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[WhiteCat]

Hi guys, I've done some personal tweakings for redko's desert map, based on all his awesome textures for all the deserts published so far. My deepest respect for redko, if it wasn't so good his original repaint I wouldn't have used it as a start point. If redko approves I'll publish a link, cheers

Some screeens showing what the tweaks are:

Before


After
 - Notice keeping original sea and coast so it's compatible with old missions over this map with populated harbours etc and no problems with ship navigation
 - Notice a more reddish / yellow color like in his MTO repaint.
 - Also notice the editing of agriculture textures to minimize pattern repetition, but keeping at the same time the texture so it matches with the work done with houses, palm trees etc


Before


After
- Notice less dark mountains. They mix more naturally at long distances with the rest of the landscape


Before


After
- Again mountains are more matched with sand. More definition in textures in general and using better mountain patterns from other redko's repaints


Before


After
- Different dry rivers and lighter mountains
- Notice the new desert roads. Now they blend better with the landscape


Before


After
- Coastal houses / ports readapted to the old coast. It means that some coastal villages in the island have been eliminated.


Before


After
- All textures have been carefully treated so now they don't present sharp 'cuts' that show the end of the texture and the beggining of other. Compare the lower part of the picture before and after

[Blond]

Looks good... Whitecat!
I really like redko's great desert work but my personal taste is:
- less dark (less contrasted) hills
- a bit more reddish ( saturated ) sand color

Haven't tried it "live" but your screens look just fine...

To be honnest - in your processing some "rocky feeling" is lost... but overall it seems more like North Africa.
At bottom picture I like your palid (lighter) sand road

[Uufflakke]

Well…I don’t know.
You did some great work with the PTO repaints but, I hope I don’t offend you with what I’m going to say now, I wouldn’t call it a tweaked map. In my opinion your version is in between the default one and Redko’s version.
Probably other members prefer your version because of the warmer  palette but what makes Redko’s map so special is the subtle use of greygreenish and a kind of slight pinkish tone here and there. That combination of cooler and warmer tones gives this desert map something extra and the variety makes it more vivid in a kind of way.
All the sligth subtle colour variations seems to be disappeared now.

And personally I miss all the tiny sandy islands, sandbanks, shallow waters, the curved coastline and different watercolours.

Just my opinion for what it’s worth…

[WhiteCat]

@Uufflakke: No problems, I get no offence, it's only my own vision. Probably it's only a problem of language, what I mean by tweaked is something that starts from a another retexture, rather than a complete retexture, that's it.

The warmer or colder textures / saturated or not is definitely a matter of taste if you wander around these forums. In general redko's Desert is less saturated than redko's MTO if you notice, so even he changed his mind. But yes, I agree that my version is in general more uniform, including the mountains, but that's on purpose, looks better to me at high altitude (but again it's my personal taste). And you'll notice the great difference between this version and the default one when you fly low.

Regarding the islands etc takes me 2 secs to put them again, it's only renaming a couple of files. But I just took them off because there were some old campaigns with many attacks to the island harbour that didn't work with redko's version because the different coastline and I couldn't play it, and takes me much less time to copy paste the old map_C than edit 20 highly populated missions.

An your opinion counts a lot anyway because you're a great map modder!

[WhiteCat]

Some more screens: what happens? we recovered the shallows! yes, they look awesome and, hey, those missions attacking the port weren't so important after all...



@Blond: Thanks for the feedback, and well, that looks ROCKY to me

[WhiteCat]

Bloody hell, what happens!! Cold colours now???



No, it's the bloody awesome IL2 engine, all the previous screenshots were at midday and clear weather, and this last one is hazy weather and a bit later

[WhiteCat]

Some screenshots on a different map now: Awesome Libya map by JV69 Bada (one of the best MapT and MapH matchings I've ever seen), with Redko's textures tweaked by me, and campaign by PhilK... too bloody awesome combination to not to post some screenshots... I had a REAL fun this afternoon with this map.

[Uufflakke]

@Uufflakke: No problems, I get no offence, it's only my own vision. Probably it's only a problem of language, what I mean by tweaked is something that starts from a another retexture, rather than a complete retexture, that's it.

Okay. As far as I know "tweaking" means fine-tuning or improving things. Anyway, enough about these linguistic misunderstandings.
Thanx for the compliment but I'm not a mapmodder actually. More an object-repainter. 

About the retexturing of the Libya map by JV69 Bada: I remember to have seen a post recently that JV69 Bada doesn't want another version to be released of the Lybia map. Too bad, 'cause it looks nice...

[WhiteCat]

@Uufflakke: No problems, I get no offence, it's only my own vision. Probably it's only a problem of language, what I mean by tweaked is something that starts from a another retexture, rather than a complete retexture, that's it.

Okay. As far as I know "tweaking" means fine-tuning or improving things. Anyway, enough about these linguistic misunderstandings.
Thanx for the compliment but I'm not a mapmodder actually. More an object-repainter. 

About the retexturing of the Libya map by JV69 Bada: I remember to have seen a post recently that JV69 Bada doesn't want another version to be released of the Lybia map. Too bad, 'cause it looks nice...

Yes, well, in the end I'm not a native English speaker, but hey I try to do my best

I know your strengths very well but lately I've seen some screens from you around (example Aleutians) which I really like (not the kind of 'I like it because I want to be nice' ) and I'm a difficult-to-please bastard regarding maps

I know about JV69 but I thought the screens were nice, hope he changes opinion. Cheers

[bada]

your "greens" looks more natural, less "forced" but removing the sand in the delta is not cool as that's just one place when the rivers floods with a lot of earth-garbage.
the other stuff that is not so good are the mountains, in the desert you have fabulous contrasts in terrain color. Take the coast in derma (lybia),the real one, not on my map the cliffs looks RED'ish..yes red
In the Desert itself, you'll find pure white sand and then, coming from nowhere a big monster black cliff.
Il2 has a texture pb, as you're limited with those, so the most important is choosing your textures to get the wanted effect, without repetition. This last part takes actually the most time. On the lybia map, it took 6months just to get the "desert texture mix" and remove repetition and it's still not finished (mountains north of el-adam for example).
and thank you for the compliment, but as i wrote: 6months just to find the right patterns for the right places and remove most of visible repetitions, houndreds of flight in 4x time, at different altitudes and differents angles.

[WhiteCat]

OK... then at that point is more accurate redko's approach with big contrasts and black mountains possibly?
OK at this point possibly I have to investigate more.

The work in your map is very noticeable, the map_T is impressive.

The main problem I see in IL2 though is not that we have few textures, textures can be worked to eliminate or minimize patterns even if you have a single texture for miles and miles (see my small correction of France fields in CanonUK's map). The main problem is how it deals with high contrasted textures at long distance, I think it should have more 'blurring' of colors in the distance. When you use high contrasted textures in IL2 there are many chances that you get an ugly effect because the IL2 rendering engine is not perfect... so in the end, wanting to be more realistic, ends by making it worse...

But... given that, yes, this texture deserves a bit more of time OK I'll open a new thread at some point with it. And I take on board the darker mountains.

Cheers!

[WhiteCat]

OK chaps... I need to review this.  (zooorry) I've been a good boy and did some investigation on my own as probably redko did at some point (well, nowadays investigation means google "libya desert mountains" and go to the images section and save some pictures, but I'm turning so bloody lazy even to do that  ) and here's the results, one of the first conclusions I get is that my version is good in certain occasions. In others redko's dark tones are more appropiate. The tone of the sand I got is mostly right but should be redder I think. And in general, it's going to be bloody difficult to achieve decently those black mountains coming from nowhere with IL2 engine, and make them look right in the distance.  Impressions? Opinions? More photos?

(By the way when I talk desert I'm talking Libya, the assumtpion is certainly valid for Bada's map but also for Desert, Sands of Time and MTO I think. Tunisia is completely different of course.)