Terrain Development Guide

Chapter 3: Optional Terrain Development

Airfields

You can use field overlays to create accurate renditions of historical airfields and other important specific areas that can't be recreated with just the standard ecology textures. To create a field overlay, set up your paint program (Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Fireworks, etc.) to paint the whole airfield at once. When finished, cut it up into blocks of the same dimensions as your terrain grid, and export each block. If you want parts of the airfield texture to blend in with the existing underlying terrain, include transparency (alpha layer).

Below is an example of the set of four airfield textures necessary for the Kunsan Airfield in the Target Korea mod:

Airfield are added to the terrain using a terrain layer. Assignment of the layer map and the airfield textures is made through the Terrain Descriptor File. If the Kunsan airfield was our only airfield, the layer definition could be as follows:

## Example of an airfield layer with one airfield ##

[Layer 8]
map = tk_fields.tga
scale = 0.25
height = 0
blend = 0
num_textures = 4

[Layer 8 Texture 1]
value = 1
texture = fields/kunan_nw.tga
rotation = 0

[Layer 8 Texture 2]
value = 2
texture = fields/kunan_ne.tga
rotation = 0

[Layer 8 Texture 3]
value = 3
texture = fields/kunan_se.tga
rotation = 0

[Layer 8 Texture 4]
value = 4
texture = fields/kunan_sw.tga
rotation = 0

The airfield map is usually very sparse, containing only index values for those areas where airfields need to be placed. Each block of the airfield texture is assigned its own pixel value/color and placed individually in the layer map. The portion of the airfield map containing our Kunsan example might look like the following: