Minihattan Island - A3

[Kaxii 11]

Yeah up close it looks great! it's just further away the LODs are a bit to bright. Also you could maybe not even need to bother with showing the 'floors' further away (the black/grey lines) as if a building is fully glass you will not be able to see the seperations as visibly as you can see them now so making those lines less visible (grey lines instead of black) could make them look less like mirrors with tons of black stripes going accross them which make them look less good. Im liking the idea of destroyable then you could make a massive skyscraper and show that BF4's levoloution is nothing compared to your maps full destroyability!

[Sol.LrMartyn 10]

Hi Bracer

nice mod. :bounce3:

I created a video about my first impressions about Minihattan 0.1 (youtube.com/watch?v=6kNH4pscDK4 -> Im sry I cant post links right now). It`s in german but I found some bugs.

Please watch the following seconds:

4:30 - Player falls/lies down if he wants to get out of a little bird (hummingbird).

5:20 - Player gets an surprise if he wants to enter a building from the roof

15:29 - AI move on a skycraper does not work.

But thumbs up for the nice work you did!

Will there be a damage model for the future for the buildings? If yes, maybe the AC-130 could destroy some *.*

I like your town for a zombie mission :-D

And little bird fights might be awesome in "Minihattan"!

If I find more bugs I will report them as soon as possible for you.

Your Martyn

[bracer 12]

Hi Bracer

nice mod. :bounce3:

I created a video about my first impressions about Minihattan 0.1 (youtube.com/watch?v=6kNH4pscDK4 -> Im sry I cant post links right now). It`s in german but I found some bugs.

Please watch the following seconds:

4:30 - Player falls/lies down if he wants to get out of a little bird (hummingbird).

5:20 - Player gets an surprise if he wants to enter a building from the roof

15:29 - AI move on a skycraper does not work.

But thumbs up for the nice work you did!

Will there be a damage model for the future for the buildings? If yes, maybe the AC-130 could destroy some *.*

I like your town for a zombie mission :-D

And little bird fights might be awesome in "Minihattan"!

If I find more bugs I will report them as soon as possible for you.

Your Martyn

Hey Martyn!

I saw your video the other day! Very nice report!

I don't understand much german but I could still see the bugs!

Will try to deal with them!

I'm going on hollydays now!

So expect v0.2 no earlier than January!

Thanks for all feedback and I hope you all enjoy the project regardless of its unfinished state.

Merry Christmas to you all!

Bracer

[gagi 10]

Merry christmas too!

Will keep an eye on this one but do you think elevators can be implemented later?

Thanks

[Kaxii 11]

I wonder how hard it would be though, as it would be a first I think for their to be elevators and considering not even BF4 ate elevators 'real' elevators but actually just boxs that teleport you

[spookygnu 563]

Just from my impression on the images, NIIIIICE WOOORK! bet its taking abit of time to get things in place for this.

I can see this becoming a fave for some Dayz fans tbh, kinda reinacting World War Z. lol!

May I make a suggestion though. All the Skyscrapers look very samey. Any way of adding variation to the structure types. There seems to be a lot of glass and not much brick on some buildings, you know like having apartment blocks and various other structures. just a thought.

[gagi 10]

That's true variation is the key :)

[MissionCreep 12]

Beautiful. Rooftops (or at least the one I tried) aren't walkable .... chopper floats a few meters above and players swim through the air. Some buildings may be permeable to bullets (?) I found bullets whizzing by and hitting me inside a sheltered stairwell from outside the building. Otherwise its great.

[bracer 12]

Yes, there is a few geo-lods missing and misplaced which causes this!

It's a silly mistake.

Will be fixed in the next version!

Thanks for reporting!

[MissionCreep 12]

Merry christmas too!

Will keep an eye on this one but do you think elevators can be implemented later?

Thanks

I would imagine in most urban conflict scenarios, the first thing to be shut down by both the attackers and defenders would be the elevator .... rooftop access would be a much higher priority, IMHO.

[tremanarch 6]

urban environment - perfect since weh have the fluid arma 3 movement system! looking forward

[MissionCreep 12]

OK - I'll admit to being an ALiVE newbie but I was wondering if anyone has tried to run ALiVE mods in Minihattan? It seems to never get going. I've set up ALiVE for Altis and Chenarus in Arma 3, and so far so good. But in Minihattan it says that it loads module_0 and then nothing else. Usually on other islands, it loads the other modules in sequence (module_1, _2 etc) as it populates the map with was scenarios. ALiVE creates a database of objectives and areas of importance, could it be that the building density is overwhelming its abilities? Or could it be that the island is too small to support ALiVE on some of the default parameters? I have set things to small unit size and minimal parameters for testing, but its a no-go. I've waited for at least a 1/2 hour for ALiVE to populate the maps ... maybe ALiVE is stuck in a loop or it would take more years than the remaining life of the sun to compute where to put the units.

A CQB highrise urban battlefield would be something to behold. Maybe its too much to expect given the amount of computing we are talking about (see my specs below). I've played SP by putting AI units into buildings and the firefights stairwells and lobbys of the skyscrapers is quite intense. Its better than Die Hard - more like Die Fast!

EDIT: It appears that the current RC of ALiVE has problems placing units inside buildings, so this would explain things.

Edited January 2, 2014 by MissionCreep

[bracer 12]

Hey dudes!

I hope you all had a nice holiday!

I did and I'm back to work on Minihattan.

I appreciate all the feedback I've been getting and that you took the time to try it out.

So expect reports on bugfixes and improvments soon, and hopefully version 0.2 will be up and running sometime during January.

All the best!

/Bracer

[dcal 16]

Happy New Year Bracer. Looking forward to the update. I have some epic machinima episodes planned for Minihattan down the road.

[bracer 12]

Upcoming fixes for version 0.2 so far:

-Fixed errors in geolods, so now your helicopter won't explode in midair when trying to land on the roofs.

-Fixed some roadway lods so that you can land and walk on more roofs.

-Working on fixing the windows, figured out how to make it impossible to walk through them while the AI can still see and shoot you through the glass.

-Glass sounds when shooting windows, and bullet hole effects (bullet holes only show in A2 for now).

-Less blocky look overall.

-Fixed the clutter in the A3 version.

-Snakes and fishes in the A3 version. A2 has......goats.

-Solved various error messages.

More to come...

Does anyone have a TDM mission or similar built for Minihattan?

[J. Schmidt 10]

I've been working on an elevator for the ArmA 2 version, I think I should be able to port it into ArmA 3 version, just working on mapping every floor height for each style of buildings so I can create a specific elevator for each building. Just click this link to the thread I've been posting my work in: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?170248-Minihattan-Island/page2.

[bracer 12]

Hey dudes!

I now release version 0.2!

Plenty of sweet fixes, not alot of cosmetic fixes, but alot of important fixes for playability!

Specially the fixed windows are important, there is still a few you can walk through, but most of them work!

See the changelog here:

v0.2

-Sharpen edges on skyscrapers to remove blocky look

-Fixed geolod on Hotel1, Mall upper structure, Skyscraper 4, Sky10

-Fixes roadway lod on Hotel 1, Mall upper structure, Row house 1, Skyscraper 4, Sky10

-Added clutter, fish and snakes to A3 version

-Fixed the glass in a few buildings

-Fixed bad rotating door

-Fixed holes in some walls

-Fixed missing textures

-Added a few interiors

-Edited the terrain

-And more.

Get it here: http://fragtard.net/forum/showthread.php/1733-Minihattan-Island?p=12923#post12923

Cheers!

[giorgygr 61]

Thanks man!

[Guest]

Thanks for sending us the newest version :cool:

Release frontpaged on the Armaholic homepage.

Minihattan Island - A3 v0.2

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We have also "connected" these pages to your account on Armaholic.

This means in the future you will be able to maintain these pages yourself if you wish to do so. Once this new feature is ready we will contact you about it and explain how things work and what options you have.

When you have any questions already feel free to PM or email me!

[SavageCDN 231]

Thanks for the update and your continued work on this

[spookygnu 563]

I like the idea you have gone for an URBAN map, there are not that many around for Arma 3 atm. But I do think you could still do with some variation in the map regarding the buildings. Doing a map based on Manhatten is a great idea but like I've said earlier in the thread about the Skyscrapers, there is toooo much of the same glass type and the structures are pretty much the same too.

do you have plans to update with different structual types or would you be best trying it out in another map if you planned to do one.

One thing I liked about Modern Warfare 2 was the large Urban landscape of the everyday suburban town, with picket fenced gardens and residential estates, right through to the shopping areas etc. I can see where you are going with minihatten I'm not disregarding your reason for doing it because this is something no one has tried or released for Arma yet, but having it vary in a way that you have different suburbs etc might be something worth looking at or considering.

cheers

Spook

[bracer 12]

Thanks Foxhound!! You rock!

@SpookyGnu

Yes, there will be more type of buildings for sure! That's my ultimate goal, to get high variation.

I'm planning to start making buildings again as soon as the worst bugs are sorted out, so that I for sure know that the buildings are playable.

As you know I'm learning as I go, making the different lods, how bullet impact works with different materials, adding textures, shadows and AI paths.

And I don't want to start making new buildings until I learnt my mistakes from the old ones.

So if there won't be any major bugs reported for v 0.2, I will start building new structures!

Cheers

[J. Schmidt 10]

@Bracer I'll go ahead and do some more major testing, what I've noticed so far though is that most of the furnishing that you have already placed are walk through. Also there seems to still be a lot of windows that one can walk through as well, and one of the buildings (I believe it's the one with the curved glass) the stairs get blocked off at the top, (the ones that lead to the roof) and I believe the same building has a gap in the stairs on one of the steps. I haven't fallen through it though, but it's noticeable when using the stairs. The Lod issues that you were having don't seem to be a problem anymore, but the glass windows on the skyscrapers (when at a distance) seem to be buggy, like they don't want to load correctly. (I don't know if that was intentional or if it's simply how the resolution lods are set up.)

If I'm not too busy today I'll hammer out re-doing the UV map for the elevator, re-texture it, add the control panels to each floor of the model building I have, as well as putting in a control panel inside of the elevator. I'll then play around with trying to get a memory point to interact with the elevator panel to follow the elevator up instead of having to set the interaction distance to the height of the building. I may even go as far as getting the doors to automatically open/close. Just let me know when you'll be able to talk about incorporating the elevator into your buildings that I've been working on. Unfortunately I'll be starting my 4th semester up of college though on the 28th of this week, and I don't know how much free time I'll have.

[bracer 12]

Sounds cool!

Yeah, the one with the curved glass is still not fixed, so don't fall out the windows there!

The glass looks bad from a distance for sure, because I'm not sure how to make glass look good at a distance without loosing the reflective effect.

Since the distant LOD removes the interiors you will see through the building from a distance, so I'm experimenting with other solution, but it looks like p**p.

And I would like it to not just be a box with a texture in the distance.

Some LOD's switch faaar to early aswell, which I'm not sure how to solve.

Any suggestions on how to make the buildings look better in the distance is welcome!!

[bracer 12]

I'm doing some experiments to reduce the LOD switching and I tried on the tallest building first, where it is most obvious.

It looks better I think, but it might affect performance as well.

I cannot notice any diffence in performance, but I would like to have a second opinion on that.

It's not perfect since you still notice the LOD switch, but before fine tuning and applying it on all buildings I would like to know how it affects performance.

Please try it out and compare with the previous version and let me know what you think!

Simply replace "bra_skyscraper1.pbo" in the @bra_minihattan\addOns\ folder with this new one. Backup your old file.

Look for the tallest building to see the difference!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8291078/bra_skyscraper1.rar

Thanks for your help!

Cheers!

Edited January 27, 2014 by bracer