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Victory! The CFS2 world is ours.

A few more screeneies

Just to whet peoples' appetites . . .

First a few from Korea: (1) the Imjjn River valley, scene of the famous 1951 battle (2) the Naktong River valley, part of the Pusan perimeter in 1950.

View attachment 92491View attachment 92492View attachment 92493


Finally, a few from Vietnam (1) near the airfield at Kep (2) a river that flows through a hill (3) the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi, a major target in Route Pack Six. [the road bridge is a modern addition and didn't exist in the 1960s although there was a pontoon bridge, according to maps of the time].

View attachment 92494View attachment 92495View attachment 92496View attachment 92497


Cheers
BuV
 
I must say, in the context of continental Asia, the Pactex textures look pretty good!
Concerning the roads/railroads crossing the bodies of water: I think those are an eyesore; in FS9, but even more so in CFS2. I'm going to implement a filter to remove those.
When are the beauties uploaded? We must get it right the first time. The packages are going to be BIG and we don't want to burden the download hosting provider and the end user to overload.
There are still a number of issues to solve, there is still a lot of content to be created/converted and there is still integration to be done to make sure it works together as much as possible with the plethora of existing add-ons. Fortunately, it's not a one-man-show; there's a few people in the community working together. These people also have real life to deal with, so I'm not committing to a release date or definitive feature list.
 
Double :jawdrop: :jawdrop:

Just beautiful. Many thanks BV, Sander and the team for the tasters. Even from 4700 and 70,000ft they look good.

I appreciate the task you are doing and the number crunching involved, but is there any easy way of giving us euro-philes a taster of what it might look like in Europe?

Sander, like your attitude towards getting it right first time, saves a lot of tears later on.....Personally, even if it took another year to do, then so be it.

Cheers

Shessi
 
I must say, in the context of continental Asia, the Pactex textures look pretty good!

They do stand up pretty well - although I think they're a bit too tropical for Korea. (I am planning to try my hand at landclass editing to recreate the paddy fields that cover the flat areas close to the Naktong and other major rivers. Massive undertaking at a country level of course but a LOD5 cell or two would be good practice.)

Shessi -

How about an area we haven't seen - the Eastern Front? (The textures here are a very old set that I just love when it comes to Russia). A few screenies around Kharkov . .

View attachment 92500View attachment 92501View attachment 92502

Cheers
BuV
 
I remember that set! Comtex I think. At the time, it was a very incomplete set, and there were some duplicates in some classes, making it a bit monotonous, and some edge masking was messy. I think combined with the EURW city textures and a bit of elbow grease it could be brought up to standard, and indeed be suitable for Eastern Europe.
 
BuV,

Paddy field textures ... try the set I did in my New Britain scenery.
You can renumber them to "b" for those out of PTO coverage areas, or even change the "5" to a different number.
Using EZlandclass you can patch over an existing texture set, just add as a new scenery layer. The game will always use textures in the add-on scenery's own "texture" folder first, so "005h" can stay as grassland everywhere else..

hope this helps.
 
Thanks for that BV.

Looking good! But doesn't quite come up to the standard or quality of your Korean shots.

Cheers

Shessi
 
That will do nicely.:jump:

I've already started DCG-ifying Europe in anticipation of the coming scenerific upgrade. I've built 4 corridor-shaped DCG campaigns for Western Europe 1943. It's feasible now, with AIRBOSS re-assigning useless CAP's to bomber escort. The existing SdC scenery isn't bad, but it will get much better.
 
....How about an area we haven't seen - the Eastern Front? (The textures here are a very old set that I just love when it comes to Russia).....

Comtex textures are my very same choice when it comes to the Russian front!

They are very dark and I wonder why a common perception of a Russian scenery is very dark in summer.

Splendid screenshots BuV!

Cheers!
KH
:ernae:
 
I know this is only a sim but it's remarkable how these new features reflect reality sometimes. I took a flight over Route Pack 3 in North Vietnam yesterday and made some discoveries.

(1) Looking north-west you can see Route 101, one of the main supply routes feeding the northern sources of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnam is on the right and the mountains bordering Laos are on the left. In the distance is the northern end of the Mu Gia Pass. (2) Looking in the opposite direction, this is the junction of Routes 101 and 137. There was a ferry across the river, the Song Trac, which flows towards Quang Khe at the upper left. (3) Route 137 winds southwards through the Ban Karai Pass into Laos.

View attachment 92540View attachment 92541View attachment 92542

Of course if an O-1 Bird Dog had flown over this area in the 1960s it would have been quickly shot down. The batteries of 37mm and 85mm AA guns that defended the supply routes meant that only 'Misty' FACs, flying F-100s, could hope to survive.

Finally, a quick look at the infamous A Shau valley (although the landclass is a bit odd for the slopes!)

View attachment 92543

Cheers
BuV
 
BV,
Thanks for the screenies, good to see. For me I really like that there are no blurries at any distance, so gives that uniform quality effect, which helps with the impression of depth.

Re-farming on hillsides, as you know it would be terraced type fields. Maybe a simple fix would be to turn some of the straight farm-line field texs through 90 degs, this might give a better impression of hillside farming?

............and who'd a thought it, sightseeing with CFS2!

Cheers

Shessi
 
BV,
...
Re-farming on hillsides, as you know it would be terraced type fields. Maybe a simple fix would be to turn some of the straight farm-line field texs through 90 degs, this might give a better impression of hillside farming?
I'm working on algorithms to interpolate the Landclass with Mesh to eliminate this exact phenomenon (well, not creating terraced fields, but rather Rock or Grass depending on the angle of the slope)

............and who'd a thought it, sightseeing with CFS2!

Cheers

Shessi

VFR ;)
 
Big progress today; Streams and rivers now cut their way through the terrain better: instead of going over the fields & crops (the lines are now interacting with the terrain textures)
View attachment 92676View attachment 92678View attachment 92677

Even with this extra task, all of EURW compiles in 1:20h on my 3 yr old laptop; not bad :)

Still a few minor bugs to fix, and 2 more features to build in and we should be good to go.
 
TRIPLE WOW!

Big progress today; Streams and rivers now cut their way through the terrain better: instead of going over the fields & crops (the lines are now interacting with the terrain textures)
View attachment 92677

Even with this extra task, all of EURW compiles in 1:20h on my 3 yr old laptop; not bad :)

Still a few minor bugs to fix, and 2 more features to build in and we should be good to go.

What an improvement !!!!!... I think I know exactly where that shot was taken.....;)

:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

May I ask if the same logic will be applied to roads, which in many cases in the old EURW do not stop at river banks, but cross directly the stream on the water?

There's also another minor problem: when river beds are quite wide they are displayed as small lakes, while they should show up as a dry beds with a small stream in the middle.
It's the case of the Po Valley above, where the Po tributary rivers, flowing from the Alps southward, have a constant volume of water and bed shape throughout the year. They only raise their level during the wet season and in the spring when snow melts. They are all fed by glaciers, which keep them going even during summer.
On the other hand, the tributary rivers flowing northward from the Appennini are almost dry during summer with a sort of medium to low stream during the other seasons, but they are subject to sudden flash floods if big rainstorms hit the mountains. The Appennini do not reach the same altitude as the Alps, so there are no glaciers to keep a constat water feed to the northward tributaries.

This is what causes large bed rivers, normally paved with stones and corrosion debris, with a relatively narrow and shallow water stream in the middle, which can extend up to the banks in very little time during flash floods, expecially in summertime. Large river beds are also man-maintained as such, as a measure to allow enough room for flash floods to expand and slow down, instead of flooding the surrounding farmland or, worse, towns and cities. In the fall of 1966 this is exactly what happened with the river Arno when it flooded Firenze, caused by a containment dam up in the mountains that collapsed under a huge flash flood.

These Appenini rivers are very dangerous and we know them very well. Many people lost their lives because they were fishing while standing on the dry bed of the river and paying no attention to the sudden thuderstorm up in the mountains. It still happens every so often. Crossing these rivers that were normally small streams while, all of a sudden, became furious walls of muddy waters and debris, caused a lot of troubles to the advancing Allies during the liberation of Italy from 1943 to 1945.

I don't know if CFS2 can be instructed to display the areas where these dry river beds expand as such. The Italian boot is all like that, except north of the Po river. Zooming in the above screenshot shows all of them as small, narrow lakes which, in reality, are not there.
If it doesn't, I guess we'll have to live with it as we did so far.

Cheers!
KH
:ernae:
 
What an improvement !!!!!... I think I know exactly where that shot was taken.....;)

:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

May I ask if the same logic will be applied to roads, which in many cases in the old EURW do not stop at river banks, but cross directly the stream on the water?
Yes, I'm going to change the layer ordering in reverse, so roads/railroads cross underneath streams. Perhaps generate 3d Bridges at those points.

There's also another minor problem: when river beds are quite wide they are displayed as small lakes, while they should show up ....
I don't know if CFS2 can be instructed to display the areas where these dry river beds expand as such. The Italian boot is all like that, except north of the Po river. Zooming in the above screenshot shows all of them as small, narrow lakes which, in reality, are not there.
If it doesn't, I guess we'll have to live with it as we did so far.

Cheers!
KH
:ernae:

Sorry, not by me. With global generic synthetic scenery at this scale, with the limited choice of available land class values and
limited resolution, and limited source data, and the fact we only have the one single static season, this is just about as good as it gets (I'll bet FSX doesn't get it right either). I'm going to further enhance it by eliminating fields & crops running up hill sides and placing Rock textures on very steep slopes.
After that, it's going to be hand work (not by me!) to make further enhancements.
The main visual effect of the "riverbedding" as I've done now, is to break up the monotony of the landscape: instead of endlessly repeating agriculture, the fields are now grouped in smaller patches which makes everything look better and more credible in general.
 
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