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[Whiskey_Sierra_972]

Hemmentabaul cheese!!!!

I like it!!!

[canonuk]

Definitely does NOT look like autopop      To me aotopop makes things look too mass produced.

Although sometimes you have no alternative - you can't manually populate a huge area with many cities and hundreds of thousands of buildings.

[farang65]

Hi Bee,

Not taking your thread away 

For Canon Uk  I know you have been out of the scene for a while.

It can be done Just takes a hell of a lot of time and imagination. 

I've populated my 1969 Football war map 6 /7 major cities (different themes), a gazillian towns (different themes), coffee / banana plantations and cattle ranches.

Just takes time and a twisted/bent sense of humour 

I populate by hand mainly cause auto pop drove me completely insane 

What Bee is doing here looks very very accurate   

[agracier]

There are many ways to populate a map and the autopop, once you figure it out, is a wonderful tool for making clusterings of objects in a more or less random manner. One of the tricks is to use different textures on which to autopop, with for each a separate template. Thus giving some diversity. Also, it is best to be very sparing with those textures on the map, not to use them in groupings or concentration and to keep their numbers down.

The best other way to introduce some randomness is by the old copy/paste method. But by doing so in small bits and pieces and combining parts of village template A with parts of village template B ... C ... etc ... by mixing and combing all those different parts you can get some nice randomness into a map as well.

This also all depends on how different regions in the world approach urban planning (if at all). North African and Mid East regions are to easy to populate mainly because of the sheer randomness of their building patters and the lack of any apparent structure or plan. That's why maps of this region are so fun to do.

But with small maps or sparsely populated maps, then doing it all by hand, provided you have the patience and time, will give excellent results as well.

[GilB57]

Although sometimes you have no alternative - you can't manually populate a huge area with many cities and hundreds of thousands of buildings.

+1 CanonUK !

Manually populating maps like WestFront 40 & 44 would have driven me insane (more than 700 bridges & 60 airfields, for example) ...and not a single chance that the first one would be ready for release now even in beta stage 

[|450|Leady]

This one needs a BUMP, over a month since the last post  ;

Hey Bee how's the Rabaul map comming?

Cheers

Leady

[crazyeddie]

I was just thinking about this map earlier tonight as well, the wait is killing me, or is that age, I'm never sure which !!

[Bee]

Sorry chaps!  It's the busiest time of year for me work-wise and I'm hard put to get much time away.  Still at it though and found some more good info, especially on the eastern end of town.  Trying to locate the famous 'Chinnery experimental house' on Malaguna Road.  It was pretty distinctive, especially with it's cocaine bushes for hedges!

Hit an invisible wall with object numbers in the township.  Frames went from 40+ down to 17-20, so had to dial back the detail a bit until things smoothed out.  I suspect I'd been a bit generous with the trees anyhow, and after culling 200+ objects things don't look much different to me anyway.  Possibly even a bit better.

Managed to create a pleasingly accurate representation of the school on Malaguna Rd and reworkd the roads in the area to suit. Government House next door is more sketchy though.  Just don't have the right objects to work with.

The western end is fairly barren still, although that end was never very highly developed.  It will be more barrack huts and tent city 
Also tidied up the northern waterfront.  Its the last of four builds.

A few more pics. If anyone knows how to get rid of those God awful green shallows, I'd love to know.

[crazyeddie]

Cheers for the update Bee, work is important and we understand.

It's still looking great, you do the little details so well.

[henkypenky]

Thanks for the update Bee, I had looked yesterday evening, curious how things were. This is a masterpiece.

[farang65]

Hi Bee,

About the shallows yes a definite puky green there he he 

I paint in Gimp on Mymap_c using various rgbs from rgb 50 - 70  in varying thicknesses I use a brush of one, three, and five pixals  around the coastline, river fronts and islands etc.

Blur mymap-c a couple of times.

After you think it looks good  save it and make a new map_c  and  map_c _table with   map_c tool box.

Then Bombsaway has created a magnatitude of interesting shallow textures. His instructions are very easy to follow mainly changing Water textures in the load.ini and correctly placing his shallows texture in the right _Tex/water folder.

He has a number of different textures available in the Textures section here in map works.

Very easy to slot in after painting on Mymap_c. My Northern Borneo map only took a couple of hours to do.

Hope that helps.   

About the frame rates the palms are a major killer I try and use others like bananas etc.

But hey you have to have some palms especially on a Pacific map. 

Frame rate dropage for me is not a problem I like detail and enjoy flying low and buzzing cities and towns.

You never know what you'll be able to see flying low over a main street perhaps a couple of dogs fighting 

Hope the info for re doing the shallows will help 

Kirby

[agracier]

I also used to get very jerky screens when flying over cities that were on a coast. I believe it had to do with the combination of a high water setting (4 or so) and then combined with a reasonably dense concentration of objects. Both of these factors made flying over coastal cities, and certainly doing any dogfighting over them, not really optimal.

However, by replacing or installing this new type of animated water, frame rates really improved for me, while still being able to gt high definition water effects.

You can follow the thread here;
https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,15180.0.html

The first mods for animated water were still rather intensive re frame rates, but if you go to page 14, you'll find a modified download of this mod in a post by HTGuderian that drastically improves the frame rates for this water mod.

Maybe this mod might help, since Rabaul as it appears in the screenshots, does not appear to be all that densely populated. Ever since I installed the mod, flying and dogfighting over water (4) and cities is no longer a stuttering and jerky affair.