Basically, the easiest way
to make better looking amp textures is to use a template, by which I mean other
sims which actually have detailed land terrain. If you have to, ask the company
of the game if you can use them. I personally suggest using Falcon 4.0, Flanker
2.0, and European Air War.
Let's say you have already gotten those new terrain tiles. How do you get them
into your FA toolkit so you can build a new library, and edit how the terrain
looks in FA?
First off, choose the map
yo wish to edit. Let's take the France Map for example. Open your toolkit, go
to Graphics/Other Art, and search for .pic files starting with FRA. (All the
terrain tiles follow this rule) And go ahead and open one up. Suppose you open
up the one named FRA1.PIC and you'll see a blob of pink. That's okay, the pink
stands for default textures, in other words the stuff you see in FA. In order
to see what the tile actually looks like, go to change pallet. Select Icon.
You'll see it resembles a city, only in very strange colors. You canot directly
edit the tile from here, the colors will only be screwed when you fly it in
FA. You have to return the pallet back to default, and then open it up in your
favorite paint program. I suggest Adobe Photoshop, but that's only because it's
what I use. As far as I know, Paint Shop Pro will also work fine.
After you've opened it up,
then open you start to cut and paste. Open up the tile you've gotten from another
sim, or whatever you want to use to replace the default Fighters Anthology tile.
Now, since we've opened up FRA1.PIC, which happens to be a city tile, be sure
to replace it with a city tile.
After your cut and paste work is complete, then click on save, then return to
the toolkit. Click on refresh in the edit graphic window that you opened up
FRA1.pic in earlier, then click on save. Build the library, and fly over France.
When you fly over any part of the map that used FRA1.pic, you should fine that
is will look like your new terrain tile. Continue editing other tiles in the
same fashion until you're satisfied.
Red Bear