Configurable Auto Tiling Enhancer
This program basically manipulates L2 in every possible way.
Source code is written in Visual Basic and its available from here - 26kb.
CATE does pretty impressive work on features (roads, rivers and cities). These features are read from DEM2L2 created TDF files and then tiled into the terrain. Its cutting kind of short on rivers as they usually are the most messy part of tiling (even humans have trouble with them), so when rivers do mess things up near roads, the auto tiling just nicely ends the river so it cannot mess things up. If the river goes near road and zig zags there to mess things up, its ended and in the suitable place where the zig zagging does not cause trouble the river is continued. If however the river and road are in perfect alignment, it tiles bridge tile into that location.
You can have CATE tiling just certain areas using your defined terrain type according to the color in the bitmap image. Lets make a quick example; You take the terrainview saved bitmap map image and color certain areas with green, certain areas with brown. Now you configure CATE's bmp rules to say that all RGB palettes matching the green, it will tile dry farmland and also change all current feature (road, river and city) tiles to dry farmland tiles. All the region matching palette brown will be used to tile mountains terrain type, also changing the feature tiles on the way. Way cool huh?
In falcon terrain the airbases consists usually on 6 tiles, which are laid either horizontal or vertical angles. One of these six tiles in the middle is the so called anchor tile which points to the coordinates from objective location in campaign/te. To see where this objective (airbase) is located we first export the airbases only out of tacedit, that exported CSV file is read by CATE where it gets the coordinates. The CSV file also tells the airbase type and using that type its selected what kind of airbase tiles are tiled in the terrain according to the terrain type, meaning farmland gets farmland airbase and forest gets forest airbase type. When the tiled are placed in the terrain, we still have the problem in game that different elevations make the runway look like a stairs, so we either select the lowest point or highest point on the airbase tile area plus one tile above and all the tiles in that range are set for that elevation. This way in game we have pefectly smooth airbase surface and all aircrafts can take off. So far (April 13th, 2002) there is no new airbases created for Falcon, all current theaters are using default korean airbase 3d objects. We have put together list of these airbases and their corresponding tile offsets, names and types, check out the list (coming soon).
Best use of adjusting elevations are the above mentioned airbase leveling but also excellent place to use it is for rivers. Now usually f4 terrain is in certain terms flat if its road, river, city, farm, forest or what ever tile type, in nature we know that the rivers are of course always few feets or more lower than the rest of the ground immediately around it, making it a river. Now we can set search for all river tiles, and if found, we drop the elevation for X amount if feet and we can even select to drop X amount of feet but now go lower than 1ft because if we set it to 0, then falcon considers that terrain piece to be Ocean.
The option to randomly place tiles is good choise to populate the terrain with different and interesting look, we can debate to the death if its realistic or not, but it is certain that randomly tiled generic tiles look always better than one (1) single tile covering thousands of tiles all around. If we combine this random placement with bitmap region paintings, we can nicely place farmlands and so on.
Do you have difficulties getting accurate map for your terrain? No more. You can have CATE build a accurate map of your terrain including all the roads, rivers, cities and even airbases included in L2. As the bitmap painting you can specify all colors to be used, same goes saving bitmap, just select any bmp 256 color palette what you want to use for any specific elevation/tile/feature etc. You can specify all tiles individually even.
