That is looking great, i have been collecting original sources to do some campaigns for the Aleutians as it was a very interesting part of the war and little known.....and these improved scenery fixes will be a must. Those tundra textures are great, can you tell us how to do that UncleTi if and when you have time?
OK, here's an outline of the method I've developed.
First, get a hold of Martin's DXTbmp & BMP2000 progs. Then, use a decent graphics editor that'll allow you to work with layers - I use Paint Shop Pro 8. Also a good idea to get Pen32win CFS 2 Pactex texture guide & Sanders G2K tutorial file - they provide a good guide as to the texture filename you''ll want to rework/ replace.
It's already apparent from my earlier work that the FSX terrain bmps that people such as Aime Leclerc have made freeley available are the starting point for much of the work. Not always, but most of the time.
I find some suitable startpoint bmps by viewing these files in DXTbmp (as normal bmps, NOT extended bmps). Once I find something that might be useful, I save as 24 bit bmp from DXTbmp. These are large files 1024 x 1024 bmps.
Now CFS 2 terrain uses FS2000/2002 (FS70) extended bmps. These max out as 256 x 256 bmp size, & the pallette of (8 bit) colours also carries any transparency information. Big difference.
Using PSP8, I fiddle & tweak things until I have something that will still look good at 256 x 256 - there's a lot of to & fro here, some of the FSX bmps are just too busy & when you reduce the image size, it just doesn't look good in game.
Saving as a 256 x 256 bmp, I then format so it will show in CFS 2 using BMP2000.
First, load up a terrain bmp from CFS 2 that uses a similar colour pallette to the one you want to use (it doesn't always need to be the same filename you trying to replace).
Using the merge image button, navigate to the 256 bmp you created using PSP & BMP2000 will create the image set. Choose to save extended image & save SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT TO THE CFS 2 folder you grabbed the original from, simply naming as the file name you want to replace in the game.
Make sure you have a back up of CFS 2/ TEXTURE & CFS 2/ SCENEDB/ WORLD/ TEXTURE folders. Now you can find your new texture, copy & paste it into CFS 2/ TEXTURE & CFS 2/ SCENEDB/ WORLD/ TEXTURE folders, allowing it to overwrite the textures already there.
Fire up CFS 2 & check out how it looks.
Simples!:isadizzy:
For custom lines, the initial work is basically the same. THe difference is to get a workable line transparency. I haven't found anything to short circuit a painstaking colour by colour reworking of the transparency in BMP2000, & there's an awful lot of trial & error doing that!!!
