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[WxTech]

Several years ago I adapted a correct DEM image for the stock New Guinea map, so as to provide realistic topography. The stock map_h is horribly smoothed, and barely accurate even on large scales. It required some small shifts here and there in order to not have to do too much shifting of the basic underlying coastline. And the stock coastline in map_c was replaced so as to be more accurate in detail.

This does result in some departures that COULD require to move some map objects like villages and airfields if their position with respect to the shoreline is deemed important. This of course would have ramifications for existing missions and campaigns! I've not done any such relocating thus far, and indeed feel it would be wise to retain an unaltered version of the actors.static file, at LEAST as regards airfields.

Many of the minor rivers have been removed, for they look absolutely ridiculous. And existing rivers have been made more realistically thinner. Due to the correct topography, where rivers run up into higher terrain, any bridges above sea level must be removed, for they cause a steep-sided hole in the landscape that extends down to sea level. Such bridges being removed do of course have ramifications for campaigns if those bridges are targets.

The network of roads is another unsatisfactory aspect, and not just because they require those aforementioned bridges. Many probably didn't exist even as tracks of significance, and now they often run across high and steep terrain in a nonsensical manner. If retained, they could be 'hidden' in large part by placing the layered forest textures on top of them, thus making them far less obvious (and more realistically hard to see as tracks uner some jungle canopy.)

My concern is that the rather radical changes will render such a map update as incompatible with most any campaign. It would largely serve as a playground for those who want to make missions or create new scripted campaigns in the theater. Of course, more modern maps that cover this region in whole or in part would be more attractive to use, not least due to more accurate airfields and such.

So. Is this project of any real use to anyone? Is it worth completing?


Here we're looking roughly north across the inner reaches of Milne Bay.

[WxTech]

Looking roughly east down the valley toward Kokoda. Better landscape texture placement is warranted, as it has not yet been globally altered from the stock map_t.

[ansons]

Hi Wxtech,  to answer your question, having a more accurate map from the ground heights and rivers point of view is always a welcome addition. I have 5 books about the South Pacific Air war written by historians of WW2 in this area (Michael Claringbould and Peter Ingman) with a daily record of the events... A good material for creating missions using  your updated map.... If you complete you project, it will be a great gift for all of us.

Best regards
 

[vonofterdingen]

One campaign maker's opinion...

I have done several campaigns for this area, both on my own and with Larschance. We have never used this map. We felt that there were better alternatives, such as Dpeters New Guinea, Green Hell, Mr. O's Kokoda, and New Britain (which covers much of New Guinea).

Choices such as this are highly personal, but I would prefer to see you put your precious time into the DPeters or Mr O maps.

[WxTech]

I do naturally 😉 have Green_Hell and the Kokoda maps. But the Dpeters map is not ringing a bell.

It was the stock map that cried out for even a coarse face-lift due to its ghastly simplicity. Which likely contributes to its use by folk still stuck with weaker computers.

[genXgamer]

Hi Glenn

I have a number of missions that I regularly play that were created using the map in question.
I use VP's re-textured map as it's an improvement over the stock one.
Further improvements regarding height of mountains, rivers, roads and the use of more appropriate textures would be most welcome.
Any future campaign or mission I do will always be done using the Green Hell map as it's pretty much spot on.

[vonofterdingen]

I was a bit lazy in my map ID; by the Dpeters map I mean the PNG 1942 map by Tomcat Zombie and DPeters. There is also a PNG 1943 map by Tomcat Zombie and farang:







The map screen shot is truncated on all sides, but not a lot.

[WxTech]

The PNG map, due its large areal coverage, is only half-scale (or at least looks to be). The result is the compression of mountains laterally, making them look to be super steep and rugged. For that reason I never use it. It would require to reduce the terrain height by at least nearly a factor of two to make it look reasonable, but then the impact of the high mountains is lost.

The reduced scale maps have always been bothersome to me when there are mountains present. The NGNB maps are not so bad, being at about 3/4 scale or perhaps a bit larger, and so do not stab my eyes with brutally jagged mountains. 😀

[WxTech]

Speaking of the PNG maps, a couple years years ago I did up a reduced-height map_h.tga using Photoshop. In the comparison below, looking roughly northward from Lae, the upper panel is the original, the lower is my treatment. (The ForestFar texture clearly needs to be made darker!)





For comparison, the same view, more or less, for Green_Hell.

[Kopfdorfer]

Hi WXTech,

I think upgrading the topo would be a worthwhile project on this map.
If you are to do it , I would ask you to consider making the airfields at Milne Bay , Vivigani Island ,
and Buna/Dobodura more historically correct for the early period in New Guinea ( there are other maps more sutiable to the later
war years when the war moved north and west ) .

At Milne Bay , the airstrips were closely surrounded by jungle , and the jungle covered right down to the coast.
On the stock Map it looks like farm fields well cleared and flattened by engineers.



Vivigani Airstrip
Only a single roughly finished strip ; not the air centre complex of the stock map.


Buna was much , much less developed than on the stock map.
There were only two airfields.



I know this is a vast explosion of the project , but it seems a shame to address one part and not the other.

Just throwing it out there for consideration.
No expectations.

Kopfdorfer

[Flamer50]

WxTech,
I still have an info pack that I put together for the stock New Guinea map a long time ago.
It's a collection of official info charts done in the mid to late 1930's which would still
be valid up to and during the war:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/1lc55b2ltkzw6vd/New_Guinea_and_Adjacent_Islands.rar/file

Here's one example:


Flamer'

[taly01]

The stock New Guinea map seems to have been created for RAAF campaign 1942, Port Moresby -> Milne Bay -> Buna fighting.   But as others said it has the 1944 large airfield complexes rather than sparse 1942 airfields.  I used it alot and had fun with it before the other PNG maps came out.

So. Is this project of any real use to anyone? Is it worth completing?

Probably not as there are enough custom PNG maps already.  I think it is a 1:1 map but I haven't used it for a while.

The huge New Guinea mountains are a problem with reduced scale maps, my 2c thoughts on it were you would keep the mountain/town/AF areas at 1:1 then compress the map in the boring sections to bring scale down, but that is alot of tinkering work.  It may be easier to just reduce everything by say 1:0.75 to keep ratios correct, as if the mountains are 4000m or 3000m high is about as fake as reducing distances by 25%