spooks2k1

Sorry dude, I deleted everything and started again, I'm in the process of trying to develop a technique to avoid the errors as much as possible, a bit of forward thinking is what's needed, either way cutting out lakes is a real pita. I'm thinking I might Ice mine over and export to a .sup file and just overlay it, Helmand in the winter lol :D, it would be much easier, just no water splashes or reflections.

Well I've tried centering pivots, re-aligning pivot to mesh, mesh to pivot, nothing seems to solve the altitude problem, the setting must be elsewhere in the game. I moved the entire scene down -2451m, and I'm flying under the sea :D The altitude issue goes to the bottom of the list of to-do's :crazy:

I'm not sure what you mean In my tests It didn't make any difference to the export, I flattened the verts after I had it working. I'm getting runtime errors with assemble scenes now so testing has ground to a halt again until I can fix it. :joystick: I was getting a parse error when compliling so i re-installed the asssemble scenes, now I'm getting runtime errors lol this is nuts :crazy:

Ok, the pivot altimeter problem,here's what we know The mesh placement before displace: And here it is after Mesh is at -98m, pivot is at 0m If you start flight at minimum height for the A10, 1072m. In game the plane is barely above the ground, and the altimeter reads 3523m. So we're 2451m out. Vehicles behave correctly on the landscape, plane still impacts the ground mesh at around 3523m. This could have something to do with the original placement of the Hi res template tiles? I don't mean on the Z axis, I mean it's latitude longitude position, If these tiles are placed over an area that the game thinks is the sea, would this affect altitude readout? Or do you re-align the mesh to the pivot or pivot to mesh ? (yet to test) Something I've noticed on other example scenes the pivot and mesh are zeroed out. Also is the naming of the pivots important ? L0R0420S01, L0R0420S00, etc just some thought's and questions.

DAMN!, I've figured out the .sup problem, I woke up this morning and realized I'd stopped experimenting. I thought I'd give it one last shot. Export lake beaches/borders to Onlay_Coastline.sup Add these lines to assemblescenes.cfg Pretty obvious when you look at it, I should take more breaks then these things would be more apparent. :D The shore is animated too, hopefully I just need to alter the TGA to match the surface, it looks like in game processing, rather than asequence of tga's It must be the same for the rest of the additional objects, I've not tried them yet. It looks like the Nevada terrain doesn't make use of .sup files, the shores and towns are all one mesh, it's all one LOD, except for the airports Onlay_VPP.sup grrrrr, now to fix the pivot placing/altitude thang. For the lakes, don't use the boolean it f**ks up the mesh, I flatten all the lake and edge of the lake verts, on the Z axis, then manipulate the existing verts to resemble the shape of the lake, you need to apply a UVW Map after every tweak, I set up a shortcut key for the UVW Map Drag that to a toolbar and run it after every tweakto fix the UV's or set up a keyboard shortcut to the macro. Now use the cut tool to cut out the shape of your lake, take care not to make non triangular faces, don't get ahead of yourself, do a small section at a time then export to check for errors. If there is one, finding it and fixing it shouldn't be a problem,just undo then export again, keep undoing until it exports ok, then you have a better chance of understand what the error was, which error message relates to it and how to fix it. After a few tries you will see what mistakes you made and how to avoid them in future. I recommend NOT to use the boolean, it kills the mesh. You spend more time fixing the errors than it would take to cut out the lake manually. If you must use the boolean Detach the lake and surrounding poly's from the main mesh first. Then run the boolean, you will have much less errors to fix, as the boolean will only affect the detached mesh. Once fixed, just re-attach and weld. Hope this helps you guys.

Well dude I've decided whilst typing this not to continue, I've had enough, I'm good at modeling and texturing, but spending all this time reverse engineering a game is soul destroying. I see no light at the end of the tunnel. I enjoy it and don't mind the hard work, but when I can see no end result, there's no point continuing. Maybe someday ED will release decent documentation that people can actually understand, but I seriously doubt it,they don't want people modding the game there are too many gaps, far too many. All info will be passed via msn and private messages, probably an unwritten rule enforced by ED. It's a shame I was enjoying it, I'm taking my modding talents elsewhere, this is just too frustrating. I'm going back to enjoying the sim :pilotfly: Hope you sort out your problems, when I got those errors out of frustration I deleted all triangles in the vicinity of the error triangle and rebuilt the mesh, and re-applied UVW mapping. Crazy method but it worked for me. spooks out

Yup getting very tired of it. I kept trying to fix the pivot thing but gave up, I moved the mesh and pivot down, the altimeter was right, but then you could fly through the ground. Impact point was about -200m underground, vehicles were driving 200m under the mesh. The Hi-res template from the wiki is wrong, not a very good starting point really. All I discovered today was where the F10 map overlay files go, and where the lake edge's and towns should go, but no clue how to set up assemblescenes.cfg to get them there. I really need examples of the .cfg's sigh....I'm on the verge of giving up on this, it's not fun anymore.

I have a town and shoreline I need to export, and I'm a little confused here, there's no information about this on the wiki. I'm not sure where to put them after exporting to make sure assemble scenes see's the files, or does it just inject them like the lsa2 process ? There are two folders terrain, and terrain_2, full of .sup files, which ones do I replace, or can I create unique names for my map? Do you have example code for the assemble scenes cfg ? for assembling .sup files? The one from the wiki only has examples of .rn and .sc files Or better still a step by step of what I need to do, there's no info i can find. Apologies if this info already exists somewhere, i just can't find it. thanks

Don't know your workflow is but here's a few handy scripts I'm using Vertex Cleaner Cleans verts after boolean. CleanBool Removes vertices that are only connected to two splines after boolean. STLCheck Max Error checking. ------------------------------------------------------------ Use this bit of code on a spline to flatten all verts on the Z axis ------------------------------------------------------------ Soulburn Scripts Absolute must have, I use: attachSelectedObjects: attaches all selected objects, much faster than max attach function. edgeDivider: divide edge into 2, 3 or 4 in one click, then drops to vertex sub-object mode, ready to snap or target weld. surfaceSnapper: object placing on terrain. thinFaceSelector: (good for finding error's) vertPlacer: Like Max align to Z, but many more options. I hate unnecessary mouse clicks :D hope these can help you. spooks

Yup, The example video works on all quads, could be a problem with tri's. I'll ask the author, even if it was a problem I'm sure he'd fix it. One click selection tool for vertices on open edges Automatic Command Pannel switching for fast work flow Works with both Editable Polys and Editable Meshes Optional welding for the vertices found in the set threshold Optional Relax modifier to help reduce distortions on the geometry Optional Smooth modifier to solve any smoothing issues Progress bar for a visual representation of the progress All operations are reverseable by using the UNDO button Works on high poly count objects Tailor made for terrains :D

Yup , it's on the top of my shopping list again, awesome script.

Ummm check this out dude. I'd totally forgot about this one, I came across it when modding for another game but my paypal account was frozen so I couldn't get it. Ant Stitcher Payware and no demo Maybe the ED guys use it already ;)

Yeah thanks, I got my head round it all, very good explanation of the problem tho', I could have done with that 6 hours ago lol :D I suffer from impatience, and always looking for ways to speed up work-flow, now i understand the problem, maybe it could be fixed with maxscript? dunno, I'll ask around. I posted a link to a test vid in my post above, it seems to work ok. onwards and upwards :pilotfly:

Ok, fixing errors is not a problem now, but I have a little issue with the Editor, when I ran It the first time it came up with 16 errors, and gave me a little triangle to highlight each one. But now it only gives me one error, even though there are more errors. I export, it reports the error, I fix it, export again, and it reports another error, so I have to export 16 times to fix 16 errors. That's my only issue with errors now. I know the Editor UI is a bit temperamental , maybe it will go away. I've made good progress today thanks for all the help, I'm rendering out a video of my progress, I'll you tube it later. EDIT: Not much to see but it's progress, I was impatient so I only did the right hand side of the lake, the shoreline goes in tomorrow. Kajaki Lake Dam спасибо spooks

+1, Especially this prehistoric version , slightly better in more modern versions of max....ahem. Cool I was going to give it a go, but wasn't sure if it was still supported. That should make things easier. I am such a dumbass :doh: maybe I should take a break :D спасибо

Guy's this document is missing from the WIKI, does anyone have a copy or an alternative link? Why has so much information been deleted ? http://en.wiki.eagle.ru/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=Moshkov&page=&year=&month=-1

I'm getting an error when exporting my shoreline But when I ChekError in the Editor it tells me there are no errors. I linked the shoreline to the terrain dummy, If I break the link it exports fine. Only my, shoreline doesn't show up in game. Do additional objects need to be linked to a dummy ? thanks

Oops sorry about that, I just looked it up in the Urban Dictionary, I honestly thought it was a term used for Taliban only, I didn't realise how racist it was, post amended, sorry for any offence.

Never mind, I got it figured :D No quads only tri's Better to use the cut tool for making water features, it's more precise and gives you less errors, boolean is nasty :crazy: Here's a good polygon non-quad selector. http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/non-quad-selector

Thanks Almazi, but it doesn't tell me what the errors are. For example: After you perform the boolean operation on the terrain mesh, it can cause errors in the mesh, these are _ _ _ _ _, _ _ _ _ _, and _ _ _ _ _. When you export ground terrain containing water features, make sure there are no _ _ _ _ _ _ _ vertices. Also check there are no _ _ _ _ _ _ edges. For vertice problems you need to _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ before exporting. For edge issues you need to _ _ _ _ _ _ _ before exporting. C'mon guy's give me a clue, those "in-house" documents masquerading as tutorials on the wiki have lots of gaps :smilewink: Please fill in the blanks. thanks

I'm now at the stage were I'm using boolean to cut out the shape of a lake, and I'm getting my first errors when exporting. It would help if someone could tell me how to fix them, they are covered briefly in the wiki, but it doesn't say what causes them. Can someone expand on what I need to do. thanks

Beautiful scenery, but who would we kill ? Hmmmm, very good suggestion, scope for tons of scenarios & missions past and present. But a HUGE area, need to have Baghdad, Kuwait and Tehran on the map ?

Pretty much irrelevant at this time, this is just a single cell as I learn the trade :D My current issue is the settings in the template and how they affect the altitude in the game, but I think I may have fixed, I'm running a test. Did you look at the Global Mapper Tutorial?...is this method ok to use on terrain with out breaking anything? It seems to work fine for me. If all is ok I will refine it and post a full version. thanks

The best way would be for people to do a bit of homework and submit a project plan covering borders coalitions scenario etc. My strength is modding, my weakness is geography and history :D We could take a vote, the top 3 go to a poll & the winner gets made ?

I came across a new feature in Global Mapper 12 that lets you make a grid of features and afer playing with it for a while, I think it's precise enough for exporting. I threw a quick tutorial together. If you pro's could check it out and let me know if it's good/precise enough for terrain making. It takes all the hassle out of exporting :smilewink: Exporting Using Grid of Areas.rar