Re: Height Maps
 

I would strongly suggest trying this its very simple, no need to make perfect maps just get the right topography for the area if you are into making scenarios.
Takes time to fill in hexes correctly but can just do a quick approximation based on google maps satellite & or the map the app uses.

Very simple to do once you have done it once its second nature.
Remember you can turn the map to suit your needs before generating.

Wont cover using this app as covered already but here is a few simple steps to select some suitable terrain.

1)Use a latitude longitude website such as http://latitudelongitude.org/pl/plock/
2)Do one of the following
Select a country then city if that's what you want or select tools - address to latitude longitude.
3)Second option either type in the address or scroll around using google maps satellite view is available if desired & its fast.
4) Once you have an area of interest press the marker to centre button.
5) Cut & paste Lat & Long into this app in another tab & generate the map.
6) I suggest using "save as" so you can move areas slightly in either tab & save another one.
7) Once you have done a few load up the map editor & see what you have.
8) Remember you can crop the map to suit your needs once you have saved it.

Attached are 2 maps showing different topography.
One is a local hill in New Zealand, not a quick climb which dominates the area & yes its well represented with 2 peaks.
Second just a random grab of Afghanistan hills as they rise from the flatter terrain in the bottom left corner.

Different countries / areas produce different types of terrain as they should so let the app help you out or inspire you.

Re: Height Maps
 

Howdy! Hope I'm not intruding in on things, but you (DMNT) mentioned satellite mode in an upcoming version. If this gets pushed out (Which I hope it does--I only have one screen so I can't have SPMBT, Google Earth, and the program all up at once) reckon you can add the ability to flip the colors of the hex grid and such? Being able to flip it from black to white and back again would be awful swell, considering how much of a b* it'd be to load up a satellite view, only to be unable to see the hex grid thanks to the color of the terrain. Just throwing the suggestion out there, and thanks for the lovely map. Can't believe my question turned into all this. Well, by that I mean I can't believe the thread is now about the best editor to ever be in this game.

Re: Height Maps
 

Apart from doing the far left of the map its not much of an issue if you only have one monitor.
1)Open map editor & slide half of it off your screen to the left.
2)Open internet program with the map or google & resize it to fit in the other half of the screen.

Tip before generating the map have a quick zoom in & look at major long roads. If needs be adjust the angle slightly to match them.
Picture shows adjusted remembering while its a bit of a pita to do you can draw roads horizontally & vertically.
Can also consider when doing map if its for general play so rotating makes a more user friendly map.
i.e. Rotate town so edge runs roughly top to bottom & check it falls on one half of the map, as in edge of town is behind centre line so defenders can set up in all of it in a generated battle.

Re: Height Maps
 

How does it look now? The new hex button (lowest right) toggles between white, grey and black hex grids. Opacity is still set at static 30% value, but it could also be adjusted.

Re: Height Maps
 

VERY nice. That allows for a number of ways to display the hex grid to suit the map that's produced

Don

Re: Height Maps
 

Looks fine though prefer original black, thanks for continuing with this its a great little app.

Just my view but contours are fine you have got this to a level where it is very efficient.

Now this is just a thought & aimed more I think at Don & Andy, would it be possible to add the following feature to the map editor to aid with visualising terrain filling.

Auto fill text on the WINSPmap for the coordinates listed on the map.
i.e. from top right 0,0 4,0 8,0 etc.
After the map is completed by my understanding pressing # will clear all the text strings.
This could therefor be implemented if its possible by a key stroke or even SHIFT#

The other pie in the sky question dmnt is you can obviously read & extrapolate the contours data, can you read the terrain data?
If so can you extrapolate main details as in woods, marsh, built up (use red earth or some such)Big question then is can the Camo boys create something that auto populates this data. Guessing that's not how things are set up unfortunately.

Dang anyone know how to set windows transparency?
I used to be able to individually adjust window transparency on my old system with an aftermarket tweak.
Load up map & WINSP map editor
Set map editor window to 80% approx. transparent & just copy the map through it.

Said it before but I would really like to thank Don & Andy for there continued support of this game along with the many other people like yourself dmnt that contribute whether it be with scenarios fact finding or great little apps.

Re: Height Maps
 

I assume you would want that to match game map hex with map hex ?

The game map will display the hex co-ordinates when you mouse over the hex but game maps will NEVER be 100% " earth like" so use a print-out of the map as a guildline in building your game map. There is no point in trying to be 100% as it CAN NEVER BE 100%. What this allows a game map maker to do is already is akin to " Scotty, beam me up" compared to what the original SSI game offered. What Tuomas has created here would have been pie-in-the-sky science fiction in 1997

Re: Height Maps
 

I understand this what I was after if its possible is a key press that adds the cords as a text string as circled in red on the attached picture.

It would just aid with visualization to save time when filling in.

If really wanted & possible could be a key specifically for loading maps from this app.

As in press that key
Sets fill to 250, fills following contours, adds text strings every 4th hex with cords.

As you say map making has come a long way we can even mess with obstacle height & density if we wish. This idea is just the icing on the cake if its feasible.

Only other changes I can think of that might be practical would be to change pavement so it works like other terrain & follows the contour rather than depressing it. Using the same basic tile shape as say impassable terrain would work well bordered by roads etc.

Re: Height Maps
 

Pavement originally flattened the terrain to 0, and was used so that patches of city grid were absolutely flat. So you got that SP1 and SP2 effect of a little sunken village of 2-3 houses "buried" in a ridge...

We let pavement flow over terrain as part of our freeing up of fields etc (They only could be laid on level 0 flatland in the original SSI games).

Pavement still serves the same function of smoothing off an urbanised area, if not as markedly as it once did (it as I said, follows terrain contouring now).

Re: Height Maps
 

Andy doesn't make maps and he's confusing pavement with fields which used to be level 1 only but we added slopes to fields years ago and now they follow contours

Pavement and both types of cobblestones clear terrain to zero which is why I used gray sand as a stand-in for pavement on the Goldap map

--this is why posting at 3:30 am can be a problem:D

Don

Re: Height Maps
 

Yep - doh!:doh::doh:

Re: Height Maps
 

I could also try and see if the generated map could come with the text fields for those hexes. However, I'm not that keen to jump in the binary format without documentation.

I'll try to add the satellite view this week as well as the "donate now" button where people can chip in - but it's not expected, just appreciated. The paypal account is in the name of a dotcom ltd (of which I own part of the shares) where my personal site resides as well, so don't get confused about the recipient of the donation. I have already signed up for billing, but not expecting anything major from there.

Don: The server should be heavy duty enough to cope with the map makers (it's already hosting a fairly popular site), so adding a link to the game manual is not a problem.

Re: Height Maps
 

It's too late for this year but next year I will. At the beginning, I recall there were traffic restrictions and I didn't want to post a link and see it get swamped with people curious about it, but I think now there just isn't the flood of game map makers I thought there might be.

Don

Re: Height Maps
 

Thanks! You are absolutely correct that I requested people not to flood the map creating system as at the time the API access was restricted (limited to free account restrictions) and the implementation was more CPU intensive than the current approach and I didn't want any negative effect for the main site from this hobby of mine. Anyway now it should be able to handle the traffic from the general public.

Re: Height Maps
 

Another far simpler way to "reveal" the contours on a freshly generated Vehola is to use the new "Strip map" feature of the extended map editor.....it reveals the contours with one control.

Re: Height Maps
 

I really like this function, however, would it be possible to implement the ability of changing the size of the generated maps?

Re: Height Maps
 

Is it just me or is the venhola site bugged lately? Several tiles don't load for me anymore at certain zoom levels.

Re: Height Maps
 

There is something wrong with the venhola site.

It does work (mostly) but the first page does not load (its white), you can change the map imagery to show the satellite view to see the two graphic features and change the hex grid colors and most importantly you can download the generated maps and open them in WW2/MBT and use them.

Its just the first page the road and basic terrain page (which is extremely useful) that is broken or bugged.

Not sure who maintains or created this wonderful tool and its a shame that it seems to be no longer supported or maintained.

Hope the original author is okay health wise and will one day fix this.

Re: Height Maps
 

I sent Tuomas a PM when this issue was first observed but I have not heard back from him.

For now, best practice is to enter co-ordinated then when the white screen loads press M then you will see the C (combined) or S satellite view and you can move the map to where you want it. I find that once in the satellite view it's still quite useable BUT........ you will probably have to zoom the map all the way out before it will "catch" and then you can zoom in to where you have centred it so if you press + to centre the grid the screen may go white again........if it does keep zooming out until the map re-appears then zoom back in.......it can be a PITA but with practice, it gets less so.

Just know that you may have to really spin the wheel on your mouse to get the " full out" view before the map re-appears OR....sometimes all you need to do is keep pressing the M-C-S button to get things back. The "secret" right now is to get into the Satelite map to really see where you are

Re: Height Maps
 

I hope that Tuomas is okay and just busy with life.

Life just too short, I have lost three last year.

Re: Height Maps
 

Maybe someone can help me with this this: Is there a way to change the "scale" of the maps so that they don't "plateau" once you reach 150m? Something like changing the height per elevation from 10m to 25m or such.

Re: Height Maps
 

The default is 10m so if you are plateauing on a large portion of the map you can try changing that higher and then instead of each level being 10m each level will be whatever you set....try 50 to start and see if you like it but sometimes with too much elevation to deal with it just won't work so you need to make your adjustments manually or pick a new location

Re: Height Maps
 

Given how C and S work, but M doesn't, what I think happened was that OpenSceneMap (OSM) changed the way calls to their map database work; and it broke Venhola.

This happened with a fanfic archive that broke a downloader program; I had to wait for an update to the downloader plugin so that I could resume tracking my fanfics.

Re: Height Maps
 

I sent an email to Tuomas about this when it first surfaced and I have not had a reply.

The last time he posted on the forums was nearly 1 year ago

This may be him....or not

https://fi.linkedin.com/in/tuomas-venhola-23900b4

Re: Height Maps
 

No reply yet and there could be 100 reasons why but I may have found out why this has happened. On my first try today a message was displayed that said the website’s certificate expired 81 days ago

BUT HOPE STILL LIVES

I can get to the map editor now but it shows a white screen until you press the bottom button that toggles between map and satellite imagery

And from that I was able to generate a map ! get while you can
https://i.imgur.com/Xr2lOaI.png

Re: Height Maps
 

This is a plain rough 90x90 map I created using Venhola and the advanced map editor cut and paste. It is nominally an area in Tunisia given the designation Hill 609 but the map is a mash up of peaks and valleys created from the original map that did not turn out as well as I hoped.

Maybe someone can use it for something. It is interesting
https://i.imgur.com/65ZyZTZ.png

Re: Height Maps
 

Seems like the Venhola site is down again. Hope this is temporary, I am working on a campaign right now...

Re: Height Maps
 

When was the last time you tried it?

Re: Height Maps
 

Probably end of last week or last weekend.

Re: Height Maps
 

OK.
I'll see if I can find his email address

Re: Height Maps
 

Message sent that's all I can do

Re: Height Maps
 

It does not look promising. You might want to think about altering spare maps you may have

Re: Height Maps
 

Too bad. I assume migrating or creating a similar service on a different server is out of the question? I do have a server that could be used.

Re: Height Maps
 

I am seeing his name pop up in Google searches that lead to social media accounts but I have no interest in getting a social media account

If you do then you are looking for Tuomas Venhola
Also look for ..

DMNT
Tuomas Venhola

and you might find an active email address

Re: Height Maps
 

I have no idea. You would need to contact him. That's the first hurdle ATM

Re: Height Maps
 

Being not much of a coder myself: I suppose this is the actual backend? https://github.com/tvenhola/SPMBT-maps

Re: Height Maps
 

Neither am I but you have found something I did not know existed

Re: Height Maps
 

Interesting. I wonder if this could be hosted somewhere else or, maybe even better, converted for use on a personal PC (still connecting to the map database of course).

Re: Height Maps
 

Well........ there is a lot of code types that Andy is not familiar with so it won't be from our end. Maybe you can make contact with Tuomas and work something out

Re: Height Maps
 

So far no luck contacting him and according to the github page the program runs on Linux, which I know nothing about. So for now I will have to use the old method with microdem. That said, if anyone has the knowledge to do something with the github page, I do control a server that could be used, so hit me up.

Re: Height Maps
 

Good luck.

Tuomas created the program but AFAIK never used it.

It would be nice for it to be under the control of someone who does but I have exhausted all of my contact info for him but he does seem to be available on social media platforms but I don't do "Social Media"

Re: Height Maps
 

I use github all the time both for work and private use. Can you point me (send me a link) to his github site?

No guarantees I can fix anything but at least I can have a look.

Re: Height Maps
 

https://github.com/tvenhola/SPMBT-maps This is the github page, although I don't know if it represents the latest version.

Re: Height Maps
 

argh its php (python) ...

Re: Height Maps
 

The best bet to getting a useful answer is connecting to Tuomas on one of the social Media accounts he uses but I have no interest in signing up for a social media account but someone interested in getting this up and running again must already be signed up and can find him. For all we know now he might be in the process of moving it someplace else......IDK but I do know he has shut down his email account that I know about and that was the only way I had to contact him to find out what is going on

Re: Height Maps
 

Yeah my plan b is doing that, maybe over linked in, but like you I still have a modicum of hope that he is just migrating his webpage...

Re: Height Maps
 

If you are already on linkedin then go here

https://www.linkedin.com/checkpoint/....google.com%2F

If that doesn't work A Google of Tuomas Venhola

Will bring up the Finn linkendin link for him

Re: Height Maps
 

Sadly, with me not working in private business, I never found it necessary to get a linked in account. But I will do as a plan B.

Re: Height Maps
 

I created an issue on his github site, let's see if he responds or not.

https://i.imgur.com/qzzVtYW.png

Re: Height Maps
 

Yes, good idea. That may end up being forwarded to him IF they have an active email address for him