Decorating Bases

[HeroesandvillainsOS 1504]

So have you ever gone to make a mission and then just sit there, cross-eyed, completely lost about how to get started decorating your base? Yeah, that's me right now. My inspiration is completely zapped.

I'm actually quite proud of the bases I've built in some of my missions recently. I like to make long-term persistent campaigns, and I don't know about you, but when it's time to hang things up for the night, it's a neat feeling when you drive or chopper into a nicely decorated home. :)

But I'm just sitting here, blank-minded; cursing the Arma spirits trying to figure out how to get started decorating some hangers (hangers have always been my arch-nemesis).

Anyway, I figure this might be a decent place to share tips or screenshots, or just general base building vent-rage posting. I'll have to take some screenshots of some of my favorite custom decorated ones at some point. They're not "Donbass" quality but I enjoy them. Maybe it'll motivate me to get some Chernarus decorating going and stop asking WHY IS THERE 5 HANGERS on this forsaken base?

Some of them will be for military stuff , obviously, which is as easy as just plunking down some vehicles (etc). But I kind of have fun making brefing areas and ammo stations and mess-halls when I'm in the groove and whatnot. But right at this moment, nothing is coming to me. Inspiration is funny like that.

So I guess if you like to build or decorate maps, welcome! Or this thread will just get buried but I'm out of ideas so why not, maybe a discussion on the topic will help me or motivate someone else to enjoy that aspect of the editor.

[bigpoppablunts 53]

I did a war room for a group I used to be in. Everyone seemed to like it. It wasnt finished in the video.

 

https://youtu.be/nPHPskgVPPE?t=59s

 

~Oh and I just recognized the name. I'm Riley on the ALiVE forums. Hello again!

[HeroesandvillainsOS 1504]

OMG that's awesome and better than anything I've ever done! Wow.

And it's in a hanger no less! :)

How the....

How the heck did you do that? Are the barriers, ginormous map and camcorder items available in the vanilla editor? It's beautiful.

[bigpoppablunts 53]

Most of that TV studio, etc. was in the AiA map pack. Have no idea if it is included in CUP maps or not.

[haleks 8212]

That's going to be an interesting topic; I have loads of unfinished and overly ambitious projects - will share some screens soon! ;)

[Rich_R 1087]

Great topic!

 

Heres a mountain top base I cooked up

 

 

 

And using one of the older hangers.........some atmosphere!

 

 

As with other posters, I'll take pics of the others as I come across them :)

[HeroesandvillainsOS 1504]

Wow! I'm jealous. I can't seem to find that wooden wall item. Does anyone know if it's available in vanilla or CUP?

Not to veer OT because this thread is cool (so let's just leave it at this), but I think I discovered an issue with certain objects and FPS degradation/out-of-memory crashes. My new method of mission making is to decorate my bases first before placing ALiVE modules, units and unit assets (etc). I basically build the bases first before doing anything mission related. After putting down some CUP Russian barracks, some guard buildings and a few other objects, my editor FPS went into the tubes and my system slowed to a crawl.

I've been building bases with straight up vanilla assets for quite some time and never had any issues, but this thread has motivated to experiment with new objects. Only one other time I had this happen to me in the editor and that was after downloading DonbassCZ's Kunduz bases which also uses non-vanilla assets and I had to ditch it due to this.

I have a suspicion some of these objects have issues with the engine (what else could it be? That's all I've done. Decorate bases). Again, I don't want to go into this here but I'll just put that out there incase some of you smarter folks notice anything and can make a definite correlation. Something is definitely up though!

[serjames 357]

Any chance people would share those templates ? Some nice assets for the community there !

[Rich_R 1087]

The wooden walls are vanilla. The can be found under walls>shoot house (I believe  :huh:  )

 

I agree with you, depending on whats placed, FPS can be severely affected. Doesn't matter how pretty something is, if its unplayable, its unplayable! Another factor in performance are the terrains themselves. The more complex bases are usually best built on older high performing terrains such as those found in CUP.

 

Speaking of which CUP is a base builders gold mine. SOOO much good stuff can be found in there and a lot of players use it, certainly for the terrains.

[das attorney 858]

Try and use simpleObjects for physx based classes - I don't think it makes much/any difference for static class based objects but fps is better for simpleObjs than physx objects for sure.

[HeroesandvillainsOS 1504]

Try and use simpleObjects for physx based classes - I don't think it makes much/any difference for static class based objects but fps is better for simpleObjs than physx objects for sure.

Can you give me an example of a physics based object versus a simple object? Are we talking something like campfire (physics) versus flatscreen tv (simple static object)?

I'm not sure if it's relevant, but I disable simulation on everything I possibly can. The only things I don't are things like light sources and objects I need to interact with. Everything else decorative gets its simulation disabled in an effort to conserve FPS.

Still trying to figure out a way to place a lit lantern on a table though! Every combination of simulation enabled/disabled for both the table and lantern either results with the lantern on the floor, the lantern sunk into the table, or the lantern losing most of its illumination.

Regarding the FPS degradation. I'm not taking about lowered performance from using too many objects. I'm talking about things moving so slowly it's literally a slide show and my system acts like its about to crash. Sorry if I wasn't clear. Again, I don't want to derail the thread though. I more or less just wanted to put that out there so some of you more savvy folks might someday catch it and report it (and of course I'll do the same if I figure out what it is). This is on Chernarus BTW which is my first time with the map.

Speaking of Chernarus, so the bases I want to liven up (the southern and northern most airfields) are extremely barren. They don't really have any fences or anything so I kind of have to start from scratch. Does anyone have any screenshots overlooking an airfield I could look at for inspiration? I placed a bunch of h-barriers to make a proper fence but honestly it's quite boring looking. I'm so used to bases on most maps having pre-built fortification I can't say I've ever built my own fences before.

[das attorney 858]

You can tell which is which in the config viewer, so anything derived from "thingX" is physics enabled, but anything derived from "static" does not have any physics and does not really benefit from having the simulation switched off.  (Look at the "parents" tab to see what an object is derived from).

 

The example of your TV is a physics object, not a static object:

["Land_FlatTV_01_F","Items_base_F","thingX","Thing","All"]

So yes, you can disable the simulation on them, but they still suck up a reasonable amount of resources.  Look on the wiki about simple objects and try and replace as much as possible with them,  (Obv as mentioned, there are questionably marginal gains for replacing "static" classed objects, but def worth it for "thingX" classed objects).  There are some downsides but if your base is turning into a jerkathon, then it might be worth checking out what you can convert (or even delete if it's just a frivolity and adds nothing to the base).

 

To demonstrate, go into VR editor and plop a unit down.  Then start playing and paste this into debug console.  Then restart and try it with the other code. 

0 = 0 spawn {
    onEachFrame {
        hintSilent format ["FPS: %1", diag_fps]
    };
    _start = diag_tickTime;
    _thing = "Land_ButaneCanister_F" createVehicleLocal (position player);
    _position1 = getPos player;
    _position2 = getPosWorld _thing;
    deleteVehicle _thing;
    for "_i" from 1 to 100 do {
        for "_j" from 1 to 100 do {
            _coord = _position1 vectorAdd [_i,_j,_position2 select 2];
            _thing = createSimpleObject ["A3\Structures_F_EPA\Items\Tools\ButaneCanister_F.p3d",_coord];
        };
    };
    diag_log format ["finished in %1 seconds",diag_tickTime - _start];
    systemChat format ["finished in %1 seconds",diag_tickTime - _start];
};

0 = 0 spawn {
    onEachFrame {
        hintSilent format ["FPS: %1", diag_fps]
    };
    _start = diag_tickTime;
    _position1 = getPos player;
    for "_i" from 1 to 100 do {
        for "_j" from 1 to 100 do {
            _coord = _position1 vectorAdd [_i,_j,0];
            _thing = createVehicle ["Land_ButaneCanister_F",_coord,[],0,"can_collide"];
            _thing enableSimulationGlobal false;
        };
    };
    diag_log format ["finished in %1 seconds",diag_tickTime - _start];
    systemChat format ["finished in %1 seconds",diag_tickTime - _start];
};

[HeroesandvillainsOS 1504]

How do I take sweet screenshots outside of just spawning in as my player? Is there a free-roam camera I can use in the game world?

[Rich_R 1087]

Hit escape, select camera on the bottom of the window that appears and fly around to your heart's content. Use the backspace key (by default) to remove the overlay grid and use whatever you pic taking button is!

 

To your concern about the monotony of making fences, they're sorted of needed for authenticity so here's how I do it.

 

• Lay down the first piece letting the editor place at 0 degrees (I usually use a nearby runway as its flat)
• Add the second, connect so it looks pretty,
• Highlight and Copy the first two pieces and paste (CTRL C and CTRL V)
• Match the pasted parts up
• repeat
• When you have enough move and rotate them into position
• Copy and paste until it runs the needed length
• Do this until you have a perimeter fence :)
• Go back and adjust the height as you see fit and your attention to detail warrants.

[HeroesandvillainsOS 1504]

Rich_R, you're the man (or woman! Though I'd presume man due to your name unless it just means you have a lot of money! :) )! I'll grab some proper ones here shortly!

In the meantime, in the spirit of keeping this thread cool, this shot was just laying around on my Dropbox. It's nothing special decoration-wise (just a very simple briefing area I use to let players spawn AI teammates from), but I took it a week or so ago because I was super happy with the lighting.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8yrbg52x5klxql1/20160814012716_1.jpg?dl=0

I used Arma 3 tools to convert the Iraq map image into a .paa file so it wasn't just a boring seismic map. On the very right, you can see the red helipad light where my choppers are. I had plans to decorate that hanger further but that base is so jam packed with other things I added (and the base itself is ENORMOUS), I didn't think it would be wise to add any more FPS eating objects. Diyala has a hard enough time as it is.

[HeroesandvillainsOS 1504]

  

 

Here's a little rec area I decorated on Diyala. The two boxes on the front are arsenal and loadout manager (from Spyder Addons) points, and it's the initial place I have the player spawn at so it's pretty neat (albeit pretty simple).

 

EDIT: Thanks guys, I simply cant get the picture to work when using the post editor and the image button. I figured it (finally) out by just using the code around the URL instead.

[angel24marin 34]

http://postimage.org

[EO 11277]

@heroes......i post screenies in the photography thread all the time using imgur, with no issues mate, i drag and drop straight from my steam screenshots folder.....on the very odd occasion imgur may not process the image first time around, but it always works out in the end, if i were you I would persevere with imgur, screenshot quality is never compromised......and i agree with your view on Photobucket.....ghastly quality loaded with spam and all sorts of nastiness. :P