Sugar Lake [67 sq km river delta terrain]

[major_desync 137]

Sugar Lake v1.51

by Major Desync

 

Background

Sugar Lake is a township in the Vieilhomme Delta. A hub for oil exploration and extraction, Sugar Lake has extensive port facilities servicing a number of oil rigs and refineries in the surrounding wetlands. These include the Sugar Lake Oil Field, owned and operated by Vrana Petrochemicals, a division of the multinational conglomerate Vrana Industries.

Given the strategic importance of these assets, Sugar Lake is home to two recently requisitioned military installations - Joint Air Facility (JAF) Sugar Lake (formerly Sugar Lake “International†Airport) and Camp Burnside (formerly Sugar Lake Marina). The military detachments in these bases are supported in local security and counterinsurgency actions by a number of private military contractors (PMCs). The most prominent of these is Ion Services, which operates out of an extensive facility in the port. 

The security provided by these forces has encouraged the government to locate several of its displaced persons (DP) camps in Sugar Lake, housing citizens internally displaced by the virulent insurgency that wrack the country. Some of these refugees have voluntarily fled conflict zones, others have been resettled as a result of Ward of the Government Orders. Corporate Social Responsibility Pacts with a number of private enterprises, including Vrana Industries, provide these refugees with welcome opportunities to supplement their subsistence allowances with Productivity Credits by working in the local oil and port facilities. Insurgent and other criminal groups have tried to exploit the DP camps as recruiting grounds, but thanks to the vigilance of the government, the military and their PMC security partners, their efforts have been unsuccessful thus far. 

The Vieilhomme Delta is a maze of bayous, channels and watercourses of varying size, and low-lying islands covered with tall marsh grass and patches of dense forest. The wetlands are infested with a number of anti-government militias. According to government sources, several of these insurgent groups are proxies for foreign states and non-state actors bent on the destabilisation of the country. Moreover, many insurgents are affiliated with international organised crime syndicates, who have made Vieilhomme Delta a highway for narcotic and arms, and human trafficking. 

Features: 

• Terrain dimensions: 8.2 km x 8.2 km 
• Terrain area: 67.1 sq. km (same area as Zargabad)
• Heightmap resolution: 4 m/pixel 
• Elevation range: -15 m to +16 m 

• Approx 280,000 objects drawn from A1, A2, and A3; AiATP or CUP Terrains is a required addon.
• Vast majority of buildings enterable.
• Low-lying river delta marsh terrain, with high marsh-grass and patches of dense woodland; many navigable bayous, bays, and channels. 
• A large low-density urban area surrounded by levees, and several small outlying delta settlements. 
• A large industrial port facility, with a number of different compounds, including a PMC base, several shipping container yards, and oil storage plants.
• An air-base, with extensive hinterland and associated radome installation, military camp, and fuel storage facility, all surrounded by levees.
• A military camp with extensive dock, field hospital and airmobile facilities. 
• A range of industrial facilities including several oil refineries and isolated outlying extraction rigs and installations.

Sugar Lake's size, topography, ground cover, and locations make it perfect for amphibious operations involving boats, subs, and divers, and/or airmobile elements, as well as counterinsurgency search-and-destroy missions, and/or insurgency raids against military or industrial infrastructure and/or personnel. The various oil and port installations are suitable for close combat and MOUT. This is not an ideal map for extensive armoured maneuvers, aside from convoys. However, Sugar Lake does offer a chance for amphibious vehicles to shine. 

Required Addons: 
CUP Terrains OR All in Arma Terrain Pack (note AIATP is no longer being updated, so CUP Terrains is recommended)

Licence:
This addon is released under the Arma Public Licence Share Alike (APL-SA) licence 

Media:

Screenshots

Video showcase by MS Leveldesigns

Video Zeus flythrough by Hisashi Nagato. 

Review by Officially Lost.

 

Change log:
Beta v1.0: First release.
 

Beta v1.1 (16/11/15)

FIXED: Error message on start-up: “Cannot Load Texture Ca\misc3\wf\data\black.pac†by removing several objects including tents from the DP camps. (Thank you Auss for the pro tip!)

FIXED: Placement and height of a number of objects - including oil platforms, wood docks, powerlines etc.

ADDED: More pier ladders to oil facilities and wooden piers to make it easier/possible to climb out of water. 

 

Beta v1.2  (26/04/16)

FIXED: Ugly artifacting on dirt textures due to new parallax mapping. 

FIXED: Various misplaced objects (floating garbage bins, sandbags etc). 

TWEAKED: Sugar Lake now uses the CUP Terrains models for all pre-Arma3 objects. It is still compatible with All in Arma Terrain Pack as of this release date. 
TWEAKED: The following objects incompatible with the latest versions of MakePbo have been removed: Shooting_range_acr, seacat, garbage_metal, powgen_big, 
TWEAKED: The positions of some of the army_hut, hotel and yellow bungalow house objects, and objects around them to compensate for inconsistent positioning in CUP Terrains. 
 

Beta v1.21 (hotfix for 1.60) (1/06/16)

TWEAKED: Config and surface textures to come up to 1.60 standard. Fixes the 1.60 Black Sky bug.

Thanks to james2464 and Makhno for the necessary know-how. 

 

Beta v 1.3 (10/07/16)

Visual Optimisation - Making Sugar Lake Sweet Again. 

ADDED: Some trees and bushes in marsh areas. 
TWEAKED: Config lighting settings. 
TWEAKED: Sat image to better match the default surface textures. 
TWEAKED: Some of the surface texture PAAs. 
TWEAKED: Heightmap - adding perlin noise to some underwater areas and smoothing the airfield runway, taxiways and aprons.

Thanks to t800a and Cype_revenge for hints and tips. 

 

Beta v 1.31 (20/08/16)

TWEAKED: Improved outside terrain.

 

Beta v 1.32 (23/08/16)

FIXED: In-game map grid is no longer divided into two large-scale grid squares. This fixes some issues with the GPS coordinates and some features of ACE3. 

Thanks to Makhno for the pro-tip.

 

Beta v 1.4 (14/04/18)

TWEAKED: Water colour now changed to muddy delta brown (props to Bludski and the Cambodian Playground dev team for the config settings)
ADDED: 1 new industrial area in the port featuring APEX objects
ADDED: Scattered APEX objects to the oil facilities and town areas
FIXED: Map glitch (fixed by A3 update)
FIXED: Issue with bulletproof windows in some CUP A2 buildings (fixed by CUP updates)
FIXED: Issue with CUP A2 army hut objects (fixed by CUP updates).
FIXED: Buzzards now land without stalling on autopilot (fixed by A3 update)

 

v 1.5 (05/05/18)
ADDED: More Apex and Malden objects across the map.
FIXED: Some misplaced objects from v1.4

 

v 1.51 (05/05/18)
FIXED: Some misplaced objects from v1.5

 

Known Issues:
1: The row of buildings at grid 056978 has a weird lighting glitch, where they do not appear to reflect the ambient artificial light after dark. However, it will reflect vehicle lights, and lights placed via Zeus.
2: A3 water is invisible through A2 windows, which gives players x-ray underwater specs when looking through them.
3: Since v1.2, running Sugar Lake with All in Arma Terrain Pack, produces an annoying, but harmless error message requiring the CUP_Ca_Plants_E2 addon when launching Arma 3. Select OK to close the message and resumes the game launch. As of this release, Sugar Lake is still fully compatible with the All in Arma Terrain Pack.
4: Some of the A2 trees do not play nice with the new A3 lighting. 

 

Credits & Thanks:
Silola for the outstanding X-Cam mod, with which most of the objects in this terrain were placed, and without which this terrain would have been delivered in multiples of the time and fractions of the quality. 
CAPTNCAPS (teamproskill) and FSF for their ever helpful Terrain tutorials. 
Bushlurker, M!lkman, Jakerod, Uro, Aus and the many others who offer help and advice in the Arma 3 Terrain forums. 
Mikero, whose tools underwrite most of the the Arma modding community. 
Gav for alpha testing. 
BIS for producing the Arma series.

 

Download links:

Steam Workshop

Armaholic

PlayWithSix

[cosmic10r 2331]

Thank you Sir!!!!!!

[McLupo 118]

Hi,

a great deal of work and effort went into achieving this result, I guess and this effort has really paid off, because it looks awesome.

Thank you very much for this great island and giving up your valuable time. 

 

Greetings

McLupo

[Tonto- 43]

Armaholic link is not working. :(

 

Congrats for the release.

 

EDIT:

Really imaginative map. Looks really good and unique with all those platforms.

 

And it runs well. :)

[major_desync 137]

@Tonto-: Thank you! Armaholic may not have cleared it yet. I'll take down the link until I get confirmation. Cheers for the feedback!

 

Update: It's live now - fill your boots with all that lovely Armahol.  :811:  

[Richie 330]

Go Major

Another awesome terrain :D

[semiconductor 309]

Wow, this map looks very interesting! Too bad I can't try it until tomorrow.
Congratulations on release! :)

[stburr91 1002]

Looks awesome, I can't wait t explore the marshlands.

 

I was just playing around today in the marsh in Altis, and was very disappointed to learn that almost all of the water there is too shallow for even the CRRC, so Sugar Lake should be pretty fun. 

[cosmic10r 2331]

I had a quick drive thru and it really is unique. ..

[Xorpane 35]

Very nice work,

Congratulations to your release. :D

Greetings

Xorpane

[1para{god-father} 105]

Congratz on release, great work ! 

[Guest]

Thanks for sending us the release and sorry for the delay, I took a day off ;)

Release frontpaged on the Armaholic homepage.

Sugar Lake v1.0

All in Arma Terrain Pack (AiA TP)

OR

CUP Terrains

[Neviothr 102]

awesomesouce.exe

[Auss 208]

1: Error message on start-up: “Cannot Load Texture Ca\misc3\wf\data\black.pacâ€; This appears to be harmless, and may be an All in Arma Terrain Pack (AiATP) issue.

 

thats caused by a warfare building possibly a bunker or sand bag, check your addons and remove WF content.

[kecharles28 197]

New mod v1.0 available at withSIX. Download now by clicking:

Hey major_desync , you can upload updates or new mods to withSIX yourself now!

Make your own promo page, get the power to release your work at your own point of choosing.

To learn more, follow this guide.

[SavageCDN 231]

Congrats on release looks great!

[stburr91 1002]

All I can say is, man, what a mess. Do you know how hard it's going to be to find rebels, pirates, and smugglers in that maze of deltas? I can't wait to start doing some missions.

 

Great job, there's one problem. This awesome map really highlights the lack of good boat, and ship assets that there are currently.

 

One suggestion. You seem to be very good at using the piers to create platforms, do you think you could do an oil rig platform out in the middle of the water?  Something similar to what you have in the north west part of the map, by not connected to any land, and have multiple levels to it. 

 

Anyway, great work, and congrats on the release.

 

ETA: Have you mapped out the elevations for the platforms, particularly the platform Calico Alpha? The new 3d editor will make it much easier, but in the mean time, I was just wondering what the elevations were, so people could place units in the 2d editor.

[docclf 12]

:o  Looks awesome, Congratulations to your release. B)

 

 

MfG Doc

[major_desync 137]

One suggestion. You seem to be very good at using the piers to create platforms, do you think you could do an oil rig platform out in the middle of the water?  Something similar to what you have in the north west of the map, by not connected to any land, and have multiple levels to it. 

 

Anyway, great work, and congrats on the release.

 

ETA: Have you mapped out the elevations for the platforms, particularly the platform Calico Alpha? The new 3d editor will make it much easier, but in the mean time, I was just wondering what the elevations were, so people could place units in the 2d editor.

 

Thank you! The two Calico platforms and Sugar Lake Alpha (don't have grid to hand, but it's on Sugar Lake Bayou) are the nearest to what you describe. I need to add some more ladders to SL Alpha to make it more accessible, as I was having issues getting aboard it yesterday.

 

Heights - I have not mapped them in detail, but I've found that height values of 5.9-6.1 will get doods to sit nicely on the main level decks in most of the platforms (certainly the two Calicos). Another 1-2 metres gets doods on the raised decks of the oil rigs and values of about 10.5 will put doods on the elevated pipe walkways on Calico Alpha. 

 

I've been using MCC/Zeus to do some unit placement on these platforms and while its not 100% reliable, it'll get a lot of the doods placed, and you can tweak the rest in the 2d Editor (until Eden arrives and this all becomes moot hopefully). 

[stburr91 1002]

Thank you! The two Calico platforms and Sugar Lake Alpha (don't have grid to hand, but it's on Sugar Lake Bayou) are the nearest to what you describe. I need to add some more ladders to SL Alpha to make it more accessible, as I was having issues getting aboard it yesterday.

 

Heights - I have not mapped them in detail, but I've found that height values of 5.9-6.1 will get doods to sit nicely on the main level decks in most of the platforms (certainly the two Calicos). Another 1-2 metres gets doods on the raised decks of the oil rigs and values of about 10.5 will put doods on the elevated pipe walkways on Calico Alpha. 

 

I've been using MCC/Zeus to do some unit placement on these platforms and while its not 100% reliable, it'll get a lot of the doods placed, and you can tweak the rest in the 2d Editor (until Eden arrives and this all becomes moot hopefully). 

 

 

For the oil platform, I was thinking something like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65fSWQSHvUw

 

 

I was using Zeus to do a quick mission to take the Calico Alpha, it's pretty easy to set units up onto the platform. Needless to say, that my AI teammates didn't move well up on the platform, but that's to be expected. 

 

I'm off to explore the deltas some more, hopefully, I'll run into the pirates, or smugglers. 

[silola 1086]

Wow Major, realy awesome work.

I like especially this idea ... :)

Thanks a lot for this.

Greeting

Silola

[Nummi 12]

This in an exceptionally creative and impressing map. 10/10!

[ares_military_recrutement 10]

Hey Major_Desync,

amazing map, thank you for your excellent work! It looks very beautiful and has a very high potential for a lot of training, roleplay and missions.

We are looking forward to use this map as our standard training area, but we had some serious game crashes (to the desktop) on mulitiple clients (6), possibly in relation with our mod package or someting unknown.

 

We already tested (about 5hours) some configurations and possible errors to extrapolate the problem:

 

Our final answer is:

"Some Mods seems to increase the occurence of critical game-crashes, but the error will occur with Arma Vanilla and AiATP on dedicated server and in the editor, also."

 

Can someone reproduce these crashes or has some similar incidents?

 

Lookin' forward to find and solve the problem.

 

Best greetings,

 

Glenn Lambert, ARES Military

TS: 88.198.46.199

[sic-disaster 311]

Looking really good!

[major_desync 137]

Update: v1.1 is live on Steam, Armaholic and PW6 now. 

 

EDITED TO ADD:

Beta v1.1 (16/11/15)

FIXED: Error message on start-up: “Cannot Load Texture Ca\misc3\wf\data\black.pac†by removing several objects including tents from the DP camps. (Thank you Auss for the pro tip!)

FIXED: Placement and height of a number of objects - including oil platforms, wood docks, powerlines etc.

ADDED: More pier ladders to oil facilities and wooden piers to make it easier/possible to climb out of water. 

 

Also - to tempt you to dive into the murky(ish) waters of Sugar Lake, I knocked together a basic 4-player Coop mission for Sugar Lake called Operation Cottonmouth. It's built with a low barrier to entry - the only mods you need are Sugar Lake and either AiATP or CUP Terrains. 

 

It's also my first attempt at a published mission - so any bug reports or feedback are very welcome! 

 

********

[Co4] Operation Cottonmouth

 

Insurgents have seized control of several oil facilities near the town of Sugar Lake, and taken the workers hostage. Recapture the oil platforms and rescue the hostages. 

A basic multi-player mission to introduce the Sugar Lake terrain. 

Features: 
- vanilla A3 factions, units and vehicles (FIA and AAF)
- Farook's Revive 
- Player and Vehicle Respawn 
- Access to Arsenal to customise player loadouts 
- Access to unarmed helos, unarmed amphibious vehicles, assault boats, and SDVs. 

Requires: 
- Sugar Lake terrain 
- All in Arma Terrain pack OR CUP Terrains 

 

Available now on Steam