No, I think you are correct. However, maybe xjouve can get some good ideas from both!

Thank you guys! Greatly appreciated.



OMG I didn't know these. Downloading! It seems really interesting.

A last pic for today. I changed a little bit the color contrast range.

Chasing over northern Flanders.

Unfortunately, I tried 4L0M's textures and with no disrespect at all for its author, the shorelines look like way too shiny to me.

I'm gonna look at what I can do. IMHO a first thing to do would be to decrease their color intensity to make them almost invisible, but still there to add that little 3D aspect. It might not be that difficult.

It seems me that shorelines are not made of clear color, but most likely of dark color. Perhaps the trick is here.

Here's Ypres from 4.5k m high.

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Xav, I agree completely about the shorelines, they should be much much less stand-out than they are currently. Your work is looking outstanding, can't wait to see the final version.

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@xyouve

I follow with interest your work.

IMHO the more intensive colour contrast range in the picture next to last is too high.

It is an occasion for me to recommend you don't try / do too much at once.
A more real water-landscape with transfer into the inflight-map and that for the whole frontline will be absolut enough work, I'm sure.

P.S.: It's only a tipp, not more.

Ideally, a variety of shorelines would be nice, although I know that would involve at least twice the effort.

In general, I like the darker, or less cluttered shorelines that are shown in the above pic, but not every lake and pond are the same! Some will have relatively clear shorelines, while others may be cluttered with a bit of flotsam and jetsam, not to mention cattails and lily pads!

Regardless of what you come up with, xjouve, I'm sure it will be very nice. Thanks for your efforts.

Thanks guys!



You are right indeed. However, a more realistic shoreline texture is, I'm afraid, a key to achieve a clean work with shorelines activated.

IMHO, at the moment water rendering ingame is better without CFS3 shorelines texture. It may be okay for a river or two somewhere, but when you have watershapes everywhere, that becomes borderline ugly. I agree with Lou that they should be much less stand-out than they are currently.

That being said, BuckeyeBob is right about the variety of shorelines that exist. Unfortunately, there is only one texture for all shorelines in CFS3 and I believe in WOFF as well.

I started, and I think nearly finished, the water shapefile for the Somme area.

A bit tricky, but I'm faster now at finding what to do. The Somme River is beautiful, but it is not a straight line to say the least.



Close-up on one part of the Somme waterbed (in the center of the above screenshot).

The very first screenshots from the Somme River Theater.

The Avre River going west from the city of Roye



Ok, look carefully, don't you see something weird?



Péronne on the north east



The Somme River from Morlancourt



The above location on Google Earth.



Well, I'm sure that you saw what I meant by something weird. Woods and rivers don't fit well.

So, we know that all waterbeds are correctly located (if Microsoft processes are OK; but I trust them). Therefore, the LCF (landclass) is not. I placed the LCF manually, mostly guessing as there's no apparent rule or existing application to do it, and we know that LCF and map (CFS3's; not mine ^^) are both stretched in CFS3.

This leads me to think that:

• 1) I missed the rule to place it (but the localization is good for northern Flanders...); or
• 2) The LCF needs to be readjusted a bit for each part of the frontline (which is not a big deal afterall)

Anyway, the result is very good for a first shot and less than a day work.

Did anyone notice that Xjove's albatros is missing a wheel!! He must have been playing in the water again!!

Xjouve, that is fantastic work and I'd love to see these waterways replace the painted on rivers. Have you thought what would happen to the bridges if your mod replaces the texture tiles? Would all bridges need to be relocated / made new to span wider shores?
Also, I think the shoreline texture is the same as for the Channel, so if you make it work for the rivers it may look wrong for the seashore. Just wondering as I'm not 100% sure if what I'm saying is correct.

Looks really good so far. Is it possible to just have treed areas all around the river, that would seem more realistic rather than it being just water painted over landclasses like farms and such,

Coming along great though!

very nice progress. are you able to make the rivers and sea at lower level than the land. maybe adding river banks or elevating the land a bit will give it more dimension. especially, when light/shadow reflects off the angled surfaces.

Thanks guys.



It took a bath at the end ^^



Two questions there:

1) Of course, bridges would have to be relocated. An application displaying everything on a map, with the possibility of drag and dropping stuff to relocate would be great. I'm thinking about that.

2) That's right. However, as I'm creating sub-theaters, this would be a problem for northern Flanders only. But actually, speaking of Flanders, the real world shore consists of beaches (which is something that can be covered ingame with my CORINE's LCF), therefore, the shoreline texture that you see is not accurate. So having another unaccurate one for this area won't be too much of a problem IMHO.



That's precisely what I'm trying to achieve at the moment. But, I'm using trial-and-error by moving a bit pixel by pixel the landclass layer, which is not ideal.

Making progress; but when getting better somewhere, it's getting worse elsewhere. Definitely a problem with the landclass layer.





The more I'm working on it, the more I'm thinking that I'm missing the appropriate projection.

Actual terrain files (elevation, rivers, shorelines) need to be Geographic Projection / WGS84 Datum prior to be used for inclusion into CFS3 engine. Therefore, I used this standard for every other files.

If you look back into this thread at this post https://SimHQ.com/forum/ubbthreads....heater-questions-for-the-dev#Post4514332, you'll see that the result is a map stretched horizontally. Now, what has to be known is that CFS3 maps and LCF are squares, so how to reconcile rectangular Geo/WGS84 and square CFS3? I tried Google Mercator projection standard which gives almost a square at the end, but it didn't fit with CFS3's. Still trying then.



Not now. I've let aside elevation data for the moment and decided that it would be better to use CFS3 old SRTM30 for a start. Maybe I'll retry later.

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It's really quite amazing the progress you've made on this Xav, and in such a short amount of time. Outstanding!

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Xav, I really like the shore treatment on the river in you most recent post as opposed to the standard one in WOFF where the shoreline looks artificial with the light soil edging.

Best Regards

+1

Superb stuff xJouve - I'm amazed by those couple of pics. in your last post above. Eagerly following developments in this thread.

Von S

I'm not often over here, but xjouve's posts at SOH on this brought me. I think there may be a way to have two types of shoreline. Not sure if it will work, but may be worth a shot. Since you are making incredibly detailed water features, the stream.dds texture (which has been made invisible in WOFF) could possibly be repurposed as a shoreline since it clearly won't be needed for its original purpose. As I understand it, using this texture involves adding a stream vector the same way roads are added. So in theory, you could leave the shoreline texture looking more beachy, and use stream.dds to create a shoreline texture better suited to rivers and small bodies of water, and use no edge texture in other areas, such as where a river passes through a town.

Best of luck on this project, looks like you've made some great improvements! As a CFS3 guy, I hope this eventually ends up part of a full size map, but in any case I'm looking forward to what you do with it.

Thanks everyone!



That seems very interesting! I need to have a look on it! Thanks Gecko!