A Modder’s Diary – Episode I: The Terrain Page 7

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Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Any Roads

The cities will present the biggest challenge. When I asked about how to place targets in cities, Wrench simply suggested I cut and paste the city layouts in his Libyan Terrain. This, again, is apparently not stealing so long as you simply acknowledge that someone did the heavy lifting before you did.

The best way is to make a list of all the stuff you want in there, fly over the city in debug mode, decide what you want where and go back and edit the .ini files.

Look’s like Grandma’s quilt from here.

Never knew .ini files could do this, did you?

The last step in cleaning up a terrain and getting it ready for publication is straightening out the coastline and laying down roads. The coastline is easy. One tip I can offer for placing coastline cities is placing the midpoint DIRECTLY on the coastline where the water is and the height field map indicates sea level. If you decide to flatten the cities out using the Terrain Editor, which I recommend, it looks a little odd when you see a cliff in the middle of the sea. I’ve had to go back and readjust the placement of coastline cities to fix this.

Now you have an idea of the scope and size of the terrain and the changes you can make to it if you don’t mind your wife throwing crap at your head. In the last week, my wife has developed her aim to the point she can hit me with a shoe from the next room blindfolded.

If you can see where to put the roads on this, you are leaning too close to the monitor.

Now, my terrain will not have any roads and it won’t unless someone with better eyesight than me is willing to put them in. My God, the tiles are small, even blown up to 3200% and my eyesight totally blows to begin with. You can add roads if you like (the original SFP1 and Wings Over Vietnam didn’t have road tiles, I don’t think), but only if you really want to ruin what little eyesight you have left. Don’t try to do this drunk, either.

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