New Map Design Thread

[SNIPER62]

good info thread.

So, this is what there is and what is missing:

Pan (current version)

• Zoom

• Dynamic Town Ownership

• Hover Over a Town Name to See a Larger Size

• Click on an AO in the AO List to Pan To and Zoom In on it

• Click on a Town in the Town Ownership List to Pan To and Zoom In on it

• Dynamic BDE Movement

• Click a Town to Show its Depots

• Click on a BDE flag to Show all BDEs in that Town

• 1 Hour Deathmaps

• 24 Hour Deathmaps

• Click a DeathSquare to Show how Many Kills have Happened there in the Past x Hours

• Previous Timeline

• Enabled Cookies in Order to Remember a Users Map Settings

• Town Search

• Town Depot Ownership

• BDE locations of the same HQ when clicking on a town

• RDP Info

• Tier Info

• Town Link View (current version)

Fives Map Background (current version)

[AHWULF]

A few things only exist in the server itself and I won't have access to those, like deaths. Towns, depos, brigades, fire bases, AOs and links are all in the db.

[SNIPER62]

A few things only exist in the server itself and I won't have access to those' date=' like deaths. Towns, depos, brigades, fire bases, AOs and links are all in the db.[/quote']

You mean deaths for deathmaps, correct?

So with the new wiretap, we are getting less information than from the old wiretap? What other info arent we going to get back?

[Sparre]

Blimey! First do I see Ahwulf is back in the lines. It's great news to all of us to hear you back and working on this new map thingy.

Then I see KFS1 is back lurking around. Didn't notice it was you back in new disguised buddy. This is just awesome…

Tallyhoo!

[AHWULF]

Everything is changing and having direct access to the running server instances is not something I want since it would make changes harder to do. The database access will be via exports so that everything provided will not be a drag on game play and the databases can be modified without affecting this service so much. Once the server is further along we can see how to provide those things that can only come from the server instances themselves.

This can only happen in stepwise fashion and has to fit in other priorities.

[SNIPER62]

rgr, so we will just have to wait to see what kinda data we get to have since the question didnt get answered. Hopefully is more than just Towns, depos, brigades, fire bases, AOs and links.

[AHWULF]

Eventually you will have way more data than before. And it will play nice with the systems.

[SNIPER62]

thanks

[AHWULF]

I haven't had anything new to add since I had surgery last week and can't sit in front of computer for very long yet. Once the current stuff is out of the way and I can work again progress will come!

[jwilly]

Glad you're on the mend.

[DOC]

I might one day write about my life experiences in the terrain editor. I remember the last night before the launch client was shipped, when I had to "fake" the existing game world because of a data corruption on the eve of the delivery of the gold disc to our then publisher ... and then recreate the game world "for real" in the time between the UPS guy leaving and the public launch taking place ("2 weeks") ... I had a dream where I was ambushed by Satan and he lived IN THE TERRAIN.

Of course, before I can write about this I'm going to need to be nominated for a Nobel Prize.

Edited June 21, 2014 by DOC

[jwilly]

A better tool would help some but would take a lot of work, I don't have a good estimate. Basically a start from scratch project.

It'd be interesting to see a "good estimate" sometime.

Of course, it would make sense to consider the RA concepts as to what the new editor should do.

[AHWULF]

I finally found where the kills data be hiding. Might be some fun stuff one can do with it.

[DOC]

It's like, shooting at some food and hitting crude instead !

[AHWULF]

I am in the middle of recording each of the 6 million heights in order to build a 3d heightmap of the entire game world. Then I can figure out how to take this and make some crude looking contours. There are 1089 points for each of 5600 supercells in the game. Of course a lot of dupes since it overlaps but you get the picture.

[smythes]

It's good to hear - good luck AH WOLF. I hope you are getting some good meds :-)

[jwilly]

I am in the middle of recording each of the 6 million heights in order to build a 3d heightmap of the entire game world. Then I can figure out how to take this and make some crude looking contours. There are 1089 points for each of 5600 supercells in the game. Of course a lot of dupes since it overlaps but you get the picture.

Hurrah.

I never understood, from a technical perspective, the years-ago responses from Gophur and others that the existing elevation data couldn't be analyzed to create acceptably good-looking equal-height contours.

Of course, the existence of such a map layer may create more entries on Doc's terrain list, reviewing watercourses "flowing" without drop or even uphill.

I assume your eventual intent is to do everything algorithmically with automated drawing tools. If however you find that some aspect of the work needs manual work, for instance building a demo from an area point-array using CAD software with curve-fitting capability, I'm available as a volunteer.

[AHWULF]

The only way I could get the heightmap as it is in the game was to park myself with code over each Supercell and save out of the values. Still trying to figure out the exact orientation. I made a sample contour with Mathematica of one but it's hard to recognize since a relatively flat area that I tried first was exactly obvious. Making contours with code is a lot of pain but once I have the data in a file I can figure it out.

The data is extremely course so contours may be pretty ugly. Might take a lot of experimentation.

Edited July 13, 2014 by AHWULF

[jwilly]

"Coarse" meaning 5 meters? 15 meters? Worse than that?

Several years back when I did some proposed map development (Channel water terrain, Scheldt Delta water terrain, Dyle River area revision) using a tileset-copy derived from Five's map work, I was interested in the contour map issue. I had assumed that if it was possible to get elevations for the corners of each 400m x 400m tile, then from those elevations, one could interpolate the points along tile edges where the elevation was equal to the selected contour line heights. This then would create an equal-height point array for a given contour line, through which a continuous curve could be drawn using Bezier tools or something of that sort.

Such a Bezier-fitted line of course would actually be false in between the interpolated points, but I think it'd be gameplay-useful nonetheless.

I'm sure your approach will be more practical that that.

Edited July 13, 2014 by jwilly

[saintj2]

I am in the middle of recording each of the 6 million heights in order to build a 3d heightmap of the entire game world. Then I can figure out how to take this and make some crude looking contours. There are 1089 points for each of 5600 supercells in the game. Of course a lot of dupes since it overlaps but you get the picture.

I thought you were doing a map to put on a web page. Is the 3d heightmap just to make contours ? And do we really need contours ?

IMHO having a "simple" map like lagus in 1 month is better than having a super-map in 6 months.

Edit: Here is an idea - heightmaps on BGE were based on an old NASA 800m dataset. Thats as close to reallity as 800m will allow . Just get a map out, without contour lines. Then get real-life contour lines (they are available on the web) and put them on the map as a optional layer. Even if its not 100% accurate it will be just as useful.

Edited July 13, 2014 by saintj2

[jwilly]

Even if its not 100% accurate (...)

Certainly the satellite data was a starting point, but I don't think there can be much relationship between the satellite data and the actually realized game map.

The lowest point in Sedan in real life, the Meuse, is almost 500 feet above mean sea level. In-game, I think all base tiles across the entire map...the plain ones that make up the land map where they haven't been replaced by specific tile-set tiles to implement roads/rivers/forests/towns...are at elevation zero.

And, the 2:1 horizontal distance compression required selective condensation of game-world features, i.e. many cities and towns are not modeled, and the countryside features are not a literal model of actual terrain. If all the terrain of the modeled territory had been built using the satellite elevations, all the hills would be twice as steep as reality, and unclimbable.

[AHWULF]

Yes the data in game has been modified a lot over the last 16 years from the original DEM data, the only real data is what's in the game's height maps.

Each octet has 8 triangles and there are 16x16 in a supercell and each octet is 800x800 meters. So there are 33x33 points in a supercell. That's pretty coarse. I was thinking maybe a grid of altitudes would be easier to interpolate. I've seen some maps show it this way. sort of a color coded relief map.

People asked for contours in the rat chat so I am investigating. But no one has ever extracted the full 3d mesh of the game world so it might be useful anyway. I thought it might be cool to show it in a browser using a js 3d library. It's only 6mil points.

Only about 20% of the game world is actually populated. Imagine what could have been. The game world is 72x79 supercells.

[jwilly]

I thought you meant "coarse" in a vertical resolution sense. Obviously if the vertical data resolution was coarse and you were doing contour lines, you'd want to use that coarseness to determine the vertical interval of your contours.

I was thinking maybe a grid of altitudes would be easier to interpolate. I've seen some maps show it this way. sort of a color coded relief map.

My understanding from the many discussions over the years has been that most of the players who have asked for contours and aren't just asking because they like anything cool added to the game, are asking because they want to determine sightlines and firing lines, or the absence thereof. Usually this is for determining whether a movement path can be observed from a known or probable enemy location, or the extent of observability from a high point where you're considering establishing a lookout, or the extent of field-of-fire for defensive locations.

For those kinds of purposes, a color-coded-polys absolute elevation map (I assume with the three corner elevations averaged to determine the poly elevation value) would not be very helpful, except by mentally processing it into contour lines.

Another, perhaps more subtle downside to a color-coded-polys map layer would be that it would look "gamey"--it would bluntly point out that the game world is built of polys--and therefore would interfere with immersion, for which game maps should look as much as possible like military tactical maps.

Just my understanding, of course.

[saintj2]

(...)

The lowest point in Sedan in real life, the Meuse, is almost 500 feet above mean sea level. In-game, I think all base tiles across the entire map...the plain ones that make up the land map where they haven't been replaced by specific tile-set tiles to implement roads/rivers/forests/towns...are at elevation zero.

And, the 2:1 horizontal distance compression required selective condensation of game-world features, i.e. many cities and towns are not modeled, and the countryside features are not a literal model of actual terrain. If all the terrain of the modeled territory had been built using the satellite elevations, all the hills would be twice as steep as reality, and unclimbable.

I don't think "all bases are at elevation zero", but all towns do seem to be leveled at the same elevation. But if that among other things made the heightmap so much different from the real world, you are right, it should not be used.

The 2:1 compression is probably just the way you look at the game world : where it should be 2kms it reads 1km. when you should travel 20min, you just need to travel 10min. The ratio between distance and height was surely kept.

[saintj2]

(...)

People asked for contours in the rat chat so I am investigating. But no one has ever extracted the full 3d mesh of the game world so it might be useful anyway. I thought it might be cool to show it in a browser using a js 3d library. It's only 6mil points.

(...)

And I in any way want to stand in front of your fun . You're thinking on going 3d then ? That's a step above contour elevation maps. 6mil, 1bil its all the same - divide your data on tiles and you'll be fine.

That's a cool project, but I still have the opinion that if (like anything else in life) if you don't focus, you wont get anything done.