[WIP] The Lost Coast 30x30km terrain (preview version included)

[digitalcenturion 20]

Not related to the Lost Isles project, pure coincident with the name

THE LOST COAST

DOWNLOAD THE NEWEST VERSION (0.2) HERE

REQUIRES AIA TP NOW!!

Old version 0.1 download (for debugging large roads)

ARMAHOLIC MIRROR

WARNING: This is an unstable alpha version with some problems, use at your own risk!

There are very few (but a lot more than in 0.1) placed buildings in this version, so it might not be suitable for actual gameplay

Note for MODS: Since this is an unstable alpha version I'd like to have the thread in WIPs so far.

VERSION LOG:

v 0.2 (7 March 2015): Second preview version. Started to populate main city. Various bug fixes. Reduced road network to avoid memory issues.

v 0.1 (27 February 2015): Initial public preview version.

Welcome to the Lost Coast, pearl of the Green Sea region! In over 30 x 30 km of varied coastline you can find rich woodlands, dramatic islands and long rivers. Be sure to visit the region capital, where you can enjoy fine building from the middle ages as well as modern suburbs.

This is something I’ve had in pre-production since Arma 3 was in beta. I have dabbled in terrain making before in Arma 2 trying to develop successful methods for a faster creation of large terrain but ultimately failing (the clunky road system of A2 was the stepping stone there). I planned to participate in MANW with this map but never had the time during the submission phase. What pushed this into active development was Jakerod’s excellent The Atlas tutorial, and also that I was getting slightly bored with Altis as a setting for my constant Pilgrimage sessions :) I intend this map to be the ultimate dynamic mission playground with enough area to get properly lost in. And most of all I wanted to create a game world that is 1:1 scale with the real world, none of this microcosm rubbish. Is this ambitious? Yes, very. Is it doable? I think it is, provided the road limit is something that can be fixed in Arma 3. I will create a ticket for it shortly, as I think it is one issue that seriously limits the growth potential of A3.

FEATURES:

• 30,72km x 30,72km size or over 943 square km sampled from a real world location in south-eastern Finland centered around the city of Porvoo

• Sampled from high-res heightmaps and orthographic aerial photos from the National Land Survey of Finland.

• 4096x4096 heightfield with a resolution of 7,5m/px (downsampled from 15000x15000)

• 30720 x 30720 px satmap/mask (currently downsampled to 20480x20480*)

• All the real world roads imported. 1300+ km of roads.

• Season: Early spring (others might be done at a later date). Not done to death and the satmap was photographed at that season so…

• One very large capital city (real world Porvoo/Borgå in south-eastern Finland) and several smaller villages. No buildings placed yet

• Oil refinery

• Many islands

• Not intended to be a carbon copy of the real world location, but a fictionalized version with a Balkans vibe. Inspirations: Half Life 2, The Road, Behind Enemy Lines

Current bugs

• *Satmap overlap issues. Not visible on the ground but from the air. Refuses to generate layers at 1m/px resolution. Can you help? Clicky

• V.0.1 :The roads currently are causing memory issues, this might be a bug with the current engine or a hard limit for the A3 network. This release contains a road network consisting of over 6000 road objects (paths). In comparison, Altis road network is a little over 1400 road objects. Road network still needs adjusting but is in place. IF you want to experience this, try a large scale mission like DUWS on the island, the problems will soon appear. My topic about the issue is here, if you want to take a a gander.

V.0.2 has reduced the road network which seems to have fixed most of the problems.

• Vegetation is basically a placeholder to give a basic idea, currently about 2 million objects.

So download the alpha and take a look around. Right now this is pretty much a preview version only but you can have some pretty epic races on this road network. I also hope mission builders make some cool missions at some point, so I reckon getting this out there early is a good thing.

Is this some terrain you would enjoy to see finished and fully fleshed out in A3? Why not join me and give a hand? There are jobs that require no prior technical expertise but would make my life a lot easier:

-Placing houses and other man made things using a 3d-editor at correct locations to make the map come alive. These can’t be auto generated to look good. There are very many buildings to place in the main city alone, not to speak of all the smaller villages. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I NEED HELP WITH! It’s also the fun bit!

Brief instructions how-to:

What you need is basically a 3d map editor, I have used Map Builder by Neo Armageddon.

This is bascially a mission you launch from the edtior that allows you two place ojbects in a 3d view from a list. To place the mapbuilder.altis folder you downloaded into your C:\Users\XXX\Documents\Arma 3\missions folder or other place you have set your missions to save, not the main mission folder in your Arma 3 dir though. Rename the folder into mapbuilder.dgc_lostcoast.

You also need some so-called "Editor Addon" that allows the normally hidden objects like plants and houses to be placed in the mission editor. After that select a spot and start placing objects. Be sure to save your project so you can continue later. Once you have an export file, email it to me. Once there are more contributors I would like to start using google drive but for now emailing is fine.

I'd like to have your export file named like this so I can keep track of different files easier

Zone_Date_Author_Description_Version.txt

so if I work on a village called demoville in zone A7 it would be called

A7_27Feb15_DigitalCenturion_Demoville_village_v1.txt

The zones are seen here. I have a separate zone chart for the city that I will post later.

-Drawing the satmap mask. Boring and tedious but easy. Can be done in MS paint if need be. The mask image helps the game put the right ground texture in the right place.

-Coming up with good Balkan sounding names for the locations.

There are also more advanced tasks, like creating new bridges and more barren trees. If some modeler is interested that would be great!

The only requirement is a decent communication capability in some language I can understand (English, Swedish or Finnish) and a google account. I plan to use google drive for sharing work, with internal weekly builds and public bi-weekly or monthly builds.

Interested? Contact me by PM here or email me at matsliljeroos (at) gmail (dot) com

CREDITS:

The National Land Survey of Finland for making the raw data this project uses

BI for the Arma games

Rydygier for helping me debug this map

Jakerod for creating the Atlas tutorial

All the guys over at the terrain editing forums for being helpful. Shared misery and all that ;)

NOTE: The continuation of this project is largely dependant on the road memory issue getting solved.

THIS MOD SHALL NOT BE USED IN ANY KIND OF FOR-PROFIT ACTIVITY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO PREMIUM ACCESS SERVERS.

Screenshots

Edited March 7, 2015 by DigitalCenturion
Formatting, credits, disclaimer

[BadHabitz 235]

Looking really damn good!

[badluckburt 78]

Ah, so this is the beast unleashed? I will take a look later today.

What kind of bridges do you need?

[digitalcenturion 20]

Thanks!

Bridges are highway bridges, the bridge leading to Emäsalo/Emsalö and the downtown bridges

[Rydygier 1309]

And most of all I wanted to create a game world that is 1:1 scale with the real world, none of this microcosm rubbish.

:) I endorse with all my heart this approach. And the topic - Finland. Beautiful.

Pity, I know so little about map making, so couldn't be more helpful (just presented a perspective of dynamic playable content creator/scripter toward the terrain). But for sure there are map making guru around able to help with the issues.

EDIT: I wonder, IF amount of road segments is actual source of issues, would be possible to reduce amount of roads engine-wise, while keeping all of them visually. I mean - turning smallest of actual roads into texture-only dummy. It's mostly about some of those in the big city, I guess.

Edited February 27, 2015 by Rydygier

[badluckburt 78]

Thanks!

Bridges are highway bridges, the bridge leading to Emäsalo/Emsalö and the downtown bridges

I'm (slowly) learning to model architecture for my Suomenlinna-map and I might take a stab at the two bigger bridges you posted. They seem simple enough model-wise and even if you end up not using them, I can always use them myself :)

[haleks 8212]

Nice! And it looks like this is going to be the bigger terrain ever made for Arma3! ;)

Good luck, eagerly waiting to explore this map!

[Guest]

Thanks for allowing us to publish your early alpha version on Armaholic :cool:

Release frontpaged on the Armaholic homepage.

The Lost Coast v0.1 alpha

==================================================

You are not registered on Armaholic, or at least not that we are aware of. Soon we offer the possibility to authors to maintain their own pages.

If you wish to be able to do this as well please register on Armaholic and let me know about it.

This is not mandatory at all! Only if you wish to control your own content you are welcome to join, otherwise we will continue to follow your work like we have always done ;)

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

[DaViSFiT 21]

wow. really excited about big maps and this looks good for the first step. when buildings and ambient stuff is placed this could really get a very popular map.

[McKeewa 7]

Looks great, can't wait to see next version :p

[kecharles28 197]

New mod v0.1-alpha available at withSIX. Download now by clicking:

@DigitalCenturion;

You are now able to manage your own promo pages of your content on our web platform and publish new content yourself.

To do so, please hit 'this is me' button on the page while logged in and follow the quick and safe claim procedure to get connected to your work.

For now you can send new content or releases our way by using any filesharing service and add your notification at getsatisfaction.withsix.com.

[Richie 330]

Wow, that city is impressive, nice :)

[digitalcenturion 20]

Thanks for the comments guys and for the hosting!

As said, I need people to help me populate this map, human settlements will only look right when placed by hand. And as said, no technical knowledge needed, just if you have a free or afternoon and could place some buildings that's enough!

Regarding the roads.. I have an idea, if the Altis amount is the hard limit, to progressively bring the amount down.

The main roads are very long so those are only maybe less than 100, then the more important dirt paths and city roads should all fit into the budget of 1400... Small few meter stumps diverting from the main road can safely be deleted without affecting gameplay.

All this is applicable only if it is indeed the road number that is the main issue, and not things like overall size, vertex count or something else..

[perezmh 10]

If you want help setting up little towns and it's as easy as you say, I'll happily put a couple hours down to set some nice ones up. Let me know how to get involved!

[mikey74 169]

Really nice!!! HUGE!!! love it. 1 problem on my end. Some of the towns and buildings are not showing up. I see spaces for them, but no buildings. lol Gonna try downloading through SIX this time and see if it does the same.

[digitalcenturion 20]

Perez I PM'd you, thanks!

Mikey sorry maybe I was not specific enough, there are actually very few buildnings placed yet on the map, hence this being a "preview" version. Again, sorry for not being clear enough on that. But if enough people lend a hand, the emptiness can soon change :)

[mikey74 169]

ahhh.... bhahahahaha I skim the read. That's completely my fault. That being said I think the download was faulty because of slow internet. The file downloading now is bigger. I also noticed this is the wip thread. lol I clicked the link from Armaholic. ;) I got excited those pics look great. Wish I knew more about maps. I'd help. Right now I'm learning configs and have created a few weapons with own sounds and a whole bunch of units and groups with there own danger.fsm's. No models, still got to learn that too. THIS map would be a perfect spot for some more testing of how they react in certain situations. Thanks for the hard work. :)

[mech 3]

Mate, I'm impressed! Arma really needs a 1:1 map urgently! Really appreciate your work and hope you find some help with this map. This is one of the most promissing project atm.

[digitalcenturion 20]

Mikey no sweat. BTW There is no technical part to putting buildings on a map using for example map builder (a mission you run and then you just add buildings on the map). Have a good one testing your work :)

Mech thanks, I see promise too. For certain scenarios size is king, and while i love Altis we can do bigger :)

[Lehy 12]

I really hope you will be able to talk to strange fishermen and kill combines in a church with this mod! Oh, wait...!

Just kidding, awesome job. You're doing great, lad!

[nikiforos 450]

Excellent potential for this map although I would advice not to use default buildings from Altis and Stratis. Using the default buildings could kill the atmosphere of the map.

[digitalcenturion 20]

Nikiforos I think some of the default buildings will be just fine, and some from Arma 2. As I said, I am really not going for a purely scandinavian vibe on this. While unique custom buildings would be awesome it is not realistic at this time. One has got to be realistic.

[nikiforos 450]

@ DigitalCenturion Well some buildings could fit in no question about that , and I certainly respect your decision as a map maker. I would avoid the typical island civilian white houses though. I have to say that this is one of the best maps for flight missions :)

[Rydygier 1309]

Well, anyway I would avoid AiA TP dependency, unless it's still supported? Optimal way is most difficult, sadly - dedicated building objects. But here I'm a bit confused - it is intended to be Finnish map (thus buildings could be of such architecture), or based on Finninsh terrain, still balkan?

[lumnuon 295]

Well I personally and probably many others would love to see a 1 on 1 map. I think a real Finnish map would be quiet interesting. However I respect your decisions as the creator of the mod and I think it will be a great map regardless of the buildings architecture and right now there aren´t a lot of buildings that are fitting and enterable without a dependancy on AiA so I guess there isn´t much of a choice.