LOST BROTHERS SINAI UPDATE 1.4

[miles teg 1]

On behalf of the Lost Brothers mod team, I would like to announce the long awaited release of our Sinai update version 1.4. In this update the map is radically redone and is almost an entirely different version compared to our initial release and Panzerfaust's later update.

Amongst the updates include:

Completely new and more accurate Suez City (sorry the place is pretty grungy in real life so that's how we made it).

New police station in Suez City.

3 new airports with the new main airbase in Israeli territory.

New Israeli city of Eliat

Tons of new objects.

Catshit's Afghanistan maps are no longer required.

The map now gives better frame rates so it allows for larger missions with more units then the old map.

Dahab and Sharm Al-Sheikh are redone to be more realistic.

New Palistinian refugee camp.

New border fences.

All necessary third party addons are included. Please read the Readme file before using.

Oh...and there is a demo mission included in the pack that uses only BIS addons. Its a very simple mission so don't expect much, however its actually really nice if you use it with the ECP mod.

Oh also... word of warning. The OLD LoBo missions won't all work with the new map since stuff has gotten moved. But I am in the process of updating those old missions and will release those in a seperate mission pack.

Anyhooo...without further adooo...here are the links:

Sinai 1.4 download link 1

Sinai 1.4 download link 2

If anyone can mirror the site that would be great.

Hereis also some pics from the map:

[im]http://ofp.gamezone.cz/news/pics2/LoBoSinai4.jpg[/img]>100kb

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>

The Lost Brothers Mod Team Leader

[dusand 0]

I wanted to mirror it on our FTP, but it is there, yet   . So, I guess I just post a news about it. The pics look good. Nice work.  

EDIT: Damn, cervo has alredy posted it.

[Metalmalte 0]

can't i dl the needed addons as sinlg epackages? or are they all put into one pbo?

nice island from the screens!

[miles teg 1]

All the extra addons you need are included in the download.

Just download and UNRAR everything into your addons directory except for the mission in that missions folder. That you put into your Missions directory.

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>

[Snake Man 407]

The download is 85mb, what are the third party addons you have included here?

[Chris Death 0]

@Snake Man:

if you would know the third party addons being used,

it won't help you, as the sinai map refers to it's own

version of them.

There comes now into my mind a nice discussion over at

Bahadur islands release thread; ppl were complaining about

so much 3rd party addons to download, and the majority

stands for putting them all into an bahadur_o.pbo file, so

you are not bothered with searching and d'loading them

all.

All addons being used are included in sinai's own objects

pbo file, and nobody needs to worry about wether he's missing

something or not.

@Miles - was it the shops in the last screenie, you mentioned

last time?

~S~ CD

[miles teg 1]

Yeah those shops needed some touch up work as well as some other objects that in the objects pbo file include:

LoBo_Block0  1 through 8

If you can it would be great if those objects could be made to match everything else a little better so that they don't look so clean and look more dirty and realistic.  Our main problem is that we can't replace them unless the new buildings are exactly the same size otherwise the map would get screwed up.   So we figured it would probably be better just to retexture them or just modify their textures a bit.

Oh...but as for the question about a list of 3rd party addons.  To be quite honest at least one of them is next to impossible to locate, and some of them may not work with updated versions.   It would take me many many hours of trial and error testing to figure out which versions of the objects packs that they originally came from.  Also some of our LoBo Objects require the textures or models from the 3rd party addons which can sometimes get messed up if the wrong version is used.  

So we decided that to avoid all of the headaches just to include all of the required addons that have been tried and tested in isolated mod folders.  

I also should mention that the 3rd party addons actually are the smaller files. The bulk of the size of our new Sinai island is due to our LoBo files containing our collection of objects and textures required for the map.

I know it sucks really bad for dial-up users though.   But it would require just as much time to download the individual 3rd party addons as it would just downloading this whole pack.  If you use some time of program that allows you to download the addon a few chunks at a time and then continue later, if it doesn't work on ofp.info or other mirrored sites let me know and I'll give you a link to our small FTP site.

Another option, if you have a public library near you with internet access or an internet cafe near you, is to invest in a 256meg USB memory stick and download big OFP stuff onto there.  I do that sometimes when I'm at my school or I burn OFP stuff onto CDR's there since they have a faster connection then what I have at home.

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>

[Kin Hil 0]

Thank you Lost Brothers Mod Team!

[eestikas88 0]

i have to try this one

[Ironsight 1]

Tried it out yesterday and I must say it's a really good island. Everything looks very realistic and there are lots of mission possibilities given the fact that you included for example realistic borders and a refugee camp. Though there are still quite a few bugs and things I didn't like:

1. Palm forests fall as it is one tree so you will see palms hanging in the mid air.

2. Can't run over the market stalls, which should be done quite easily with a Merkava, but it looks now like a big block of croncrete.

3. Flickering harbours in Eilat. If you higher or lower the docks a bit it should be solved.

4. I had quite some lag, I don't know if it's because of my computer but it lags even more then Tonal

5. Some buildings had missing textures, can't remember which buildings it were though.

6. I don't know if you used the BIS appartments or your own but I have some lightning problems on them, sharping the edges should solve that.

If you solve these things it's a great island and then it would deserve a 9/10

[offtime 0]

i didnt test it yet but from what i see on screens

9/10 should be given at least for all the efford puted into it

doesnt look anything like other boring islands ppl make for a weekend and then release them as betas.

[klavan 0]

I've downloaded and tried it yesterday and I must say that all you guys have done a great work, really!

My only problems with this stuff is the lag (I've got an high-end PC, but maybe with a combination of setviewdistance and something else it should be OK) and some building's textures (but nothing important).

I expecially appreciate the large roads that passes through the towns: the AI (at least the infantry and the smallest vehicles) proves to be comfortable in CQB situations.

I realy like realistic maps and this one is one of the better I've seen 'till now, that's for sure!

However here's a (veryvery) short wishlist:

-Sandstorms

-Music and sounds (minaret chantings, radio loops, and similar)

And all will be perfect!

Keep up the great work, guys!

Klavan

[StealthTiger 0]

High speed data transfer mirrors from Stealth-Net:

Lost Brothers - Sinai Update v1.4

Enjoy!

[dusand 0]

There comes now into my mind a nice discussion over at

Bahadur islands release thread; ppl were complaining about

so much 3rd party addons to download, and the majority

stands for putting them all into an bahadur_o.pbo file, so

you are not bothered with searching and d'loading them

all.

All addons being used are included in sinai's own objects

pbo file, and nobody needs to worry about wether he's missing

something or not.

You're right. Many people were disappointed of high number of the required addons. They were looking forward to Bahadur but they didn't download it because that huge list of required things.

Sinai 1.4 did a good job attaching the addons into the rar archive.

[Mox 0]

Great work from Lobo!, smart thinking about all the addons in one package too.

A few notes though,

-I missed some (or at least one) Island anims.

-I.m.v.h.o the current Island lags too much.

From reading the first feed-back, I'm not the only one struck with this inconvenience.

Lag is THE usage-killer of every custom project, wheter it's a small addon or a huge -time intensive- project like this.

I was also wondering what standard's you are using to test performance since the release already mentions a overall performance increase in this version ?

I dont have a superb dual CPU/GPU test-rig but am getting

around 20-30fps on Tonal (unit amounts and viewdistance related), which is -so to speak- kindoff my

default comparisson Island for new releases.

I'd hate to see yet another great Island wasted because of this and I'm realy curious what Lobo's thoughts are about this, especially since -from the looks of it- all objects are placed with great care and the overall object count is way less then anything near Tonal's for example.

[miles teg 1]

Wow...thats wierd. My old computer that I tested this island on was a 1.33 ghz AMD T-Bird with 512 meg of RAM and a cheapo 128 meg TNT2 graphics card.

So it was my no means a high end computer. But also I had the view distance set to default (which I believe is 900) and the graphics settings at 800X600 32bit and with shadows off and terrain detail set to low.

Nevertheless I experienced much less lag then on the original Sinai map and certainly far less lag then what I get on Tonal.

My new computer, a 2.8 gig Emachines PC with 750 megs of RAM and a 128 meg GF4 video card likewise runs pretty smooth on the map with view distance set to 1500 and at 1024x768x32. All other graphics settings are at default and my benchmark settings are 4792.

However... the important things to look at are.

1. Viewdistance. If its something over 1500, then yeah you may get problems.

2. Also VERY important.... What units are you using? The Egyptian units in our last addon pack only had 1 LOD so they will lag this map like crazy if you use alot of them.

In our soon to be released addon pack #3, we fixed that so there should be much less lag. Also if you many units from high-res addons or addons that use heavy scripts, then you may run into problems. My demo mission also lags a bit with ECP but it also has a ton of units on it.

3. check your terrain detail. For smoothest performance it should be set to low or very low. Anything higher then normal will cause significant lag.

As for the bugs:

Yeah all those bugs are known and will be fixed very soon when our Iran/Iraq map beta is released with an updated object pack. So the missing tetures will be fixed, the lighting problems, the tree groves falling down all wierd.

Also there are some huge problems with the apartment clusters we made from the BIS buildings (to lower object count). Fixing one bug we've had with that should help the lag also. So when our next map is released, if you put it and the updated object pack in the same mod folder as this one, it should fix alot of problems.

But aside from those things, I hope you'll mess around with the settings and enjoy the map. If you like this map, I think you'll like our upcoming Iran/Iraq map which have plenty of flat areas of Iraq for tank battles, some good urban areas, as well as mountainous areas of Iran. But we still need to work on the marshland areas (trying to find good marshgrass) and fix up some of the urban areas of Basrah and other cities.

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>

[Snake Man 407]

The rar contains the following addons:

AGS_build.pbo

AGS_inds.pbo

ags_port.pbo

Baracken.pbo

F3WX_O1.pbo

JOF_Objects1.pbo

MAP_Heaps.pbo

MAP_MilObj-Pack.pbo

MAP_Shed.pbo

RKSL-Hangers.pbo

RKSL-HASN2.pbo

xobridge.pbo

These addon pbo's total to 31.7mb rarred up (max compression of course).

Thats all I wanted to know before download, well lesson learned.

[miles teg 1]

Oh, Ok. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I thought you meant that you needed the name of the packs they came in and the version number and all that.

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>

[Placebo 29]

Miles Teg please watch your image sizes.

[miles teg 1]

Ooops...sorry. I normally check all of the file sizes of pics before posting...damn..that one musta slipped past me.

Sorry about that.

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>