Zephyr Net

Come to ride with Jester! New canyon terrain for snaking

When I first watch the Topgun, the scene of first dogfight in the Topgun class with Jester, catches my mind like forever. Thus I always want to fly in a valley between two mountains, and maneuvering to evade crashing. There are some screenshots from my favorite movies, guess which movie they are?














The common point of these scenes is flying between mountains. If I want to do that in FA, I have to modify the height of map. The map editor of toolkit is great, however, it cannot edit whole map in an easy way. I know a lot of pioneers are doing great jobs on map editing, but there is not a tool, which can draw map visually and easily. Thus I develop a tool, FAMapBmp, which can transform T2 file into BMP, and then can be edited by any image process software. That speeds up and expands the possibility of map creation significantly. With FAMapBmp tools, you can grab a contour graph and convert it to T2 in one second.

For test, here is a modified BAL map and a test mission. This terrain is based on this satellite map of Google as follows.



This satellite map will be converted as follows.



In this mission, Jester is chasing you and wanting to shoot you down. Moreover, you have to reach waypoint 1 and not to be shot down by ten MIM-23 and AA guns. You have to use canyon terrain to escape them. There are some screen shot, have fun with Jester!










New BAL MAP Lib can be downloaded here. http://sourceforge.net/projects/fash/fi ... B/download
Jester mission can be downloaded here. http://sourceforge.net/projects/fash/fi ... M/download

The tool, FAMapBmp, will be released ASAP.

NICE!
Firefox was the one that got me to love nap-of-the-earth flying.

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Fighting for justice with brains of steel

Let your anger be like the monkey which hides inside the piniata.

Yes I had canyons in the FAF Kora map, but not like that! ... Be careful though, as the FA graphics engine doesnt like abrupt changes in elevations!

Have you experienced the mountians poping up and down or dissappearing as you fly closer to them or thru them?

radical_d did an accurate terrain elevation map for Korea using real world elevation data and it was just about impossible to fly it due that issue...

So you made another tool? Wow I cant wait to try it out for improving the FAF map!

Where were you 10 years ago!

Can you increase the sight distance for elevations so they showup from father away?

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Hotshot
"FAF Shape Meister"
FAF/FA-2 Design team
TSH Member/Developer
VNFAWING.com Forum Administrator

VNFAWING Forums
VNFAWING Website

FA Futures/FA-2 is Still Being Worked On and Will Be Released...

Hawke,

WOW! That's some pretty amazing stuff. I know how to make the maps larger than 256x256, in fact, most are actually smaller than that so it was really easy to figure out how to do it.

http://members.multimania.co.uk/fafref/maps.htm

There are a lot of 'unknown' fields, but if I recall correctly, I figured out what those were but never updated this page.

Let me know if you want any more information or if you have any more information you can glean. This is quite exciting!

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You know you broke it when you're the only one around when you broke it. I learned this at a Sears store.

Dude.

Dear Radical_D:

Thank you so much for the reply, actually, I learn the most of information of T2 file stuff from your page.
Moreover, your work of map tiles also let me know how a map is assembled to display.
(otherwise I still only chage BAL.pic and wonder why the map textures do not change..^^).
CAG has metioned to me you already done 512x512 map, I will very happy to fly on it.
Thanks for your great contribution!