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[Squashman]

I discovered that for a few airfields there was present a partially transparent, dead straight line or two a short distance from the field, like a 'border'. Particularly obvious where located on/over water (as for Lakunai and Gasmata). Another similar effect was found at Schwimmer, where the border floats above the river just to the south.

Upon looking at the relevant textures, in the alpha layers for these there was a noisy fringe of partial transparency along one or more edges. Painting over this narrow fringe with black (for no transparency) cured that issue.

Yes, I see what you mean, the dark line is quite visible over water. There seems to be one also on the landward side of Gasmata but is barely detectable against the land textures.
Any chance you could put up a link to your modified files?

[WxTech]

Squash,
As per your request:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/84b0sg8kbz9lcwj/Green_Hell_fixed_runway_textures.7z/file

The readme file contents:

NOTE: If you like the original 'hard-edged' appearange of the runway textures, then you may not need this mod at all. To at least check if you need the affected textures replaced, do this. Open up Green_Hell in the FMB. Go to Schwimmer (14-mile) strip and carefully look around the river immediately to the south. If you see the ghostly presence of a straight line hovering in the air (at the same elevation as the runway) over the river, you might want to replace the textures for:
- Lakunai
- Salamaua
- Schwimmer

Go to the obviously-named folder here, then copy/paste the SkinHi.tga file to the same-named folder where you first installed it.



Otherwise.....

This replaces *ALL* runway textures (NOT terrain textures!) and accompanying files for the Green Hell map. To do this, simply drop the plateS folder into the same
..\3do\Airfield\
folder where the current plateS folder resides. That is, you are overwriting the current plateS folder, which in turn contains some two dozen sub-folders, each for an individual runway texture.

What have I changed?

1) For every individual texture I altered its .mat file so as to enable transparency. This makes the edges of the represented runways, taxiways, revetments and roads blend smoothly into the underlying base terrain textures. Hence the inclusion of ALL related folders.

2) A few of these now transparency-enabled texture plates revealed narrow 'border' strips along part or much of one or more edges of the 1024px square texture, being particularly visible on/over adjacent water. The three strips suffering most from this are:
- Lakunai
- Salamaua
- Schwimmer
A handful of others have had similar edge strips fixed, even though being over land makes them difficult to see.

This fix involved simply painting over these partially transparent edge zones with black in the alpha channel, so as to make them completely transparent.



No other changes of note have been effected.


WxTech
Jul 21, 2019

OK to freely distribute, modify, or whatever, without restriction.

[Tokyo Rose]

Hi all,

that's been a while we havn't been able to follow this tread, coming back at it, whoooow ! many things to say, many thanks to give !

Well, with no help coming thus far on my list of missing objects a couple posts ago, I did the following in order to be able to fly on this fantabulous map.

Sorry some of you seem to have waited for aftercare and had to troubleshoot themselves, we both have many other things to do aside, families, jobs etc..  as far as im concerned, far from home with no access to a photoshop/il-2 equiped computer

Makes one wonder if the original artists fully understood the various parameters controlling the way the graphical elements interacted.

Well, no wonder anymore : i have close to 0 understanding how this works and relates all together  i basicaly discovered the basics of photoshop and the intricacies of IL-2 1946 while creating a few skins and drawing the airfields for this map 

That said, many thanks for your outstanding work and improvement of our work WxTech 

- Your jungle trees suit our textures much better now !
- Your modification of the base file and your work on the alpha layer just wonderfuly changed the look of the airfields, althought we must admit it's a bit of "magic" to us as we're still trying to understand what the "alpha layer" really is.

We are just back working on the map, as you suggested, the rivers are being vaslty reworked and extended, many new pre-war strips are in the process of being added, and the static is being improved thanks to a pack of Australian very detailed maps Yann just dug out from the web.

Now, if we may ask for your expertise here WxTech, our runway objects have an awkward look when viewed under specific conditions as dusk, dawn or bad weather, they kinda shine, with a flashy greyish or icy look... we would like to modify this so those runways look more mat and or dark and keep their detail, but have no clue how to do this. A couple of screenshots below to illustrate :

Below, under fair weather conditions, everything looks as it should be (one again congrats on your modification WxTech, that greatly improves the runway objects edges and blend them marvelously with the underlaying textures !  )


Below, at noon, stormy weather problem :


Is there maybe something to change in the light parameters of the base mat file ?

Anyway cheers for the follow up and help, we'll post a few other screeshots later on today to show how cool the airfields look with WxTech modifications ; )

Kevin

[WxTech]

To better match earthen object textures to the landscape, try adjust
ting the two most important parameters, diffuse and ambient. This might also require to tweak the texture's overall brightness as well, once some combination of .mat file values is found to give the best overall gradation of appearance under all lighting conditions.

You might start with setting both ambient and diffuse to, say, 0.7.

Or vary only one, in steps, over a large range, while leaving the other at 1.0. Do this for both parameters in turn, to see what aspect does what.

It might take some time to do all this!

Make sure specular and shine are set to zero.

Be aware also that the LandLight parameter the game is using plays a role. You can set your own LandLight value for a specific map by giving it a unique name. I recall Carsmaster did some work in this area, and a search should turn up more useful info (I'm getting ready for work at the moment, hence the brevity.)

[Marat]

Dear friends,

Where to get the missing objects for this beautiful map?

Code: [Select]

buildings.House$MaintShed
buildings.House$Supplies
buildings.House$FuelDrum
buildings.House$MaintShedHoist
buildings.House$WorkTable
buildings.House$WheelChock
buildings.House$ToolBox
buildings.House$StepLadder
buildings.House$MaintStand
buildings.House$RepairShop1
buildings.House$TallMaintStand
buildings.House$MaintCart
buildings.House$Tent_1
buildings.House$HangarThreeNoObjects

[Marat]

Very strange. I found all missing objects in Geezer objects mod, did everything as specified, checked the missing objects by means of static checker. All objects are available now, not a single missing, but the missions cannot be saved anyway

[WxTech]

Tokyo Rose,
I looked at the runways under all kinds of lighting and weather conditions, but see nothing quite like your screenshot, where you get a somewhat bright surface against the much darker surrounds.

My LandLight.mat (default location in Maps/_Tex), and which controls map-wide lighting, has:

[ClassInfo]
  ClassName TMaterial
[LightParams]
Ambient 1.0
diffuse 1.0

If you have no such file, create LandLight.mat, and copy the contents above into it. The values of 1.0 are almost certainly the default. If you wish to go darker, Ambient and Diffuse could be, say, 0.6 and 1.3, respectively. Or for a brighter map (potentially useful for winter), Ambient and Diffuse could be 1.0 and 1.4, respectively.

Now, I'm running 4.09, and the graphics dll's could be different from yours. All the default values of 1.0 in both LandLight.mat and the Base.mat files for your runways are working satisfactorily for me...

[mandrill]

Just curious. I checked my maps\ tex_ folder and found the LandLight.mat file with the contents set out above.

But I also found another file SLandLight.mat.

Can you tell me what this file does?

[WxTech]

To see what might use SLandLight.mat, check various map load.ini's.My first guess--not high confidence!--might be the Slovakia map. But who knows...

[mandrill]

To see what might use SLandLight.mat, check various map load.ini's.My first guess--not high confidence!--might be the Slovakia map. But who knows...

Hmmm... Never thought of that. It could - as you say - just be a .mat file for a specific map.

[Squashman]

Very strange. I found all missing objects in Geezer objects mod, did everything as specified, checked the missing objects by means of static checker. All objects are available now, not a single missing, but the missions cannot be saved anyway

Hi Marat
What version of IL2 are you running?

I have GreenHell working perfectly in my BAT 3.6.2 install and in my VP Modpack install but, in Modact 5.3 and CUP (to part 12), despite having no missing objects, I cannot get missions to save - The map loads fine and I can open it in Map Editor, but no missions - Go figure?

This is a problem with so many different versions of IL2.
I now only use BAT as my benchmark.

It may be a texture issue? I will keep investigating.

[WxTech]

It occurs to me that another factor is likely contributing to--if not fully responsible for--the anomalous brightness of runway plate textures. And that is that cloud shadows do not affect *objects*. These runways are just like houses, etc., in that they are illuminated at a fixed level, whether a cloud is casting a shadow upon it or not.

But the underlying terrain texture *will* darken due to a cloud shadow.