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daringd

limitations for laying out and planning larger urban areas?

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OK people,

so, I'm sorry once again to be asking something else, I wanted to have a complete terrain with layers and road system laid out before I began thinking about buildings and such like, but it has occurred to me that organising my roads now will benefit from understanding the limitations of my urban areas and/or general and common limitations.

So, is there a general acceptable limit on buildings, roads and trees (etc etc) on a map? presumably it matters what you intend it to be used for... I want to set up this map for use with the DayZ mod, so that means multi player, putting it on a server and having perhaps 40 players and zombies floating around. I can imagine to try and lay out a full sized city would simply make players computers want to cease up. The map is 2048x2048px terrain, 15.36km x 15.36km with no mapout (island) and a 7.5m cell size.

my real goal here is to understand what the limits are, how people usually gauge these limits, and then I can begin to hit a balance while still in the early design and layout stages. Any and all opinions and experience that anyone can offer would be massively appreciated. If building a well balanced and believable urban zone means sacrificing in other areas of the map I would prefer to understand that now, that I can plan things out as differently as I need to.

Thank you in advance

Daring

PS it's quite late as I post this and my mind is fried from work, so if I have left out any information I should be including, then don't hesitate to ask!

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My best advice would be to plan as much as possible ahead and just really start building the map and positioning objects later on.

Photoshop would be your best friend, design the map as much as possible there and do it in such away that specific areas are easily selectable. Paint roads, urban areas, forests in different layers. Use these layers to make or add to the attribute and sat map, also use these for masks and backgrounds to be used in visitor and bulldozer.

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Hey Chill,

Way ahead of you. let me base a few things out so you know where I am and how my mind works...

1. map is based on the Bamberg area of Frankonia, Bayern, in germany, and surrounding areas, I've planned out the map in photoshop already in terms of coastline, where what townships and 'cities' will lie and how they will be connected.

2. I'm now laying roads in V3 for a few reasons, a) I can export the roads and bring them into photoshop for use with my layers and the satmap, so that everything lines up ultra perfectly in game.

3. next phase will be to get all my roads on flat terrain, level everything out in L3DT ready for object placement, add forrestry in layers exported to World tools etc, and to complete my sat map in temrs of general surfaces.

4. then I will be looking to begin adding buildings fences, walls, objects and so on.

5. back to sat map and layers to tweak and line up, finalise things and make sure everzthing looks as it should etc.

6. save terrain and forget about it while i begin construsting all bridge sections, unique buildings, anything providing a nice theme throughout the terrain, signposts and suchlike.

7. back to V3 to add all of this stuff, bck and forth between V3 on O2 to tweak once again, fix textures, troubleshoot...

8. revisit the layers to spend some real time really getting character and feel of the terrain again

9. export it all for use in game and then sit for as long as it takes to get my cfgClutter exactly as i want it and all other config files

10. get some people testing the shit out of it

of course, this is a general plan, and is subject to me pulling my hair out in the meantime, throwing my pen, shouting rude words at my computer and having to add tens of new steps to really squash any problems that crop up, but you get the general idea...

so the question is really more about how do I understand the limits of what objects i can have, how big and sprawling can urban areas be without killing FPS, how should I gauge how big my forests are and with how many trees per 'questionmark'meters squared.

I really understand why people say 'work on a small island or terrain first', but I've never been about making it easy for myself, and the workflow isn't a real problem to me, in terms of i understand this is going to take some serious time and I'm now getting that this is far from as easy as I would like (with lots of revisiting old work and tweaking), but whatever, none of us are here doing this because it's easy.

does this make a bit more sense?

Daring

PS as I write this there is a very distracting song on the radio that is some sort of cover of falco's "Rock me Amadeus" with the chorus replaced by the words "everybody's geil, g-g-g-g-geil, ev - rybody's geil g-g-g-g-geil-, everybody's geil g-g-g-g-geil, ev - rybody's geil..." what's happened to the world? apparently, this was released in 1986! I don't know what to say.

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It depends on what kind of buildings you intend to use, with or without interiors.

I was struggling with this problem when building Emita City.

I would recommend testing Fallujah, Zargabad and Emita, compare how the detail of buildings affect the performance.

Find a balance you like between open and closed buildings.

I tried to keep atleast one or two open buildings in each block to keep it interesting without hurting performance too much.

The less detailed buildings, the more you can put.

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Cheers Bracer,

that's what I was looking for, just a pointer to something I can gauge. I'll have a shufty over the next few weeks so I can decide which route to go with it.

Daring

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Hi daringd,

Im also at the starting point of my own island, and will follow your conclusions as you've asked some really good questions here, so if it's not too much trouble, could you update us newbies with your findings as and when they come up please?

I'm taking the route of creating ALL my objects/buildings etc first, and then starting on the terrain but I'm extremely interested on your process here.

It sounds like you have a good knowledge and a solid plan.

Ideally (and I think I speak for you too) I'd love to have 100% enterable buildings, and that's what I'm going for, so good luck..!

Marc

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Hi Marc,

A noob's reflection on taking on a map building project... I like it too, I'll start it off as a new thread though so it's easy to find, give me a couple of days to shake off my new years hangover....

Daring

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You might wanna check the WRP object count to determine whether how big you can scale the map:

http://tactical.nekromantix.com/wiki/doku.php?id=arma2:terrain:bis_terrain_analysis

I'd recommend Chernarus as a maximum, as we often encountered heavy lag after some hours...due to the object count, I assume...

You use L3DT for a real life area?

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Hey Zero,

No, I used a process I wouldn't care to use again for extracting and stitching together all the DEM info for the area, it was surely an 'arse-about-face' way of doing it, but I got all my real life terrain data. now I'm using L3DT to tweak and smooth out all of the roads and get them on a level, which is... as you can imagine, driving me crazy. I need more control over my vertices, but so far I'm at a loss as to what i can find to do this. *deep sigh*

just checked out the object count on Chernarus, which I had no idea how to find before, so that does give me something to go on, which is a very good start to my next phase of the project. 1,055,157 objects

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@ ZeroG and Daringd,

It sounds like you both don't like L3DT..?

Is there a different one you recommend?

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Mean...

I like L3DT well enough for certain things, if you want to add some character to your map or spice it up, it's fine, but for me, I sort of wish I had individual control over each vertex, now if I could find a way to export my terrain to maya and back again without it screwing up, I'd probably be a much happier bunny, but until then, I'm sort of getting by with L3DT now.

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Damn,

So its not possible to export it back to maya for tweaking..? Thats a bit of a pain... :(

I was sort of counting on that tbh...

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@ ZeroG and Daringd,

It sounds like you both don't like L3DT..?

Is there a different one you recommend?

Well, for fantasy maps it sure is great.

I am more into real life data...and there Global Mapper is the tool to use, as it allows importing all kinds of real life data layers (height, vegetation rivers, roads, buidlings and sat-images FOR FREE and georectified!)

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I'm thinking because for real life data you can use global mapper.

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After Visitor, L3DT is virtually the ONLY other tool that comes close to making many of the difficult tasks much much easier.

It was never designed FOR ArmA terrain making and so has some shortcomings ...... unfortunately like ALL the tools available to us at present.

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Well, I'm sure somewhere there will be some way of doing it, it's a case of looking... I tgried and thought I had found something, but it turned out not to work, if I fond something I'll let you know, if you come across something, let me know! please!

D

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@ ZeroG and Daringd,

It sounds like you both don't like L3DT..?

Is there a different one you recommend?

Leveller

Leveller is my number one weapon of choice for heightmap editing...

I got a copy back in the 3.0 days as a gift when it was a whopping $200+ - but recently v4.0 has been released and the price dropped to a seriously tempting $49!

As a heightmap editor, Leveller is hard to beat... think of it as a L3DT 3D view plus photoshop side-by-side... with all the familiar photoshop tools for selection, like magic wand, etc...

Its the selection thing that is one of the most powerful advantages Leveller has over L3DT...

eg: If you wanted to smooth roads, load a mask image of your road network as an overlay on your heightmap, then just select them and choose a smoothing style... (Actually, theres a dedicated Roads tool which allows you to import vector lines of your roads and do much more sophisticated road-specific smoothing) But, more generally, you can load any kind of image as an overlay, then you can select stuff on the graphic, then use that selection to do stuff in those areas on the underlying heightmap, like dig rivers or lakes (theres a "Lake tool" too), make ditches alongside roads or raise a hedgerow network..

You can use a pen and tablet if you have one, with full pressure control - you can literally "brush" hills or "paint" beaches...

There's a full set of plugins and filters provided that do all sorts of cool erosions and things, make realistic craters and terraces, etc... All of these heightmaps were made with Leveller, for example...

So was this one, but the Sat & Mask were L3DT-generated...

Having said all of that, if I were to recommend one program it would still be L3DT... apart from it's glaring letdown on the heightmap selection front it does just so much other stuff that's relevant for Arma terrainmaking it's really a must-have program... especially for "geotypical" terrains where its heightmap analysis tools can be incredibly useful...

If I'm making a heightmap from scratch, or doing tricky edit stuff like pen-smoothing, or selection-based stuff like lakes or rivers or ditches I'll use Leveller, for simpler editing I mostly just use L3DT, and for per-vertex "tidying" I still use the Visitor height tweaker keys... down at that individual vertex level you can't beat seeing the actual terrain almost "in-game"...

B

Edited by Bushlurker

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Cheers Bush,

looks like a class act of a tool and well worth the investment, I'm going to check it out if I continue to have the problems I was having before, This is probably the first time in my life I see the value of an evaluation copy, though I don't think they do one, I'm happy to knock out the price of that to have it kicking around my computer... Thanks

D

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@DaringD- is L3DT giving you that much hassle..? I just ask because I've not yet started my actual terrain. But when I do, I want to use the optimum programme for it...

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hey,

no it's not, it's just not completely practical, though you get used to it, it does it's job if you take some extra care with it

Daring

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Bush...

With leveler, I'm considering it as a valid option.

With it's selection based tools and such, is there an option that would allow you to select a road for instance, and then do something like the 'moving average' that the V3 script does (I use the word 'does' in the loosest possible way).

I was also wondering if there is, or if it would be possible to write a layer effect for Photoshop that would take the centre line of your selection and then drag that colour out to the edges of the selection, following the centre line, I'm sure there must be a super easy way of getting a road smoothing tool to work exactly as you need it to.

D

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Hi...

is there an option that would allow you to select a road for instance, and then do something like the 'moving average' that the V3 script does (I use the word 'does' in the loosest possible way).

Firstly I should point out that I'm still a "leveller 3.3" user - there's been some significant additions and enhancements for the Leveller 4.0 version - most of which I don't know much about...

I did have a go with the 3.3 "Roads Tool" which is basically one of several supplied "plugins", like the "Lake Tool", "Crater Tool" and some good Erosion tools (like Gforge - my favourite ;))...

The Roads Tool is a bit of a fuss, and I suspect that it's more designed for Levellers more usual usage - designing small areas like golf courses, in extremely high res (by our standards)...

I've used it successfully once or twice, though I didn't persist at the time since the roads in question had been already laid via the standard Visitor tool / Homers original Roadpainter 1, so they were proper networks, so the built-in smooth scripts were a viable option...

Here's the basic procedure I followed....

First you need a vector or bitmap "mask" of your road lines - load that into Photoshop, tell it to trace all the lines as paths - save as Adobe Illustrator .ai vector format.

Load new vector line network into Adobe Illustrator ("legacy" v8 or something is all thats needed, you don't need Illustrator CS5 or whatever)

Once in Illustrator, "attributes" can be added to each line - these attributes can individually specify for each road... smooth type, bank angle, road profile (level, curved, rutted track, etc)

Then you export this enhanced .ai file and it's ready to import into Leveller...

Here's the relevant tutorial page...

A bit of a fuss, huh?

Results are pretty good, though tbh, if my roads were proper Visitor "road network" roads, I'd be inclined to go for the traditional "moving average" script, and just manually tidy the edges where necessary...

Where Leveller does score big with the excellent selection tools is for things like lakes & rivers, hedgerows, etc... You can prep the usual bitmap mask and import that as an overlay, then choose to use the selection tool on the actual graphic then, once the appropriate area is selected, switch to the underlying heightmap, call up the lake tool - set a depth, a bank angle and whether you want the edges to fit in with the surrounding countryside, and you have a lake... or select all your hedgerow lines, choose "raise by 0.5m" followed by a couple of smooth cycles and you have a complete network of raised hedgerows, or lowered ditches, or whatever...

I'd definitely suggest that you examine what's on offer in Leveller 4.0 - it's a terrific tool, and I believe there's new stuff like texturing been added too... but it isn't a "Magic Bullet"... it won't instantly solve all your problems, or avoid the need for patiently following every road in Vis/buldozer - vertex tweaking keys at the ready, watching out for the dreaded "roadside jaggies"...

As I believe you mentioned in another thread, it's not until you're actually in there, on the ground, that you actually SEE the landscape as it is, or, as it will be in-game... it's only when viewing at that level that you can put the final "polish" on things, and you only really get that "nearly in-game" view with Visitor & Buldozer...

I do commercial VBS2 terrains a lot nowadays, with all the (supposedly) cool VBS2 tools... but I still try to budget my time to allow for two full days before delivery, just to creep around the landscape, vertex tweaking tool at the ready, looking along every road, inside every house, along every coastline - microtweaking a vertex here and there...

Sheer dogged persistence is the most effective tool of all... ;)

B

Edited by Bushlurker

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I think your summery is bang on, so far I've found persistance to be the most reliable tool in the box, and experience, which I'm fast gaining now. During my drive around I've noted and tweaked hundreds of road sections and jaggies, on and off road, and once is over, I have to them rely on L3DT and V3 to do the business, since the map is being developed soley for DayZ, players spend more time running round terrain than on roads, so it's very secondary really to get a perfect road system, but essential that it is still 100% right.

I'm thinking of just allowing myself a lot of time as apposed to seeking this 'magic bullet', I'm gogint o hit all of my smaller roads tonight with the moving average script and then take it back to L3DT or get better with the vector tool in V3 for a fine tune, some of the leveling I have done in L3DT is.. well, very amateur looking, and I'm just not happy with my handy work there. Still considering leveller 4.0 though purely because I have few Euros knocking about and it's worth a bash for the other tools too.

Daring

EDIT - AAARRRGGHHH!!! I just found out how to real time fine tune vertices in Buldozer! this makes everything about a Ga-Zillion times easier for cleaning up edges and so forth... but I can't believe how much time I have wasted NOT knowing this before!

Edited by daringd
Extra ninformation...

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