[WIP] The SH5 EcoMod

[Muckenberg]

Hi
I have been using this mode with TWoS since Gap released it and without any problems.
As far as I remember, it should be done northern Germany and the coast of France. Gap had the coast of Scandinavia.
The mod is really perfect and greatly enhances the visual experience while sailing along the coast.

[gap]

Originally Posted by excel4004

Just discovered this amazing mod.

Long time nothing was posted, how is the actual situation of this mod, GAP?

Hi excel,
thank you for your nice words and sorry for the long silence on this mod

Unfortunately some months ago the external hard disc where I had stored many WIP mods together with various SH modding resources, has failed. This was a little disaster for this mod too, as the said disc also contained many tree distribution maps, three cutouts, environmental data spreadsheets and other useful resources that I had gathered/built over the years and that the EcoMod was based on.
Those are bad news indeed, but let's focus on the good ones: many (though not all) of the EcoMod-related resources I have lost can be recovered from the web, and I still have in a safe place the terrain editing tools and the knowledge that, with the priceless help of good friends like Jeff (Groves) and Pintea, I earned during my past work on this mod. This is to say that me resurrecting it is all but an unlikely eventuality.
Moreover I have an unreleased version of the mod that I could share with the community if there is enough interest. If memory serves me well, it contains my reworks - based on satellite data - of the french coast and seabed between the cities of St-Malo and Le Havre, along the English Channel, as well as four or five new terrain/vegetation types spamming from the German Bight (Helgoland with its red cliffs and low vegetation) to SW France (Les Landes maritime pine forests). This is an area that was already covered by the previous version of the mod, but had uniform features.

Originally Posted by excel4004

Runs it stable with actual TWoS? Is with the last version a campaign restart needed?

Well, when I planned it, I had TWoS/OHII compatibility in mind. Besides the high level of detail of some of the textures used (which can be replaced by lower resolution textures also included in the mod in the form of optional mods), I see no reason why the EcoMod should affect game stability, and going by the report of vdr1981, fitzcarraldo and Muckenberg, which I thank for their extensive testing, I think we can exclude any major problem in the use of my mod with TWoS. Enabling the current version of the mod even in mid campaign should be totally safe.

Originally Posted by excel4004

Will this mod be a part of TWoS, what are the future plans?

Whether to make this mod part of TWoS or not, is entirely on Vecko. As he has already noted, in its current status the EcoMod is more a proof of concept over some little known/modded game features than a complete mod, but if in future he will decide to include my changes in TWoS, I will gladly give him my blessings

Originally Posted by Jeff-Groves

Gap is spending time on Sicily right now.

Hi Jeff, talking about this mod and your OBJ to RAW converter, I think I have found an instance where it failed to convert height values correctly. I am pretty confident that it must be something related with the numeric format exported by Wings3D's wawefront exporter, though I am not 100% sure about that.

If you have time and are in the mood for digging in the issue, I could send to you the problematic file...

[Muckenberg]

Hello
If you have not yet released a part of your mode and are considering the release so I would definitely be interested. As I wrote above, your mod is really a perfect job.

[fitzcarraldo]

Originally Posted by Muckenberg

Hello
If you have not yet released a part of your mode and are considering the release so I would definitely be interested. As I wrote above, your mod is really a perfect job.

+ 1.

Regards.

Fitzcarraldo

[gap]

Originally Posted by Muckenberg

Hello
If you have not yet released a part of your mode and are considering the release so I would definitely be interested. As I wrote above, your mod is really a perfect job.

Originally Posted by fitzcarraldo

+ 1.

Regards.

Fitzcarraldo

Okay guys, I have the files of the upcoming EcoMod version in front of me. Let me finish some incomplete features and write the documentation, etc. They should be ready for release in a few days.

[Jeff-Groves]

Originally Posted by gap

Hi excel,

Hi Jeff, talking about this mod and your OBJ to RAW converter, I think I have found an instance where it failed to convert height values correctly. I am pretty confident that it must be something related with the numeric format exported by Wings3D's wawefront exporter, though I am not 100% sure about that.

If you have time and are in the mood for digging in the issue, I could send to you the problematic file...

Yeah. Send me the file.

[Muckenberg]

Originally Posted by gap

Okay guys, I have the files of the upcoming EcoMod version in front of me. Let me finish some incomplete features and write the documentation, etc. They should be ready for release in a few days.

Thank you very much and I look forward to sailing around Helgoland. Since I read the thread and saw the pictures so it will definitely be a nice view of the island.

[gap]

Originally Posted by Jeff-Groves

Yeah. Send me the file.

Nevermind Jeff,

I think I found how to solve the issue, but maybe I should explain what was the problem and how I solved it.

Before I interrupted my work on this mod, I had been editing an area of the SH5 map spamming over several raw tiles. For ease of editing, after converting the said detail masks as obj-format meshes (using your RAWtoOBJ script), I offset their X/Z coordinates in W3d so that each tile was close to its in-game neighbours. After tweaking Y coordinates of the combined mesh, I re-exported each obj tile singularly. While doing so, I omitted to re-center them around the X and Z axes, thinking that your OBJtoRAW exporter ignores those values anyway (in theory only vertices order, as written on the obj file, and Y coordinate values should be relevant).

My assumption proved correct for all the tiles (that I successfully converted back to the raw format using your script) except one whose RAW output is obviously wrong: SH5 renders it totally flat, and Photoshop opens it as a 204x200 pixels array, rather than the usual 202x202. The fix, which I just discovered, was re-centering the problematic tile mesh on the X/Z axes before converting it back as a RAW file.

What I don't get at this point is why other obj meshes with similar offsets, were converted correctly without need to re-center them. If you want to investigate further the issue, I have uploaded for you three files:

• W002N049_3_2.obj - the problematic wavefront file, which is converted incorrectly by your OBJtoRAW script;
  
  
• W002N049_3_2'.obj - the same mesh, but centered: your converter deals with it flawlessly;
  
  
• W002N049_3_3.obj - a terrain tile with similar X/Z offsets as the first tile mentioned in this list, but your script converted it correctly without need of re-centering it.

You can find them at the following link:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/t5mic...Masks.rar/file

[Jeff-Groves]

Somewhere in the conversion a few bytes are being skipped.
I have my suspicions why and I'll do more checking.
Nice thing is I have version 10 of SweetScape!
This version has a DeBug capability built in now.
I'll run the script on DeBug and step through each conversion to find the exact spot causing the issue.

[gap]

Originally Posted by Jeff-Groves

Somewhere in the conversion a few bytes are being skipped.
I have my suspicions why and I'll do more checking.
Nice thing is I have version 10 of SweetScape!
This version has a DeBug capability built in now.
I'll run the script on DeBug and step through each conversion to find the exact spot causing the issue.

Thank Jeff, sweet!

Let me know if I can assist you in any way

[Jeff-Groves]

Just pointing out this helps for future work.

[gap]

Originally Posted by Jeff-Groves

Just pointing out this helps for future work.

With the negligible exception of the file I uploaded yesterday, so far your conversion scripts have worked flawlessly.

With their help, and with the use of few more tools (Grass GIS, the hgt data reader that OldCoder recompiled for us, a photoshop pgm importer/exporter, Ref's SH4 terrain data importer/exporter, and couple of spreadsheets I created for converting from pgm to obj format and for 'blending' seamlessly the data of two obj meshes), I was able to convert RW height data into in-game heights with unprecedented precision.

At present we can rebuild directly in a 3D editor fairly realistic models of little islands, seabed reefs/trenches, cliffs, gulfs and entire coastlines which were poorly modelled in stock game. We can reliably predict how they will look in SH5, and we can check the positioning of various 3D objects relative to them, before importing them in game!

This is exactly what I had in mind when I observed that, though an useful tool, the Terrain Editor built into the game was not accurate enough, and when I started bothering you and Pintea on the possibility of creating new tools

[Jeff-Groves]

I'm starting to believe there may be bug in 010 causing the odd ball issue.


I plan a few more tests to verify before I send off a bug report.

[propbeanie]

Little endian versus big endian?...

[Jeff-Groves]

Found the problem!
Vert 8307 is 0.0000000e+0 on the Y

Thus does not get converted to a hex output properly!
Will code for that kind of situation.

When you re centered the other files you were slightly off on the Y axis so it changed things a bit.
Same vert is 1.0000000e-6 in the other file.

Still think it's a bug to be honest. A zero should be converted to a float no matter what!
Sent a bug report to SweetScape.