Porting across SoW-based mods

[Marching Thru Georgia]

Packing is the same procedure and uses the same files with the exception of unitglobal which has additional columns, so be prepared to rewrite and relearn this part of the process.

Very good news. The Russian position batteries will be able to deploy soon.

[Little Powell]

The terrain sprites were not packed for Waterloo. There were too many issues due to the way the graphics were created, and there wasn't enough time to fix them all. And honestly, there was a very little performance increase with them packed, if any at all (maybe 1 fps, and even a fps drop on some graphics cards).

As far as any other issues porting over maps, the minimaps are much larger in waterloo. So they will have to be resized to 2048x2048 to fill the whole window.

[Crikey]

Hi LP - Interesting. B)

Loaded up one of the SoW maps with packed terrain sprites. Runs fine (apart from the mini map size) with no errors in the Sow.ini (once I found it!) Probably needs some TLC to bring it into line with the new maps but encouraging.

However, noticed it's made some terrain darker. Note the wheat in background. Is there some sort of filter being applied in the new game or ini settings?

[Saddletank]

Looking promising. I am not surprised some of the terrain object colour values are different. From what I've heard the shaders on Waterloo were adjusted a lot.

[Little Powell]

However, noticed it's made some terrain darker. Note the wheat in background. Is there some sort of filter being applied in the new game or ini settings?

Yeah that looks like the same issue we ran into. I'm not sure what is causing it, but it did the same for the new Waterloo sprites. It makes them darker, and less transparent--the alpha channels have hard jagged edges, instead of the smooth look you see in the game now. Just something we ran out of time to troubleshoot much, and decided it was best to just leave them unpacked.

However now that you can re-create it on non-Waterloo map, hopefully that will help us narrow down the cause.

[Crikey]

LP - yes, it only seems to be crops and grasses that are affected. Those that have a more blurred alpha channel than normal trees etc, which have crisp contrast at the alpha layer. Odd.

So your solution was individual unpacked dds and the use of the old style csv. Textures.csv?

[Little Powell]

So your solution was individual unpacked dds and the use of the old style csv. Textures.csv?

That's correct. For now at least, until we can figure out what's causing the issue. You're right though, it only seems to happen on the smaller sprites like grass and crops. I think it affects the trees some as well, but it's less noticeable.

[pakfront]

The terrain shader now does lighting calculations in linear, rather than sRGB, space. This allows for more dynamic range, but the old Gettysburg terrain splat textures may look a little odd.

[Saddletank]

To be honest that's a minor issue. If all the old GB maps can be used we are laughing really!

[Marching Thru Georgia]

All the SOWGB maps I have tried have worked in the new game. As stated above, some of the colors are off but it's a small problem. The mini-maps need to be resized but again, that's a minor issue. The advantage to the new display style of the mini-maps is that I no longer need to supply a large and small version of the KS mods.