Create new tiles with TerrainEditor

In this tutorial we'll try to create new tiles in order to import them in Falcon 4 terrain system. The idea is to find an area already tiled and try to make some tiles which blend with the existing ones.

For the purpose of this tutorial I chose the area you can see below in the image. It is from Korea theater (coordinates 524,212).

The purpose is to draw something in the middle and create some tiles for that. I'll start by changing the current tile size to the maximum (256) in order to have the best possible resolution to edit the image later and to create 256 pixels wide tiles later. Then I'll save a screenshot of the current view (without anything displayed on it) by selecting from TerrainEditor menu Tools→Save Map Screenshot. You have the option to save the image as JPG or PNG. I used PNG because JPG is a compressed format and may have some quality loss. You may want to save a screenshot with the grid displayed, in order to have for reference later.

In Photoshop, I painted something that resembles an airfield (I know it's terrible but bear with me). I cropped around the painted area and the result is (after saving it as DDS):

Next step is to cut the image into tiles in TerrainEditor. Select from the menu Windows→Tile Lab Window to bring it up and on that select Open Image.

Your new image will be overlayed on top of the map and possibly covering everything (if it's big enough). No worries, just shrink it to cover the area you want to be replaced. The purpose is to blend it with the background so it doesn't have any graphic marks, discontinuities etc.

Set the desired tile width (for the tiles that are about to be created) and press the Create Tiles button to create them. You'll get the following result in your folder that you specified:

You can of course rename the tiles as you like. Remember that the order the tiles are saved, is starting from lower-left and going by row (left to right). The program will save all squares as tiles that your image is overlayed on it and will keep the existing tiling as background wherever the image you provided is transparent (e.g. at the edges).

Now we have to put the tiles we created into the BIN file. Open the BIN Editor.

We want to put the new set last, so we select the last set on the list and make sure that in the Options, Insert Default Set is set to After. We select the type of the set and hit Insert Set.

Now we have new tiles available for tiling. We go back to Terrain Editor, open the Tile Palette and tile the region with the new tiles.

Here is the result: