CaptainMaxwell
Posts: 13
Joined: 7/13/2013
From: Vienna
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Well, kind of.
Fiddling around with Armoured Brigade last year. They have some documentation on how to extract base map data from DEM maps and OSM. After playing around in QGIS I realized that one can do so much more.
In about three months of work I developed a process in QGIS that can take data from a DEM (like radar height map) and a vector base map (think Google Maps) and construct a TOAW map out of it. The results are simply astonishing: I was able to draw a 75,000 hex map with forests, mountains, escarpments, rivers, roads and annotations in an afternoon. Accurate and pixel perfect (for better or worse).
This is a screenshot of part of the basemap in QGIS (If you are curious, this is, in austrian military parlance, the ,,Bruck gate''. This is the path that the Red Army used in '45 and that supposedly the SGF would use in WWIII).
This is a screenshot of the part of the computed TOAW map in QGIS.
If you download them and switch back and forth between them in your image viewer application, you can compare terrain features and labels. You can also see the activated layers for the TOAW map. It's basically a geo-referenced table of a bazillion hexagons in QGIS that collect the data for the respective tiles during the creation process and are then textured in QGIS using the in-game textures. I wrote an exporter function in python that can then produce a mml-file out of this mess.
This is a screenshot of the part of the loaded map in TOAW.
I have also a dump of the complete map from TOAWs editor, but that file is simply too large.
The basic process is straight forward enough (if you have the base data), but coming up with (TOAW-specific) solutions to auto-build the proper contours, to make sure that both types of roads and rivers work together and that escarpments are created automatically gave me some serious headaches. I also tried to create rocky terrain, but you would need laser scan data to do that (normal DEM data is too coarse). Terrain features that you can not find in Europe are not implemented (but the process can be adapted).
This is of course of no use for historical maps, but for contemporary ones where there is data this can speed up processes by orders of magnitude.
Mapping and wargaming was on the backseat for about a year now, and only recently did I return to it. I saw r williams efforts over at the other thread, and thought that he could make use of it. There is enough DEM data available for Europe, and for 1990 free CLC vector data is also available (actually, for most of Europe).
You can find the process manual as attachment. It should give a complete walkthrough for dummies. I will keep the style file, texture sets, and the coverage and export scripts back unless someone really needs them.
I should also mention the associated caveats:
1.) The screenshots show the maximum solution. This is built from an official government dataset. Those usually cost a fortune, and open alternatives generally neither have the quality nor the detail. But then you usually don't want to go all the way to even importing river names and such.
2.) Even though the process builds a map within hours, you will most likely spend weeks learning the basics of QGIS and applying it to the base data. You have to consolidate, clean and repair it (yes, even for government grade data), understand the data structure, and select and filter the features out such that the process can eat them. If you feed it with trash, it will produce trash.
3.) This is a global, robotic process. Save for the water calculation I employed no fuzzification. The process will steamroll over the whole map as per global settings. The terrain calculation is not fixed (you will have to provide values to it; except for the escarpment detection, but those can be easily changed), but the coverage calculation for the moment is. But I am happy to discuss alternative values; currently forestation seems to be a little bit to common.
4.) This is pixel perfect, without abstraction. This is fair game for terrain and coverage, but should be treated with care especially for the roads as you will end up with bends and kinks more often than you like. Or roads through water.
5.) The way I apply the contouring and overlapping coverage textures may not be universally accepted, but I like the map to look ,,good'' (for whatever that means). Unless it breaks something in game I have no intent to rebuild that.
And since I was asked: I hope that I can migrate the process to Modern Campaigns, using the above mentioned CLC data. The process can be applied to everything, as long as I know (or can reverse engineer) the map structure. And it can't be more complicated than TOAWs contouring...
 Attachment (1)
< Message edited by CaptainMaxwell -- 1/9/2022 8:03:21 AM >
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An auto-mapper for TOAW - 
RE: An auto-mapper for TOAW - 
How good do you feel it is at picking up escarpments?
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