Terrain Improvement (dev branch)

[tremanarch 6]

the grass looks more like sea grass and the trees.. like ultima 3 ^^

but still a nice tech demo though!

[old_painless 182]

Nice grass, but too monotonic for real use. Lush green grass in shady areas under trees in a forest area is just unrealistic. Needs some work to change from shady forrest undergrowth and the meadow grass shown in the video.

[M. BlackBeard 26]

Not TLDR at all. Points out facts, underlines community interests. @ BI » This will totally be worth looking into, after polishing their product in the beta and solving the other performance issues at hand. I vote Nord for president! =)

Good stuff bro!

[WonderWaffles 1]

Wow that's pretty good. This will definitely make the game look a whole lot better :D

[jgbtl292 0]

an other old idea from me was ( i hate satmaps , from the sky in a jet i see more details then on the ground ,small fildways and others ( chernaurus ) on the ground i see nothing from this real satmap )

the idea was - satmap for build the map - then delete satmap from the final map. and make a own satmap from the final island in a better quality.

is this a solution ? i think is easy and very more detailed on the end. and i see only things where are real in the map.

and the differend in the quality of range is smaler then the 1m² per pixel detail from the real satmap.

and the woods from the sky maby then not more brown sqares - he then looks are woods ^^

hope you understand my english is not the best ^^

Edited March 19, 2013 by JgBtl292

[r3volution 0]

Damn, freakin Outerra looks awesome. But yeah, the problem with a lot of this tech demo stuff is that Bohemia even if they DID purchase one of the engines, would basically have to reconstruct the game engine around that new core program.

That essentially means no way is it likely to happen at any point soon.

That said, I think BIS would be well served to have a look at some of these technologies to see if they can pick up a trick or two (if they haven't already had a look).

[NordKindchen 12]

an other old idea from me was ( i hate satmaps , from the sky in a jet i see more details then on the ground ,small fildways and others ( chernaurus ) on the ground i see nothing from this real satmap )

the idea was - satmap for build the map - then delete satmap from the final map. and make a own satmap from the final island in a better quality.

is this a solution ? i think is easy and very more detailed on the end. and i see only things where are real in the map.

and the differend in the quality of range is smaler then the 1m² per pixel detail from the real satmap.

and the woods from the sky maby then not more brown sqares - he then looks are woods ^^

hope you understand my english is not the best ^^

Dude that is basically what my first suggestion is. I understand that your english may not be the best:P ;) + I dont expect you to read every entrance of this huge topic. But atleast the first post should be comprehended^^

Nevertheless - heres a short summation for u again;)

First: You dont have to "delete" the satmap to achieve this goal. In fact its better to take the satmap as a Template and work details out.

But as I wrote in my OP-topic - this comes with many many many drawbacks.

One for example is the enormous workloud. Another is the probably big performance hit. Third is that this will most likely mean that BI have to recreate every map from ground (Since the satmap size is a fixed value that you set at the very beginning of the map creation. That means that BI would have to set every tree, every house, every stone and every street again if they wanted to increase the satmap size)

That said - its very very hard to justify all this.

Thats the reason why I thought about the other - the "better" way to increase the details at mid range.

Best regards!

[-huviline- 10]

Just wanted to say that I like the idea.

Few days back i read another topic about Arma 3 mid range textures - i guess it was in the Arma 3 mod-s section - this was good implementation too for now, but yours definetly could be major improvement to what we have now.

So hope this will be voted in in the feedback tracker.

[EricM 0]

Despite the massive wall of text, the point is well made. It would really make for a great addition to the game visuals.

Basically, RV engine already uses a similar set of masks for the clutter generation... so it would be a natural extension (those masks may even already exist).

The various tileable "detail maps" are nice and since they're actually broken by the masks you probably wouldn't notice the repetition too much.

Nice try.

[NordKindchen 12]

The various tileable "detail maps" are nice and since they're actually broken by the masks you probably wouldn't notice the repetition too much.

Indeed! The example pics I made are all done with "repeating textures". Did you notice this? Me neither^^

Best regards!

[-=seany=- 5]

One way to improve the default texture "blurryness" is to force Anisotropic Filtering to x16 in the Nvidia control panel profile for Arma3. It makes a big visual difference to texture sharpness and doesn't really cost any FPS. Sorry if this was already mentioned, I never read the whole thread.

[Dwarden 1125]

both Outerra and Proland (and many other planetary / huge scale engines) got nice technologies ... sooner or later some of them will see it's way into gaming world

[gliptal 25]

both Outerra and Proland (and many other planetary / huge scale engines) got nice technologies ... sooner or later some of them will see it's way into gaming world

Sooooo, will Nordknichen idea find it's way into ArmA III?

Yay!

[NordKindchen 12]

I would be curious too^^

[Dwarden 1125]

Sooooo, will Nordknichen idea find it's way into ArmA III?

Yay!

majority of theirs solutions would need engine bump (aka no A3) ... the minor ones are matter of time / resources

[old_painless 182]

Hm, Nordkindchens suggestion is doable with the current engine. Are you referring to Outerra et. al when you say "engine bump"?

[jefcostello 1]

I guess no to outerra, but what about the logic map textures/unsharp/grass mods? Are those viable options to the final release of A3?

[NordKindchen 12]

Is the integration of a logic map for mid range textures out of reach? I mean - since you basically got the function enabled for another part of the game - wouldnt it be comparatively easy to implement?

On top of that - werent you Dwarden the one who fought for this kind of solution since years?

Of course - Panterra related engine changes are unrealistic. But a simple logic map put between the input and output of the mid range textures - that doesnt sound too hard to implement, does it?

I am very eager to hear about it! Greetings and best regards!

[ginger mcale 11]

Would like to see the answer to this question as well.

Greetings

[sqb-sma 66]

Just wanted to say that I like the idea.

Few days back i read another topic about Arma 3 mid range textures - i guess it was in the Arma 3 mod-s section - this was good implementation too for now, but yours definetly could be major improvement to what we have now.

So hope this will be voted in in the feedback tracker.

Yup, Bad Benson made a midrange texture replacement mod, but it's nowhere near the quality a logic map would give. It looks incredible, the clarity and so on, but there are some flaws:

• Runways/terrain that's not open field still has the grassy texture (major)
  
• Poor anisotropic filtering, unreliable clarity
  
• Lack of variation, everything looks the same
  

It's as good as a single texture is going to get, and I wouldn't play without it, but a well implement logic map, noise or bump map will trump it by a long shot.

Link to midrange texture replacement mod thread: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?150645-midrange-terrain-texture-replacement/page10

[NordKindchen 12]

Id reall like to hear sth new

[NordKindchen 12]

I am trying to create a mashup of several different midrange textures to show how my system could loook like.

Sadly I dont know how to create my own addons - I already dug a lot into the system but I cant get any pbo to work properly. If anyone could help me I would greatly appreciate it!

[old_painless 182]

NordKindchen, this is traditionally a good place to look: www.ofpec.com. It has tools that you can use to unpack other pbo's to see how addons are built. I think it's called Eliteness the tool to do so.

Also check out this thread and its forum:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?152072-How-to-De-PBO-Files

Oh, and this looks useful too: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?148373-The-newbie-modders-request-immediate-assistance

-OP

Edited April 5, 2013 by Old_Painless

[NordKindchen 12]

Your links lead me towards this mini tut which really really helped me!

Still I think I have different problem.

Thanks for mentioning Eliteness. I already tried different tools already - for example: BinPBO, MakePBO, cpbo.exe, ExtractPBO and Eliteness. All tools work without errors but I simply cannot get addons to work.

What I did: I took a working addon - used Eliteness to extract the PBO and used cpbo.exe to repack it again.

The resulting pbo has exactly the same filesize and filecount in it still it wont work when used ingame.

Same happens with every other tool I used.

Any help on this?

Greetings!

[sqb-sma 66]

Your links lead me towards this mini tut which really really helped me!

Still I think I have different problem.

Thanks for mentioning Eliteness. I already tried different tools already - for example: BinPBO, MakePBO, cpbo.exe, ExtractPBO and Eliteness. All tools work without errors but I simply cannot get addons to work.

What I did: I took a working addon - used Eliteness to extract the PBO and used cpbo.exe to repack it again.

The resulting pbo has exactly the same filesize and filecount in it still it wont work when used ingame.

Same happens with every other tool I used.

Any help on this?

Greetings!

I know it may seem like a stupid question but, you're sure you're running the mod correctly? With modfolders and all that? I had no trouble with PBOs, and I used PBOview, surely the others work correctly?