Tiled maps - Google maps compatible (WIP)

[10t 12]

Updated 2014-06-13

Version 0.2 of Stratis, Takistan and Zargabad added (slope shading improved, but the colours might be a bit too dark).

Added Chernarus.

Completed zoomable Altis . Click the pic below to see it in action (apologies for the slow server it's on; it's very cheap):

Here are some example thumbnails of the first maps I've finished I thought I'd finished but find myself continually revisiting. Click the thumbnail for zoomable version:

Stratis:

v0.1: to v0.2:

Takistan:

v0.1: to v0.2:

Zargabad:

v0.1: to v0.2:

Added 2014-06-13:

Chernarus:

Altis:

Feedback:

I'm not sure the colour balance and intensities I'm using are right for the sorts of things people might want these for. The latest set seem like they're probably too dark. I'd appreciate people who are thinking of using them letting me know if the maps would work better for them looking some other way.

Usage:

In themselves, these don't change gameplay at all (but if someone can generate PAAs or something to replace the in-game map with these then please do!). They're just available for people to use in their other out-of-game tools and things (like the AAR generator, Realtime Browser Map, DayZ loot maps, etc.).

If you are planning to use them, be warned that the 100% zoom images are NOT 1px:1metre. They're (mostly) 2.2px:metre. Make sure whatever web app thingo you're doing can handle that or not care.

Download:

While you can write a wget or use a website downloader to grab all the tiles off the server above, I'd prefer you didn't.

There are zipped collections here. New maps will be added as I upload them:

Stratis v0.1

Stratis v0.2

Takistan v0.1

Takistan v0.2

Zargabad v0.1

Zargabad v0.2

Chernarus

The Altis tiles are split into three, since the two highest-resolution zoom levels are enormous and may not be any use to some people anyway:

Altis (zoom levels 2-7: 251MB)*

Altis (zoom levels 8: 627MB)*

Altis (zoom levels 9: 2100 MB)*

NOTE: The zoom level folders in the Altis zips are named wrongly as 0 to 5, 6, and 7 respectively. This works fine in openLayers maps, but will mess up Leaflet. MAKE SURE YOU RENAME THEM as per the Zip filename.

Background guff:

Hi all.

I was inspired by the work of Axek/Axyl (Automatic AAR Generator) and DemoCore (Real Time Browser Map) to make some new tiled versions of the A3 topographical maps.

After reading way too much Edward Tufte, I get a bit excessively passionate about effective graphical communication and information design. His comments about the information density in Eduard Imhof's Swiss survey maps were part of what got me to do this.

I took screenshots of the maps in-game and applied some shaded relief (slope shadows) and height-specific colouring ("hypsometric tints", apparently - thanks wikipedia. Oh, and "bathymetric tints" in the ocean portions, too). Combined with the existing contour lines it makes the relief data in the much more legible.

I've turned them into Google Maps API-compatible tile sets and will have them available to download as I complete them.

Source:

Screenshots of the in-game map, combined with heightfield information extracted from the map PBOs.

For those who are interested and want to do something similar or (hopefully) better, a small version (2048x2048) of the file I used for the Stratis map is HERE and can be opened and edited in Gimp.

Acknowledgements:

Axek/Axyl, Marty and Slydog from CTB for their work on MAAS_AXY_AAR and answering my stupid MapTiler questions

DemoCode for Real Time browser

Alduric for A3MP

sbsmac, whose ScreenGrab utility gave me the idea for a similar Python script to get the map images as screenshots (I don't much like the EMF export)

Mikero for his DePBO, ConvertWRP and DePEW tools, without which I couldn't have got the heightfield information.

Aaron Torpy for making the terrific L3DT freely available.

Everyone at BI for their freakishly awesome work on making the islands in the OFP/ArmA series. Watching my screen as it methodically panned across the maps of each island highly zoomed in made me appreciate even more the phenomenal work that's gone into them. I still can't get over the awesomeness.

The makers of the Gimp for a FOSS Photoshop-beater, and ImageMagick and Vips - who saved my CPU from catching fire while messing with these by giving out pro-spec image manipulating software so generously.

To do:

1) The rest of the Arma 3 and A3MP maps.

2) Work out how to translate the 2.2px:metre ratio of the 100% maps to work properly.

3) Find out (someone please tell me) exactly what the conditions are for me making similar things from non-BI maps (such as FATA, ClAfghan, etc). In any case I'll be asking the makers for permission, but in case they're hit by a bus between now and then I'd like to know what I can do.

4) Fix crappy colours and shading that you guys notice and tell me about

Licensing:

As the source of the A3 and A3MP maps are originally covered under the APL, I believe it's possible and appropriate to license these under the Arma Public License Share Alike (APL-SA). And so they are (unless someone tells me that it's incompatible?).

Edited June 13, 2014 by 10T

[democore 4]

Totally awesome mate! Great Work!

[Rich_R 1087]

Very nice!

[10t 12]

Updated first post with Altis developments.

[nodunit 397]

Those are some awesome charts, its a night and day difference!

I was wondering if in future I could borrow these and use them in my apache and any other digitized platform that may come out, credit would of course be given.

Edited June 6, 2014 by NodUnit

[tibador 10]

Do i hear HD maps into your Apache's in arma 3 hehe /beg to start working again on them

[DJankovic 401]

is there any way we can get all maps 4x4k res?

[democore 4]

Implemented this into the testbuild of the online map viewer! :)

Whats the status on Altis? :)

Keep up with the awesome work!

[10t 12]

I was wondering if in future I could borrow these and use them...

Absolutely! The more places I see pretty Arma maps, the happier I am. Give me a shout if you need to work on getting file sizes down or any particular resolution.

is there any way we can get all maps 4x4k res?

Yep - I'll post them here and PM you when they're done.

Implemented this into the testbuild of the online map viewer! :)

Whats the status on Altis?

Nice work on the Real time browser. Altis - if I do say so myself - is looking good.

First post updated.

Edited June 13, 2014 by 10T

[inexus 10]

Very nice maps 10T.

How do you create the maps?

[10t 12]

How do you create the maps?

Hey Nex. They're a combination of screenshots of the ingame map and shadow maps and height fields generated from the map.wrp in the map PBO.

I know that the topology cheat lets you get an EMF, but I was having issues exporting the files (solved by running as Admin, duh) and then when I finally got them out I've struggled to export them to raster images at the resolution I want. I've been playing with translating them into SVGs and manually cutting them into layers (roads, trees, buildings, MGRS gridlines etc) to recombine again later in different ways - which also reduces the filesize - so I may go back to that later.

To get the screenshots at the resolution I wanted (I needed 3090 for Altis...) I wrote a script to pan the map around at a given zoom and trigger an external Python script to press the Steam screenshot key. A bit overwrought, but it did the job. Then imagemagick made it easy to trim the screenshots and stitch them back together ready to edit in Gimp.

There's an example of how I put Stratis together here.

I like what you're doing with Axyl's AAR generator/viewer. If you can get these tiles to work with leaflet without being misaligned from the unit markers, let me know.

[inexus 10]

I think I need to generate the map tiles using TMS. I dont' know how to do this so I posted on the Google TileMapper forum and hope somebody can help.

Once I got that info I will update the rendering of the maps. I think it will align with how you create your tiles so it will align.

I'll let you know as soon as i got it working.

[10t 12]

AFAIK, they actually are TMS. If you set the flag

tms: true,

in the tileLayer definition then they'll line up properly (very brief leaflet docs reference here).

Here's one of the tests I was doing aligning markers to known points (you might need to scroll up, depending on your browser window size):

With tms: true

Without tms: true

The second one's identical, except line 61 was deleted.

Otherwise, if it's a tile numbering issue I can just knock together a script to rename them all in bulk - much quicker than regenerating the tiles, believe me.

[mecharius 2]

Hi 10T, thanks for these amazing images and letting me use them in my editor :)

I'm looking to get a single PNG / JPG at a particular zoom level (I don't need the lowest zoom levels - I've previously been working with map images around 4000px width/height). Are you aware of an easy way to do this? If necessary I can write a script in Python using ImageMagick or something like that?

[Beerkan 71]

chin == chin + floor

:butbut:

Unbelievable..!!

[mecharius 2]

Ok, this was surprisingly easy to do using Python/PIL (through Anaconda)

https://gist.github.com/will-hart/133814e92cf45745e9d1

[inexus 10]

No, it didn't do the trick. I'm not sure if it's leaflet or what. I am using leaflet 0.7.3. I am thinking if I should switch to openlayer...

Are you able to help me with how you run scripting to export screenshots from arma?

[10t 12]

Ok, this was surprisingly easy to do using Python/PIL

Glad to hear it. Imagemagick also has a nifty one for those who don't want to mess with Python: montage -mode concatenate

No, it didn't do the trick...

That's weird - do you have an example uploaded somewhere that shows it? What do the two links I posted look like? Is the tms:true one rendering ok in your browser?:

Is the other one showing up backwards?:

Or is it something else?

As for the scripts, I'll dig them up and put them on here. They're pretty ugly (really ugly) so you shouldn't expect a great user experience. Probably better - if it's still an issue - is to just rename all the tiles to the alignment leaflet expects (0 at the top, increasing to the bottom). Super quick and easy to do.

Not sure about openLayers. It doesn't seem as fluid and pleasant to use at Leaflet. Might solve some problems though, which could make it worth it.

Edited June 14, 2014 by 10T

[mecharius 2]

Yeah I saw montage but couldn't work out how to get it working :)

One comment - its quite difficult to see the runways in a lot of the maps unless you are completely zoomed in. Have you considered shading them in?

[inexus 10]

I hope I can get some time today, Sunday, to spend some time on this.

Pondering if I should go and pick up the Samsung 4K monitor as a 2nd monitor today. Just can't fit everything on a single monitor when doing dev work.

[nodunit 397]

Absolutely! The more places I see pretty Arma maps, the happier I am. Give me a shout if you need to work on getting file sizes down or any particular resolution.

Wonderful! I'll send you a PM, don't want to derail your thread.

[democore 4]

Yay nice work! Going to implement altis and stratis v 0.2 soon! :)

[mecharius 2]

I've released my editor using your maps 10T - thanks!

[alexcroox 29]

Double post

Edited April 2, 2015 by alexcroox

[alexcroox 29]

These are fantastic thank you, do you plan on making more for the other AiA maps?