We're going to need a map making tutorial

Ivan Rapkinov

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Don Maddox said:
Are these sold with the game or has someone scanned them from paper copies or what? What scale are they?
iirc they're all 1:50,000 - don't quote me on that

Some maps were released with the game, others were released as gimmes from the USMC (like 29 Palms).

not sure on whether redoing them for another game would be considered rude or not ;) :D
 

tws71669

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Don Maddox said:
Yes, I think scans of paper maps would be best, although I was hoping someone had something that could actually produce an image that looked like a regular paper map.
This is exactly what my goal is, by getting the sat. data and putting it into 1:50000 format I am going to try and create topographical papermap looking .bmp file. But with the superbowl on this weekend, it's gonna be a little while before I have some good stuff to post!
 

Dr Zaius

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tws71669 said:
This is exactly what my goal is, by getting the sat. data and putting it into 1:50000 format I am going to try and create topographical papermap looking .bmp file. But with the superbowl on this weekend, it's gonna be a little while before I have some good stuff to post!
Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.
 

Dr Zaius

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I just spent the last several hours messing with the ADC2 map editor again. This time, I was serious about it and spent some serious time trying to figure out how it works. I've made a good deal of progress, but this isn't a user-friendly process. There are many aspects of it that I just can't seem to understand how they were done for the game.

I'm opening the original scenarios and attempting to reverse engineer them to see how things were done. I will say this: if you are technically profficient and have some time to spend, this system offers the designer a huge degree of flexibility to do almost whatever you want. You can create maps that look entirely different than what came with the game and they will work fine as long as you include all the necessary files. That part of the system is very neat and very powerful.

On the other hand, if you don't know what you're doing, this is just painful. Granted, I'm having to learn a lot of this the hard way. It probably wouldn't be nearly as difficult if there were a step by step tutorial. If I get this thing figured out I may do one myself.

If any of you have experience with the AID2 map editor, please fell free to lend us your expertise.
 

TDR

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OK dragging out old posts here...:laugh:

I have been trawling the old scenario design stuff re ADC2 and map making for a way to build maps unconnected to real 3arc sec DEM data. Though it is possible to get needed actual DEM data and view real world via Google Earth it has some level of drawback with abstract map/scenario design

Now if one has read DrunkRussian’s tutorial, “Creating Maps from SRTM Data – Tutorial”, on making maps there is a point where the selected 1 x 1 degree square is converted to ArcInfo ASCII Grid format. This is all done using the program VTBuilder. This ArcInfo ASCII Grid is a format that can be manipulated to build any height terrain type. It has one minor drawback there are 1200 x 1200 row colums of height data stored in the file. Now the ATF/AATF system can only deal with at best a 50 x 50 Km map, which is much less than a 1 x 1 deg square, hence all the 1200 x 1200 values are not needed, that is can be a value of ZERO.

Now the problem being to get the “abstract” height values into a file format that is the same as the ArcInfo ASCII Grid format.
This is where ADC2 comes in I hope. So after reading this thread and a few others can height data be extracted from the elevation aspect of a ADC2 map?

If so there is a possible extended life to making ATF/AATF maps.

As an example of abstract scenarios, there are about 126 USMC Tactical Decision Games which ca all be ported into ATF/AATF if this concept can work.

I suggest ADC2 as this would be a good way to build the basic TDG maps for the scenarios and the ‘nominal' elevations can be fed through a small program to make the ArcInfo ASCII Grid format file to go through the normal elevation/map process.
 

Pat Proctor

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One of the reasons I selected USGS 3 arcsecond DEMS as the format for making BCT/ATF/AATF maps was that it was in a text format that can be manipulated. If you make your alpha value 0, your ATF generated map will use the same north-south as the DEM. You will not be able to get a direct 1 to 1 correlation of the data points, however, because the ATF map generator uses a hard-coded second-latitude-to-meter conversion factor. (28.4 m/s, I think). That means, at least in vertically, the data is in ~78 m intervals, while ATF samples at 100m intervals.

All of that having been said, a program to create or edit ASCII DEMs to add raise or lower terrain would be a great tool. I am not sure it has a broad enough user base potential to justify our building it, but if someone else wants to take a stab, I will give the software the broadest possible dessimination (and, of course, give credit where credit is due).
 

TDR

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At present I am in the “think” process. As it stands ADC2 can not produce the elevation information in a separate file. So fundamentally there is no simple approach to getting a elevation mapping tool easily.

With the user designed type maps where elevation is in essence “what you want” cf what is really there, the latitude disparity may be a minor issues, or possibly be covered by some “in program” manipulation.

The main thing is to get some form of editor to create the ASCII Dem file that can be passed to DEMCON, the DEM converter and on to the ATF/AATF Power Tool kit.

With respect to the alpha value I considered this should for these types of maps to be ZERO as it is somewhat meaningless to have it otherwise.

Anyway thoughts progressing...:)
 
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