Madagascar, Southeast Africa (1977-2018) Terrain
December 13th, 2017 (First Release)
by Menrva
-For Strike Fighters 2, Recommended Full-5 Merged
This is a complete remake of the AE terrain made by Deuces and further tweaked by Wrench.
The entire map has been retargetized and slightly retiled. Numerous airports and targets have been added in order to expand playability, targets of opportunity and year span.
Following one of Stary's great discoveries in terrain modding, this terrain features a new 250m heightmap, the double of a stock SF terrain, allowing for greater precision, overall better look and so on; visual oddities might appear, unless you make the following change in the FlightEngine.ini inside the Flight folder:
[BackgroundSceneClip]
FarClipDistance=70000
This terrain has a year span from May 30, 1977 (the beginning of the Mozambican Civil War) to December 31, 2018. Despite the year span, this terrain is not right for reproducing the Mozambican Civil War. Instead, the terrain is meant to pit the French Navy against the combined forces of Mozambique and Madagascar in a what if scenario where the Comoros and Mayotte islands are being threatened by the two Soviet-aligned countries.
The French (Blue Side) only have three flyable airfields (a fourth airport becomes available by the year 2002). Don't even try to fly Blue Side long-range bombers from said small airfields; I am providing a rather realistic representation of the area, where the French are tasked with the defence and patrol of the skies above the Comoros and Mayotte islands.
Having SF2NA is a must, as I have enabled naval ops. If your mod's folder contains French ships and carriers, you'll see fleets being generated during single missions.
The terrain is all but complete. It was a quick project, but it is a great improvement over the original. It could use more targets and airports, slight fixes to the heightmap, a more refined high-res tileset and so on.
-Credits (in no particular order):
-Deuces, who had the idea of recreating such a gorgeous environment in the Strike Fighters world.
-Wrench, who kindly allowed me to improve upon his work by giving me a blank cheque and trusting my capabilities. Thank you, sir!
-gerwin, whose TFDtool has proved to be essential in today's terrain making. If the terrain is pretty accurate to RL it's also because of him. I included his very nice Airfield 7+8 Addon Pack, too.
-mue, for the improved shaders he made, which I have included and set up for the terrain, and for the tools he made for SF2 modding.
-luk1978, for a very good-looking waternormal.bmp which he shared quietly at the SF2 screenshots thread. Your mods are very interesting!
-MigBuster, I have included some of your great hi-res textures for runways.
-Stary, for the old .TOD mod which added trees on this terrain's tileset.
-Gepard, for his great tutorials about terrain making, in the SF1 Knowledge Base at CombatACE. It's a gold mine!
-RussoUK, for the fixed Pit LOD he made, which solved a shadow bug from the original TW's LOD.
-krfrge, who has produced a tutorial for recreating SF2-like planning maps, which prompted me to work on templates and my own high quality planning maps. Thank you very much!
-tiopilotos, who supported me support during the terrain's development.
Because the original terrain was born from Deuces and was later tweaked by Wrench, I included Wrench's original readme file from his AE v2 package, to the end of giving proper credit to everyone involved directly or not. Also, I always find it a pleasure to read Wrench's ReadMe files, give it a try!
Time to fly over the lush jungle, hope you enjoy flying over the terrain as much as I enjoyed making it!
-Known Issues:
>Low number of targets.
>"Water humps" in a number of areas.
>Low-res tileset and bugged alpha channels.
>Nothing in life is perfect, or is it?
-License:
This is a freeware; yet it can be redistributed ONLY in other CombatACE mods/mod packages.
Any small changes to the terrain files, .ini files, etc. are NOT authorized if you plan to release them to the public. But permission will be granted to those who request it to me at CombatACE.
This terrain may NOT in any way, shape or form be used in any payware additions.
What's New in Version 1.1Released Yesterday at 07:24 AM
- Terrain's folder cleaned up of unnecessary files.
- Remade planning maps to match new quality standards.
- Terrain's heightmap remade from scratch, fixing major bugs.
- Mission types are now limited to prevent CTDs.
- A Blue Side airport is now available since 1977 (instead of 2002) as historically accurate.
- Retiled the terrain to a great extent; Mozambique is now green as it should be.
- Reworked some target locations and _movement.ini routes for better gameplay.
- Various bugfixes to _types.ini and _targets.ini files (thanks to swambast for providing bug fixing)!
- Added reworked water shaders by yours truly (thanks to Stary for a new great-looking water bump map)!
- Added airfield approach lights; airport lights are now visible during daylight hours if there is inclement weather (credits to comrpnt for the original SF1 series mod packages).