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Hannover Map needs to be updated!


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Hello everyone,

 

since SB 4.xx, i've seen, that the Hannover Map "Hannover-Weserbergland", has so many unplayable areas. Streets and bridges dissapeared, many houses in cities are on streets you cant even drive through with AI vehicles anymore. Many streets ending in nowhere. So my question is: WTF happened with this map?!? When i want make a new scenario in a nice area and zoom closer to a city, then i see houses on roads, big streets ending in nowhere right behind cities. Everything looks like, the "new" map designer had no mood for creating this map and ruined so many parts of this map - I don't know; it's just a guess.

It's clearly visible in the cities AERZEN, RINTELN, TODENMANN. Such mistakes are an absolute No Go! And the fact that also some highway bridges are not possible (for the AI) to pass over, bcs they are at a hill and the endings of the bridges are hanging in the air. The fact that most towns and villages are not looking like in reality with roads and building, i dont mind. I think Manteuffel was very tolerant with editing this map. That's what i've noticed many years ago. But still, i don't remember, that this map was so screwed up with missing roads, bridges and random places buildings in cities, on roads etc, before SB 4.xx

 

Can we hope for an update of this Map in next SB Version?

 

 

1325276383_Screenshot2022-05-18232617.thumb.png.4e90ce9b20fc277c13fa261307e8e59c.png(buildings block roads + missing roads!)516560191_Screenshot2022-05-18232650.thumb.png.ac1c5e71eda11ea8f371190622caf050.png(buildings block roads!)537630079_Screenshot2022-05-18232720.thumb.png.f3763289d25d8b843985c3423164415a.png(buildings block roads!)115504666_Screenshot2022-05-18232750.thumb.png.a51427b009b5f1828438bc012ebde638.png(roads?)511050398_Screenshot2022-05-18232819.thumb.png.1834edc4dbea3ad164d5761bf1ee9368.png(roads?)1128239740_Screenshot2022-05-18232905.thumb.png.a1a9c9c6dca4166643b79c387512df77.png(bridges?)SS_23_30_53.thumb.jpg.2f1fff1c552b909192f5e459af5da8fa.jpg(can't pass)SS_23_31_53.thumb.jpg.ec1f19c94caa7fa58951367344de098d.jpg(not possible to pass the roads by these random places buildings)SS_23_32_21.thumb.jpg.e6819d80cd0a50c61394a50c0d518e17.jpg(Missing roads)

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@Gladiator(911) this is being worked on (joining roads, "fixing" bridges, etc.), albeit by a private individual.

 

As you'd appreciate being a volunteer they are doing it out of love (i.e. Euro: 0) so I don't know when it will be finished.

 

However what I've seen to date looks good.

Edited by Gibsonm
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Hi Gladiator,


As Gibsonm pointed out, the map is being worked on. It's actually a massive update that includes adding roads and buildings to Hannover Mitte and the surrounding areas. I'm trying to make it as close to realistic as possible within the constraints of the limited building models but it will look a lot more like the actual cities. I've also been connecting roads, adding some cities to the Northwest and East, fixing railroads, moving buildings off of roads, fixing bridges, cleaning up strange artifacts, and so on. I'm trying to get it done by the end of this month or middle of June at the latest, but it's been a huge amount of work. I've been spending about 4 hours a day of and on working on it since the beginning of December. It's just a lot of picky tedious work so hang in there as it is coming.

 

By the way, there will still be some areas of the map that will be incomplete. There are just way too many actual map object and areas in real life and it would take a lifetime to fill all that in. I'm focusing on the most important populated areas and some of the smaller towns. The map can always be added to in the future but it will be a much better starting point. The reason the map is so goofed up currently is that it's been converted many times and some of the original objects were substituted in those conversions. So I've had to splice roads in a lot of cases and then use the bridge tool to make the proper one. There are many rivers so it's time consuming. I'm about 80% to 90% done I think.

 

Here are some shots of the work in progress. (notes on the map are for my reference only)

 

Hannover-Mitte.jpg

Hildesheim.jpg

Lehrte.jpg

HannoverMitte-1.jpg

HannoverMitte-2.jpg

HannoverStudstadtBult.jpg

HannoverBuildings.jpg

HannoverLindenLimmer.jpg

Edited by Striker
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"The Siloah hospital is missing"

😛

 

 

Seriously, great work. I shudder at the thought what this will do to the framerate, though. The Steel Beasts engine was made for sparsely populated (rural) terrain, not cities the size of Hildesheim, let alone Hannover.

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10 hours ago, Striker said:

Will be testing as I go and so far it doesn't seem to have that big of impact. I can also thin it out a little as necessary. I'm not certain that people will be using the high density areas but you never know.

You could always use the high walls to simulate dense urban areas.

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...that would reduce the polycount, but inflate the object count (which would be the limiting factor in this case), so - no, from an optimization point of view that would be worse.

 

The thing with bottlenacks is, you only know you hit one when the performance goes down.

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On 5/24/2022 at 7:34 AM, Ssnake said:

"The Siloah hospital is missing"

😛

 

 

Seriously, great work. I shudder at the thought what this will do to the framerate, though. The Steel Beasts engine was made for sparsely populated (rural) terrain, not cities the size of Hildesheim, let alone Hannover.

Well, build a better engine then.

:P

 

I started a build of Berlin centered on Checkpoint Charlie, seems to work OK

(Cept the pathfinding, before i learned how nav mesh works)

Biggest challenge is how 1960s Berlin looked

What kills frames is fire and smoke in excessive quantities

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On 5/24/2022 at 12:34 AM, Ssnake said:

"I shudder at the thought what this will do to the framerate, though. The Steel Beasts engine was made for sparsely populated (rural) terrain, not cities the size of Hildesheim, let alone Hannover.

I personally don't think it will have that much of an impact overall. There are plenty of areas that actually have a lot more density than East Hannover and Hildesheim. If you look at the areas around Garbsen and Seelze they're close in density and Hamlen is even more so. I'm actually being pretty conservative with the number of buildings in comparison. I've been monitoring the performance as I go along and I haven't noticed any difference compared to those areas. I'll also adjust as necessary. A great example is when I worked on the Saisbury map for my campaign. The city was densely packed with the same models all jammed together and when I tried to drive through it I had terrible stuttering. When I spread them out and used varying models the problem went away or was reduced to a non-problematic state anyhow. So having reasonable gaps between models appears to reduce the frame rate issues. A good example of this issue is when you're map editing. If you start stacking a lot of building models in one place so a lot of them are overlapping each other, the engine slows down badly. If you go to the F1 3D view and try to fly around them you can see the problem. Spread them out and it smooths out significantly.

 

Frankly, I don't see people using the entire area as an ops area anyhow, so it will be more for visual reference hopefully. So someone making a scenario might use a section of the city as a reference point but would not put units inside the dense part of the city. It makes navigation too difficult anyhow and you're more likely to get bogged down with just doing that rather than actual fighting. But it will be nice for setting up defensive positions in reference to the location and having it reflect the actual location on the map rather than a blank area. I'll make sure that I monitor any comments that people have about it after I get it done and I'll be able to adjust as necessary. This will just be an initial version but hopefully there won't be too many of them. I'm trying my best to nail it on the first iteration.

Edited by Striker
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4 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

Yeah, maybe I'm more frightful than warranted.

 

Cautious and prepared does not make you frightful ... 😉

 

>The only issues I see with cities from a ... few ... MP games, are FIBUA is a bit challeneged. But you can work around it. And the bigger one which is if you drop a ton of ordnance in the urban area with direct or indirect, then the Smoke and fire WILL do bad things to the framerate. Which you can also kinda sorta work around, at least partially. If you know the potential issue.

 

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  • 1 month later...

Just wanted to update you guys on the progress. I know it might seem like it's taking a long time but I've actually been putting in quite a few hours every day on this with a day or two break in between. It's really time consuming to place stuff correctly. I'm actually almost done now. The last few items are to add a couple industrial areas and then I'm going to spend the next couple weeks finishing up the fixes. I finished the three Eastern cities so I'm including some images here. They start with Hildesheim, then Sehnde and then Lehrte with the map view of each first. I'm hoping that I can get this wrapped up in the next couple weeks. The hard part is essentially done with the adding of buildings. The rest is fairly easy and that's just doing the final road and building placement cleanup.

 

Hildesheim-01.jpg

Hildesheim-02.jpg

Hildesheim-03.jpg

Hildesheim-04.jpg

Sehnde-01.jpg

Sehnde-02.jpg

Lehrte-01.jpg

Lehrte-02.jpg

Lehrte-03.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...

Just saw all your answers.

Well, great to know that the Map gets updated. 👍

Even though i'm more a fan of details, in my point of view it's a bit pity, that most of the time the same big houses get used next to each other to fill up a big city. I know, usually we don't drive through big cities like this and it's not really necessary to put 1000x more work into a city and work with Google maps like the way i do and add every single house and sort of house with color etc on exact position like in reality. Thats why i need many weeks just to finish a small town. But the entire Hannover map is already made very tolerant. In this case i really don't mind and be simply greateful when the main-issues get fixed. And ofc i'm also very greatful when the map will even gets bigger and more parts can be used for new scenarios as well. :) 🥰

 

Thank you a lot for your work. 👏👏 I know it's a tough and annoying work to create Maps; especially cities are like a heavy pain in the ass.

 

Edited by Gladiator(911)
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Thanks Gladiator. I just submitted the map today along with the notes on the revisions. I gave it to Sean earlier and he has it but I don't think he's had time to put it up on the server and give me the actual code keys for it. I'll post it as soon as it's available.

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Great you got it across the line! From my comments:

 

A lot of effort, esp. as the author went back and re-vised the map based on feedback.

 

Very much appreciate the effort and this will be the AO for the upcoming "Rolling Thunder 22 (or perhaps 23)" mission set / event.

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  • 1 month later...
On 8/10/2022 at 11:55 AM, Gladiator(911) said:

Thank you a lot for this great work. I'm really happy with. Also with the big Autobahn-bridges. Awesome that you edited the ground for to make it possible, to pass the bridges (for the AI) 👍👍

 

Well done 

You're welcome Gladiator. It was a lot of work but I tried really hard to make sure it was reasonable for appearance and performance. I'm taking notes from anyone that messages me if you find a problem. I'll probably plan on doing an update to it some time next years and release it at the end of the summer like this one. If you run across a problem please let me know.

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