Area expansion / scenery replacement

[Hans_Petter 1]

Here's a few screenshots showing what I've been doing lately. The plan is to extend the Seattle region. Then I decided I would start by upgrading the Coupeville megatile (acaj) before moving into uncharted territory. The large images show the stock Looking Glass acaj and my replacement version.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/186296.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/186297.jpgThe images are reduced in size and quality. Here's a close-up of an original megatile:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/186298.jpgAs you can tell there are squares, blotches and jaggies. Antialiasing really works wonders! The original tiles are hand-painted black and white images. Fields are painted yellow or brown and trees are green which leaves something to be desired in the color department. The poor resolution is due to the cpd compression. With bin we retain more detail. We might upgrade several key areas. The transition between old and new textures can be made smooth by cloning, airbrushing and hand-painting. Granted, the palette is limited but not that limited. And, the number of pixels per megatile allows much more detail than what we got after the cpd compression.

[Guest fu3]

H-P,"... And, the number of pixels per megatile allows much more detail than what we got after the cpd compression."I'm glad that someone else noticed this ;) You know that I already released my modified Bandera State but I've played with a couple of other spots in my spare time:Harvey:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/186299.jpgSwanson:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/186300.jpgIt's not that hard and the results are great :-waveRegards,Jon Point

[Hans_Petter 1]

Looks great :-) I see that you've done pretty much the same as me -- adding a "highlight" from a better source and blending it into stock terrain. By doing it this way we won't have to replace entire megatiles to improve an existing area. The clue is to hide the transitions. A straight line with an obvious change in a texture that should be continuous is THE thing to avoid. I like to round off forest textures by cloning some of the new texture into the stock texture. Note "cloning" -- not "paintbrushing". Cloning keeps the texture intact. Paintbrushing is nice for smooth surfaces as fields (allright, "paddocks") or water. It's also nice for getting rid of "jpeg smudge" if you use a jpg source image. Further, it's great for removing squares, jaggies and blobs in the stock terrain. Needless to say, any editing of this sort requires a millions-of-colors image and a file format that isn't compressed. BMP is a good choice. When it's all finished we apply the Seattle palette and save as a targa file.