Battlefield Modding Tutorials BFMODS

I'm trying to regenerate the terrain shadows for my Gulf of Oman map, but everytime I merge the shadows with the surface maps, I end up with god awfull purple terrain. Why the hell is this happening? I tried doing it with a clean new map with just the static objects, and I've even tried doing it from the command line. But only end up with the same result, ugly purple terrain. It makes all the object shadows just fine though...

Please help as I have changed a good number of objects on this map and need new shadows.

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I have cameras in your head!

1942 or BF2?

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[Sexy]Leapord

Um...this is the BF1942/BFV sections so it is BF1942!!!

(Gulf of Oman was converted from a BFV version of the map that was converted from BF2!)

The purple terrain doesn't occur untill I merge the files. So I'm thinking there is nothing wrong at the shadow generation process, but something at the merge process is screwing up.

I used GIMP and found a way of doing this manually. I take a texture segement and load both it and it's shadow file as each individual layer. Then I combine them using the "Overlay" mode of the layer system. It appears to merge them the way I want and best of all it doesn't get screwed up. However I would have to do this on 50 files (100 total if you include the shadow files), so I really don't want to resort to this. (unless you know of a script for GIMP that can do it for me!)

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I have cameras in your head!

Sorry I'm kind of at a loss, but I have one suggestion.

Awhile back I had painted a nice texture on a map of mine with Ed42. I brought it into battlecraft for shadow generation, but some tiles would be good, and others awful looking! The good tiles were what I had painted with shadows, and the bad ones were battlecrafts crappy generated textures from the material map.

Try this (Hopefully you weren't the one who suggested it to me, lol):

1) Open the map in BC with your nice textures
2) Go to the paint menu.
3) Go to every 'piece' of the texture (individual texture files really)..you should know what I'm talking about. Use the smallest brush, and set it to 'darken'. Just brush a little bit on each square.
4) NOW generate shadows how you would normally...then merge. HOPEFULLY you will have your new texture.

Like I said, I'm kind of at a loss, but maybe this would do it..?

Well the thing is, I only tried BC when the normal process (I normally do this via only the command line) didnt work. Both resulted in the exact same result. Purple terrain. All tiles appeared like this so what ever it is it's effecting them all and BC wasn't the cause. I don't really want to regenerate the shadows too often. It takes about 40 minutes each time on the 2.0 pixal detail size (as seen in the con files, not how BC describes it), but I got better things to do then sitting around generating terrain shadows. The (automated) merge process takes about 20 seconds so doing that often won't bother me as much.

I don't use BC to merge as BC wants to use it's own method of converting all the terrain textures to DDS, but it's slow as hell and DDS Converter is 10 times faster at doing it just as well.... (yes I did try both generating and merging with BC just to see if that would fix it, but it resulted in the same thing)

Well I've gotten half way through of doing it manually. The end result will be a bit brighter then the normal automated merger, so I will have to either darken the detail texture or darken all of the textures. (will try the detail texture first)
It only needs to be darkened just a tad bit, so it isn't washed out or anyting. It looks just as good as the automated way, just needs a small brightness adjustment.

But I may try your suggestoin before finishing the rest. But I don't expect it to work.

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I have cameras in your head!