooner "Blue Nose" with great care and precision. I built large scale R/C airplanes and even built a few 'Bread and Butter" type sailing craft from scratch. That was then. This is now.

Today I haven't the patience or the acute eyesight I once enjoyed. If you factor in the obvious disincentive due to the inability of my old system to put any new terrain or upgrade to any use then clearly it is unlikely that I will try any serious modding. I haven't even gone to the trouble to mod IL2'46 for Korean War planes as I was once preparing to do using the creations of others. I have backed up my entire un-modded Il2-46 folder on a DVD but nothing else.

My hat is off to PV1, Stickman and all the others who's skill and dedication has made BoB and now WOV such a great and immersive pleasure for all of us.

As far as I'm aware, the purely terrain mods which I do, which only
alter the shape of the base terrain, and don't involve any addition
of models or other whizzbangs, should have absolutely no effect on
the performance of any machine. The only issue which goes beyond the
terrain itself is that I have had to keep up with Bader's fondness
for reassigning the usage of the terrain textures, which has resulted
in a huge reworking of the textures surrounding the airfields, and
in several regions where open fields were required, where the many
textures worth of open fields provided by Rowan have been reduced to
two. So as a result, there is a link, as of about 2.07, between the
terrain fileset and the terrain texture fileset. The latter having
persisted in changing with every patch necessitating the former
follow along, and thus the two filesets must be used together for
best results. One might think that as the texture files have been
expanded from 512 pixels per side to 2048, that this means a great
increase in load for the vidcard, but since about the 2.10 patch,
the bdg.txt file contains a variable to set the resizing of the
texture files before loading into the vid card, so by suitable choice
of size value, one can even decrease the memory load. Legal values of
the LANDSCAPE_TEXTURE_SIZE variable go in powers of 2, starting
with 256 or possibly less, to the current maximum of 2048.

If you are determined to run an older patch level than 2.10, you
can achieve the same effect with a newer texture fileset by loading
the files into a graphics handler like IrfanView, and resizing them
by hand.

The latest terrain and texture files can be had by downloading and
installing the latest patch (if you have an old patched version you
don't want to mess up, make a copy of it in a new differently named
folder and have the patch write to that location). The texture files
are those named img00xx.dds, residing in the landmap2 folder. The terrain
itself is in six files, as described in the tutorial. Two are .grd files
in griddata, the other four are in Landscap; 2 .dat, and 2 .ind .
Easy to spot as they are newer than all the rest. Just copy them to the
corresponding locations in your install (might as well save the originals
somewhere first in case you screw up) over the existing files, and make
the edits to bdg.txt, and you should see the latest terrain shapes and colours.

Oh, one more item. You will also want to copy over the corresponding
fartiles.bin file, which also resides in landscap. This is the file which
renders distant terrain, and it needs to match the updated near terrain.

Just a note to indicate I've done a minor update to the terrain tutorial,
and updated the links accordingly. V2.10 mainly updates web addresses,
and provides more information on land-use textures. It will be compatible
with the texture file mod we have done for 2.12.