According to DOM's notes there are 204, 800 terrain tiles in the default 640x320 matrix that makes up the EAW world:



Making an entirely new EAW theatre involves checking and replacing every one of those 204,000 tiles. Inevitably it is a long term business.

Over the last few days I have been having another run over the Italy/Balkan/Ukraine theatre, and despite the fact that it is the umpteenth time I have done this, I find another fifty-odd tile glitches. A modder's work is never done

I have been able to help the task by now colour coding different types of tile icons, so that internal angles and external angles stand out.



After a while, you get so gozzy that tiles that are 25% grass or forest start loking like those that are 75%, and the odd error in those, and the tiles that are 50% grass or forest, but round the wrong way.

I doubt if you ever get them all

A painstaking process

Not that it makes any difference but to be precise the length of the side of a tile is exactly 4096 metres which is 2^12 (2 to the power 12).

I suppose there is a good binary computational reason for that to be so.

Not bad though, 22 years ago DOM was 4 metres out on the length of an EAW terrain tile.

Though DOM being DOM I wonder if he was simply using a rounded figure to avoid boggling our brains.

One of the positives for the crude "new map" files that we use online is that we know that the tile is approximately a 4 kilometre square.



After take off from the carrier I estimated that the enemy planes were at about 320°T. I headed in that direction with wing leveller on.
The circles are tiles with a diameter is 4 km.
I estimate that the nearest bandits are about 6 km away at 10 o'clock- time to have a gander


Spot on!
20030 feet is just over 6 km

All these worlds ...



Middle East,



China/Korea/Japan



Midway



Pacific Carrier War



Battle of the Alpes

Maybe, one day, they'll be finished ...

Well at least you have done enough to give us some good fun at GameRanger

It's great that they are out there in some or other useable form.

I also had some fun yesterday using the Polish part of the Balkan map (basic eaw.tm version) in a 128C version of Andy's Poland scenario. Single missions of course. Trying to edit the campaign files to fit would do my head in.

And then there's the roads not gone down, or at least not very far:



This was an attempt to create a more accurate map for Emil's Caucasus campaign. Abandonned at an early stage.



Norway.

More than a passing resemblance to the theatre map in Eurofighter Might ... might return to this one at some point

More unfinished business...

Ost World







NPAW (Aleutians)...

Great maps Lolo. How useable are they?

For the OST world... It's a scaled down world (about 30% scaled down from real distance) in order to get most of the perimeter - In fact it's in the backburner for years (decade ?) - not worked on it for a very long time

Elevation map is done but still lots of tweaking to be done :
- Coast tiles to be flatten
- River bed to be flatten
- Airfield tiles to be flatten
And of course tile / elevation sync as you first post showed which is still a lot of work

Tiles map :
- land / water tiles separation done, most rivers done but still a lot of tiles tweaking : I would say only Sevastopol and Moscow area are 75% done

Targets : only sevastopol area so quite a lots of work

For the NPAW/Aleutians world Elevation and tiles land/water done but i'ts a dead-end as Aleutian islands are very tiny and elevation (volcanoes) is very high so shore line is not at all realistic

Just want to say that after having myself a go at world shapping (with very poor results) - I find your work simply ashtonishing ! lots of work and dedication from you so really the community should thank you for the job you are doing

Maybe I should reboot the projects after all

Lolo

Lolo - thanks, and yes perhaps you should.

DOM's old Hill Generator can automatically flatten coast and river tiles, and level airbase areas, and can decrease or increase elevations on selected areas areas of the map.

This is how I used it to create basic elevations in the Italy/Balkan/Ukraine map:









You can then use the utility to "randomise" between elevations.

These utilities got left to one side because they would not run under Windows7/10/11, but they can easily be run under Windows 10 using DOSBOX

Thanks for the tip Moggy !

I'll will find the tool and the Dos emulator and have a try.

Lolo

The thing with DOM's Hill Generator is to realise that of the three dat files it uses,

HG1.dat is eaw16.HM
HG2.dat is eaw.tm
HG3.dat is targets.dat

So I replace the HG dats supplied with the utility with those relevant to the theatre I'm editing

The way I use it is to add lines to the end of the DOSBOX setup file "dosbox.conf", to mount the main EAW folder as a new drive, go to the folder with DOM's utility and run it automatically. On my setup it looks like this:



It's fun!

Thank you for the additional tips Moggy

I had already figured out what the hgx.dat files were by inspecting the files sizes and guessing how the utility might work.

Great how-to for the dropbox Utility.



Lolo

Is that a EAW specific Map Editor?
Looks like something we could maybe use for EF2000 if its code could be adapted...

It's the one Microprose actually used to make EAW. It makes EAW tile matrix files, either eaw.tm or eaw32.tm for later versions of the exe.

Aha, that explains why it looks so slick.
Anyway, Thanks,
It was just an idea from my side, but wouldn't be much help unless I create EAW terrain first, then convert the resulting tiles.