Draconus Battle Camp/Mods---Tank Stuff/Dynamic Weather/Winter/Mudrunner OverHaul

@Digital-X dont mess with tree amount and there is reason why you dont want too

The grass brushes are simple plane model flat
The other plant stuff like trees is actual 3d model remember i talked about above to manny 3d models throw at engine will overload it and cause crap fps and fps dips

You can also create ur own grass brushes by simply creating new section in above coding,a grass xml for it which would sit in classes>>grass folder
then a simple flat 3d model of grass then texture it....grass doesnt have a billboard so no need to worry about that

Careful too the editor is touchier than a woman at times ...screw with the wrong thing and it may slap ya then say nope done working for you at this point and suddenly start crashing...tread carefully when messing with anything...i always create a new folder in say plant folder and back up any files im going to mess with...i would do this always incase you bugger something you dont have to scrap the whole editor and reinstall it

OK thanks, changed all the values to 4000 just to see it, and it works wonders. Although I have a LOT of small stones and some biege grass on my map so lowered the amount of some.

The moss grass looks fantastic now it;s nice and full.

My own grass brushes sound interesting, I was curious about increasing the height or making my own but a lot taller. Like half vehicle height.

@Digital-X Np ur welcome... careful throwing to manny grass brushes with increased amounts at engine...youl eventually get an instancing error due to manny distributions of different types in one givin terrain block area...i would do it with rocks,grass brushes messy,long,sort ,moss herbs ,twigs ect

last edited by Draconus

Yeah I threw everything to 4000 and it took about 5 minutes just to load my new map, and that's almost bare on a max scale.

I have a test map now so will have a crack at my own grass.

I put this:

<TestGrass PlantsPerBlock="200">
<PlantType Brand="test_grass" />
</TestGrass>

In the above code, that's correct?

I made the testgrass.xml but what do I do about the model? A thing blade of grass in 3DS MAX? that'd end up as a .X then.

Unless something goes in the MeshCache.zip and another in TexturesCache.zip? I always forget those.

last edited by Digital X

Looks much better 🙂

Time to create the Windows XP Hill background haha.

Anyway of increasing the overall heigh/size of the grass? I tried enlarging the "short grass" in GIMP but it remained the same size, taken the .dds from the texturecache.zip

I tried making my own grass in 3DS Max, had it listed in the distribution but "meshes/grass/test_grass.xml not found" I cannot even find the meshes/grass folder?

last edited by Digital X

Why don't they just stock have the grass density this high? I mean if you want a realistic game, then surely the devs can automatically make the grass this high, right? IDK, just a thought though.

last edited by RiskyWisky

There's a lot that should be the norm really. Patchy grass is only good if the grass is mostly dead.

Evening everyone...so little writeup on proper texture format for all the __s_d textures ,some of the sfx stuff like oil slick and such is in photoshop save it as dds then texture format is 16 f floating point...why you cant edit some of the texture int he texture cache with paint.net is because it doesnt support this format

Tire tracks--To do custom tire track for truck save it in photoshop dds format with texture format set to 8 L-- Luminance only

i was able to figure out the format the stock tetxures are in and these are current for those types everything else i always use dds format dxt5 texture format for best quality

Gimp may supports the above formats Pavels art guy uses PS so everyone knows

@joridiculous ur welcome enjoy but be carefull with it to much may still cayuse issues so dont go nuts with it 😉
Same goes for the rest of you guys with the rest of you guys with the grass brush tip

Also i had serious issue with the editor was working on the map and i belive issue is with custom height maps..if you do way to much terrain with a 4k height map you may suddenly have issue with dx out of memory error when you got to rebuild..so far this only happened once it buggered the editor on rebuild due to this issue and since editor writes to the height map directly on rebuild it litterly made it all black so terrain was completly flat and all detail gone ..i fixed it using back up height map in app data folder so keep those in mind guys if you have issue revert to last hieght map save in app data

I also found issue with overlays sometimes hard to explain it but what happened is the xml for the map had the overlay data still there a section when ever you add something

If editor ever buggers like this go in manually and find what you deleted and make sure its also gone fromt he map xml...this will cayuse serious issues period...so far anything major ive been able to fix myself like with st editor...i always felt bad for the guys who lost there entire map due to issues like above

another thing too dont know if people noticed the water works on gavity for the amount of current...

example if i take a river overlay make it at 90 degree angle and paint speed at 100 on it then tilt it upwards itl increase the amount of water flowing past the speed of 100 percent

If i can get the water to not clipp through anything other than a truck itl create a water displacement around the rock which looks really natural...same effect can be done with terrain raise it in middle of river a little and have the speed at 100 flowing around it itl create this nice water displacement

I am going to do a water fall unlike anything done before on the Adirondack mountains map

Also guys if you want the water to have serious push there is flow setting in bottom right of the editor when working with the river overlay
This will be specific for the map itself and over rides the media xml for the game with water section and flow

Something i am trying to figure out...that Mutator section bottom right after you load a map up ..only thing i havent figured out yet is that and wtf its for lol also if you do small map then save it also as a refrence you can add that onto side of new map with refrence points...how people put maps together back on st

But you will need mod exe to use the map due to it being much larger than max size of stock map but something for you guys to play with

The Mutator changes the environment between "normal" and "autumn"

So if you had nothing in the Mutator box and painted some grass, trees it appears lush and green

Type "aut" without quotes press enter, should now have beige, autumn looking leafless trees, grass etc.

My map originally used the autumn mutate but it killed so much of the lush feel I wanted.

Once you added the Mutator, rebuild the terrain and the changes will take effect.

Using my map as an example.

Without the Mutator enabled

alt text

Now with the Mutator enabled (see bottom right)

alt text

last edited by Digital X

@joridiculous no crap that is cool...so that is how to do aut stuff i was wondering on that.
Cool song love anything heavy 😉

Youtube Video

last edited by Draconus

Typ "aut" without quotes in the Mutator box, then rebuild the terrain.

To remove it, simply clear the Mutator box and rebuild again.

It will change to max the bottom image.

How it works is anyone's guess, magic?

@joridiculous no its not magic it simply uses the aut meshes in stock game instead which have aut textures for them 😉

I have such a friggin awesome idea on this know...Winter mutator 😉

last edited by Draconus

@joridiculous im porting my winter edition over so i can do adirondacks map in winter as well two version might do 3 normal,aut and winter as pack

last edited by Draconus

@joridiculous it should be simple to do simply reproduce how the aut stuff is done up with winter versions of everything plant wise...i make copies of all meshes needs with _winter instead of aut...this should load it when you type winter...pavel is using that aut as tag to the perticular meshes needed for autum how i think it works