Snow

[junk2drive]

I modded the terrain png and dds with the snow texture from Panzer Command.

I tried making a folder in the WCS folder but it doesn't read the files.

We could use a mod swapper like JSGME or have a folder with original copies to overwrite modded files.

Maybe eric can add more choices to the WCS folder?

[z1812]

Looks good!!!

[junk2drive]

We (grand scale we) could do a winter mod like the old Bulge mod for CMBO. I hesitate to get carried away until eric gives a position on it. I doubt that WCS has invested the time and effort into this for an expansion, but one never knows.

[junk2drive]

Got the light woods, heavy woods, two plowed fields, clear and outer. Need marsh I see.

[Gerry4321]

V. nice Paul.

I just hope this series keeps going. It looks like there are people interested in creating user-generated content. Which should help the game to have legs.

Gerry

[Ratzki]

These look great. Thanks for all the work.

[DoubleDeuce]

Nice work J2D.

I think interest will pick up if any remaining bugs can get squashed AND we can get more content for designers to use in creating scenarios (meaning more units and nationalities). [:D]

[SapperAstro_MatrixForum]

Wonderful work.

I always wondered why there was no snow...except for the actual cover of the game!

[junk2drive]

Thanks guys. All I did was copy and paste some 512x512 terrain to the game graphic. The real work will come from people with more talent than me to put snow on buildings and walls and maybe units.

[ericbabe]

That does look very nice. I had hoped to add something like this for SOS, and to allow firefights to choose between graphics sets -- that way we can turn the grass and wheat off during the winter.

[junk2drive]

AFAIK Matrix owns the rights to the PCO artwork. I'd be happy to keep working on this for you/us.

Think about a naming convention that all winter files will use and I'll make them separate.

In my mind, if the future has Pacific and North Afrika, you would want the editor to have a button for default, late war summer (German camo after mid 1943), Jungle, Desert, Snow.

[ericbabe]

Thanks!

I'm not quite sure how the licensing agreement for the Panzer Command assets is drawn exactly, so I can't say whether these graphics would be reusable in a Matrix product. (WCS spent six months doing gratis work on Panzer Command -- fixing bugs, refactoring code, and writing optimization -- so I'm somewhat familiar with the engine and assets for that game.) Free snow and ground textures are pretty easy to come by on the Internet, so I don't imagine that this should be any sort of bottleneck.

The filenames should all stay the same. I'll set up any graphics that have a winter version in a parallel directory structure under a "Winter/" directory -- e.g., "Data/Winter/MapTextures/DetailAtlas.png"

[junk2drive]

Yes I remember you working on PC.

The graphics that I used came out of the Mapmaker folders which came after Koios. I am pretty sure that they came from the internet and not drawn by an artist.

Do I need to do a .dds as well as a .png? If so, what output?

[Jamm]

Looks good Junk

[ericbabe]

ORIGINAL: junk2drive
The graphics that I used came out of the Mapmaker folders which came after Koios. I am pretty sure that they came from the internet and not drawn by an artist.

Do I need to do a .dds as well as a .png? If so, what output?

I think I ended up using only the PNG files to generate a texture with mip-maps and DX compression on the fly as the PNG files are loaded. If you've only modded the PNG files and got the snow to work, then that's what I did, and the DDS files are unused and unnecessary.

For snow, we should probably do new spec and normal maps too (snow has a lot of specularity), so maybe this is the sort of thing that ultimately we should try to do with a program like Filter Forge -- which can generate terrain textures and spit out spec and normal maps along with the diffuse maps. However, your screenshots look pretty darn good to me, so maybe we don't have to worry about the spec maps right now (I'm sure our artists would freak out if they heard me say "don't worry about the spec maps" [:)] )

[junk2drive]

Big problem is all the other items, trees, buildings, etc, as they are xnb files. I tried a couple of xnb converters to png but they either don't work with Windows 8, or your particular xnb, or ?

I also tried installing the XNA Game Studio 4.0 but it said it wasn't compatible. Don't khow if that is because of 8 or Visual Studio.

I'll try it without dds then.

[ericbabe]

Wow, that's very ambitious. However, I think you would need our original project files to edit the xnb files -- I wrote custom import libraries for most of the model types. I'm considering trying to write a snow-shader that would be able to add a snow texture on top of many of the scenery models without the need of laboriously updating all the texture files. If I can get this to work, it would save an awful lot of work.

[junk2drive]

Yes it would! There are a lot of xnb files.

I can't get water to look right ATM.

[junk2drive]

I have replaced everything green on the detailmap and still can get rid of the green on the heights. Some is clear and some is light woods. Notice that you can barely read the white text for hex info.

I also had to use the dds file.

[ericbabe]

That looks very nice. Unfortunately the hill texture files are XNB files, which is why you haven't been able to mod the green on the hills. (The hill shading was a huge pain to try to get right -- I probably spent as much time on the hill shaders as I did on all the other ground shaders combined.) If you wouldn't mind posting the snow texture you're using, I can try to make XNB files to replace the hill textures.