Hi guys!
Back to old Il2 after a long hiatus, because after 18 years I think it's still the best damn WWII flight simulator and you guys have been very busy in my absence creating amazing things, so I felt very tempted to reuse some new textures, specially from Cyberolas´ Singapore or Burma (hats down man!) to apply them to my favourite map, Kyushu. It is my favourite because both personal reasons and also because it's so damn difficult, it has several problems: awful map_T, the need of good high altitude looks because the missions are at 7000 m escorting or attacking B29s, need of good low altitude looks because if you are japanese you need to take off from somewhere and you don't want to close your eyes the first 5 minutes because the textures at low altitude look awful, long stretches of quite flat woods and plains, and lots lots of cities.
To get the 'elephant in the room' out as quick as possible, if you are a religious fanatic of Redko's Kyushu repaint, and you don't think it's needed any other repaint of Kyushu (including my previous ones) maybe stop reading or even better comment below something like 'stop working on this Whitecat, we don't want it!'
Redko's repaint has some very strong positive points, but in my personal taste it has also some weaknesses so I have been struggling of what to do about this map. I don't think I have found perfect solutions so I will comment some problems, and please bear with me I will compare at some point with Redko's but by all means I'll be very respectful no worries.
OK so comments, questions and problems I have:
Nagasaki at 1000m:
No problem with this one, a good start
Cyberolas' city textures tweaked a bit to match the rest of the Japanese landscape, look quite good in my opinion
Saturation vs desaturation:
I struggle with this. Unsaturated textures look great at high altitude, but at low altitude, even at 12 noon without clouds, they look sadder than a bad foggy day in Holland after your wife has left you, while in reality Japan is not like that on a sunny day. This effect is even worse if you unsaturate cities. Here below you can see that I sort of did something in the middle, and left the awesome Cyberolas Singapore city textures a bit more saturated. The problem is that, if you do that too much, the cities look in the landscape like a postage stamp in a white envelope. Not very good. What do you think?
Closer look to Nagasaki:
I would love to leave Cyberolas' texture for Japanese cities, problem is, the location of houses doesn't match at all, looks horrible. It's my main problem with this repaint right now. It will require to edit in the dozens cities of the map the actors.static, for two reasons: relocating big buildings and changing the small black ones which look horrible. There is also another problem, when the houses are destroyed, even the red-roof ones look black and horrible in the distance so they don't match with the texture. I would need to do something like I did in Iwo, Kyushu pre-bombardment and Kyushu post-bombardment. I could solve like Redko did, no houses in the cities. But, thing is, it's nice to bomb houses... muhahaha
Also, city-center textures in the core of the cities is one of the best features in Redko's version in my opinion, but to add matching houses there, if I were to use photographic textures, would thousands of houses, and putting only a few looks really weird. With many houses I know that at some point the FPS drops a lot, although it helps if you use the same house all the time apparently... So lots of thoughts there about automated actors.static manipulation, destroyed houses, etc...
Forest hills:
If you are an old timer you will remember my first texture of Kyushu in allaircraftarcade (now allaircraftsimulations) when I came up with the hilly forest idea, because the long stretches of flat forests in Japan were terribly boring (not the case in New Guinea for example). Redko took the same to his Kyushu, with high contrast, and I have seen the same in other maps like Cyberolas Burma. Problem with hilly forests is that, the texture that gives you the hills, especially when it's with high-contrast, when it is at the border of the forest, creates this very ugly black effects, like some bloody black caves plenty of Ucorns at the border of Fangorn forests, but men, Japanese forests are not bloody Fangorn
They are just forests. I reduced the contrast of the textures a lot, and used less-dense forest tree textures, so that gives you forests a bit more boring, with less dramatic hills, but no weird effects at the forest. And no repeating artifacts at high altitude!
but yes they are more boring... thoughts?
3500m:
7000m:
Uniforming colors:
Take a look of Fukuoka at 7500m. Again, textures of Cyberolas resist all altitudes, I take my hat off. You can see different textures there for the fields around Fukuoka, some of Cyberolas, and mountain textures from Mixx. I use what I call a uniforming colors method. It makes all the landscape seamless at long distances, and minimizes weird effects less repeating patterns, plus minimizes the issues with the Il2 long-distance renderer (more than 10 km + or -) that has much poorer quality than the short renderer (<10 km). On one side, it avoids weird effects, but it's much boring than using different color textures with much more personality like Redko's.
Trees:
Another big issue with this one. I have used my Vietnam jungle trees that I see lately all over the PTO maps, but not because I like them here. I don't think they are appropriate for Japan, way too tropical. The reason I have taken the MTO altered bush out, is that it has a very strong pop-up tree issue that kills immersion heavily. But, I love MTO cherry-blossom-like trees for Japan. I realised that for example the pop-up issue was much smaller in Cyberolas Singapore, and when I went to look why, here we go, he had used my trees which for some reason have less issues with that. Lots of thoughts about this too
I may try to make some new cherry blossom pop-up trees to substitute my Vietnam jungle though
Roads:
No picture here, why? because there ARE NO ROADS. My number 1 immersion killer for 2018's IL2, and something unsolvable apparently due the old nature of the engine. Sorry I cannot stand the zig-zag roads anymore, actually I will probably eliminate them from all the other maps like here, for my private use, using my transparent road texture. Any road-lovers out there?
Jokes apart, I'd love to hear your thoughts about all this!
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Topic: Kyushu repainted by Whitecat 4.0 (Read 9862 times)
