Terrain Elevations query

[Hadge]

Hello all,

Its been a while since I posted, so I hope all my old comrades are keeping well !

Are the terrain contour "slopes" available as a mod for non JTS downloaded/installed games? ..... I have been reading with interest the trials David (Strela) et al have been conducting with the JTS files, and was wundering about us poor people still using the old files

I can't work out where the slopes would fit on a traditional 2d/3d hexsides .bmp or on any other terrain .bmp tile ... any ideas?

Cheers

C

[Mr Grumpy]

Can't help you with your query, that is for the really clever guys here, but great to see you posting again, it has been some time and I hope all is well "up north"

[Hoplite]

Playing long FR'14 pbem and it would really help to evaluate terrain with especially high unit density. Would be grateful if it will be a mod.

[-72-]

It can't be a mod, in the sense that what is involved is the program pointing to a specific spot on bmp file and that spot has to conform to elevation differentiations.

It is that second part (the pointing to elevation differentiation) is something that comes from the programming and if it is not in there you can't simply add in a slope effect, because the program has no instruction to use those in many titles.

I purposefully phrased it a little loosely in the sense that technically speaking if some artwork is omitted from a file then even if the program has instructions to point to it/them then that image or those images just don't get shown is all that happens.

Basically what I am saying is when the graphics files are modded there is no programming done just creating images on bmp files.

At this point the FWWC series does not have the coding necessary to point to elevation change hexsides.
There are also several PzC published by JTS that still don't (Moscow 42, Kharkov 43, Tunisia 43).

It is interesting in that the way these elevation change hexsides work is different in something like NB as opposed to PzC. I have not found that there is any change in the dimensions of graphics (like hex size) as there has been in PzC.

Anyway my point about elevation hexes can be proved if you have NB, all one would need to do would be to get some set of files with hexsides (the mods on SDC added recently do -but I am sure that is not the only place something like that is available (I just don't spend much time looking is all), rename your original hexside file to something like _stock_filename.bmp and then add in the new hexside file - then open up your title in question and see what happens. I only wrote it that way in cases someone wants to try this for themselves so this might be a bit of a spoiler, but nothing happens -the programming simply ignores the new hexside graphics added.

[76mm]

There are also several PzC published by JTS that still don't (Moscow 42, Kharkov 43, Tunisia 43).

Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't realize that; do you know if the plan is to upgrade them to show elevations as well? Is there any indication on his site which titles have been upgraded? All other things being equal, I'd much prefer to buy a title with the elevations...

[-72-]

You know 76mm I don't know the definitive answer to that, mainly because I work in other series. However, that being said I can't imagine any reason why they wouldn't if for no other reason for consistencies sake.

If I had to guess it would be waiting on the next round of updates -but I don't know for certain.