L3DT Users' Community

Hi, I just got L3DT Pro as a day earlie b-day present (btw today is my b-day, I'm 17) anyways, I am making maps for Battlefield 2142, and I was wondering if anyone had custom climates that match Europe in 2142, I.E snow and dirt with maby some green, because the Arctic climate dosn't work well with the map editor, because both the arctic snow terrain and one desert terrain look real glowey in the game

I would also maby need a new climate for the north africa maps, like a different desert climate

The Desert Climate in L3DT dosn't work well as I said because of the glowey terrain stuff

I am mildly retarted when it comes to the making new climates, but I'll read up on it maby, but if someone could link me to some custom climates, I mean, any custom climates would do well, I'd love custom climates, lol

Hi Morgan,

Happy birthday! I'm sure I can modify a climate to suit your needs, but I'll need you to post some screenshots of the "glowey" effect so that I can see the nature of the problem. Please e-mail them to aaron@bundysoft.com, or else upload them to the users' gallery.

Best regards,
Aaron.

Hi Morgan,

Thanks for the screenshots. I see you're not using the light-mapping feature, so your texture maps are being generated at full brightness. Other than using the lightmapping module, there is in fact no global way to set the texture brightness, though I'll add this to the to-do list now.

Fixing this in the climates is technically possible but frightfully laborious. You would need to edit each and every land type in the climate you're using, and set the r/g/b colour modifiers to, say, 0.8 ('Col. Mod.' button on the texture layers tab). This would take a long time.

Another way, rather faster, is to generate and use the light map. If you don't want shadows/etc, I recommend you set the sun elevation to 90, set the brightness to 0.8, the sun/amb ratio slider all the way to the left, click on the 'amb. colour' button and select white, then click 'next >>' to go through to the next plane, and here disable every option, then click OK. Once it's done, generate the texture map with the 'use light map' checkbox enabled. The texture you get will be about 80% as bright.

Best of luck,
Aaron.

I don't think there is a way to put the lightmaps onto the map in BF2142 but I will go ahead and give it a try lol

Hey Aaron,

For one map, I changed two of my rock textures to a white rock texture (chalk like), but the final image from L3DT is quite "creamy". If I use the method above, will it become more whiter?
I don't want to change the ambient sun colours, since it'll change everything globally and cause shade variations between tiles.

Hi Piratelord,

Yep, the colour modifiers would be the best way to re-balance colours for specific textures. In your case, with the texture looking too creamy, you'd want to slightly elevate the green & blue settings (say, 1.1 and 1.2). You'll need to tinker a bit, of course, but that's the idea.

Best regards,
Aaron.

PS: Following this discussion I'm now seriously considering making a separate texture manager, which would allow users to easily tweak settings for textures used in several land types, and even change the texture image without having to modify all the climates that use the texture in question. I think I can even do this without breaking the climate file format, which is a nice change. Anyway, that's something for me to consider later in the year.

I created a thing in L3DT that dosn't have the light terrain for some reason I'll see if that works