homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation European Air War EAWPRO Benelux terrain Add In

Once in a blue moon the EAW Launchpad changes it's online game to keep players interested and flying. This time I decided that the recent Blood moon was a good opportunity for a new enhancement for our 10 year old BENELUX terrain set by incorporating a random selection of my 600+ Harvest tiles. These are all 8 bit versions of normal 256 x 256 pixel drawings to maintain the highest possible frame rates for our missions. It's a bit of an experiment and depending on demand the selection may change in the future.

Here's a few screenies which I hope our readers will like. More screen shots of our missions will also regularly appear on my website https://rabartel.home.xs4all.nl/

































VonBeerhofen

EAW Launchpad janitor

Those are simply wonderful.

Thx for the heads up OG! There's a lot more as I started these in 2007, but I can't possibly show it all in this thread. New tiles are still being created so I'll replace the above picures with a few more when I have time for it.

VonBeerhofen

A few more new pictures above which clearly show the new nature grouping algorithm. This has also opened the way for fully randomised tile sets which are no longer constrained to a specific position in EAW's various nature groups, and all land tiles can be used anywhere as standalone. This creates a much more diverse look without the repetitive nature borders we all know from the original EAWv1.2 world. Randomisation of Mountain, Forrest and City tiles is still pending, for now I only fully randomised the Field, Grass and Road tiles, which occupy the largest area in the game. When fully randomised the default nature tiles can be seeded throughout the EAW world in small amounts which will further improve diversity. For instance, each city tile can then be used as a single village tile or any village tile can be incorporated into a group of city tiles and ofcourse the same goes for all other natures, so in essence it's the subject matter which defines a tile's use and not predefined areas with fixed corners and borders using only a small selection of 3 or 4 tiles. Use as many as you need!
Merry X-mas!

VBH

Replaced above pictures with a few more with new tiles!

VBH

New pictures with new tiles showing the use of "BREAKER" tiles. These are tiles with not much on them and as such easy and less time consuming to create. They open up the crowded areas, which are obviously not everywhere as populated as some pictures suggest. So by replacing one or two 'crowded' tiles a bit more open space is generated. Of course such tiles can also function as a standalone nature and create a more desolate looking terrain. All tiles initially start out as a 'breaker' in Photoshop and allow them to be easily changed at will by moving, rotating, adding or subtracting layers, the one's shown here are new and will be turned into more populated versions at a later stage, the pictures were made for determining how the transitions to adjacent tiles work and to get an idea on how they can best be used.

I also found this picture, on old gem from the past when I created the sky for Moggy's Dunkirk and had just begun investigating how to best create these tiles. Sadly I lost my border set which also provided the ground's irregularities background on top of which everything else was drawn so I reverted to using borders from previously created tiles instead to keep border colors as identical as possible, this to get as little seams as possible. To be honest they're not as precise as when I started as I had to make minimal changes for each new tile and those changes accumulated over time due to the new process I started using. Notice the alternative coastline and glasshouses I tried to mimic in my first attempts. I was very happy with the coastline as it contains the connecting road of the Atlantic Wall which ran from Spain all the way to the North of Holland, part of which is still present in my village, as are some coastal defenses.



P.S. of course the lake color was later changed after I saw the result in this picture, in game things can look very different due to the ambient lighting, you learn as you go.

VonBeerhofen

A new field tile (Nr.475 so a bit of a jubilee version) to add more diversity to our on line missions in the Launchpad and because they're just fun to create:



and a whole series of 6 base tiles which can become anything or add a bit more spacing between tiles:













VonBeerhofen

Another experiment with complimentary orchard drawings on 2 tile corners. Notice that with the randomized rotation of certain tiles multiple shapes can be created in combination with other tiles. This gives an impression of different farms, in spite of using the same drawings. Nothing new in EAW but great fun to play with. I hope it helps getting rid of the game's notorious repetitive terrain. Here the tile is placed as main grass replacement, hence there's a bunch of them together in various rotational states. With this tile set any other tile can be seeded in between, except river or sea tiles, which will then further diversify the view. For now the grass set was kept as in v1.2 to remain compatible with the previously used Euroblend set, which would otherwise cause on line target problems with players.



VonBeerhofen