Terrain editing

[VladAlex 0]

Ok, arma is out, now we are all waiting our TOOLS !

We dont have any idea of the release date of majors tools. But I create that topic in order to let island makers exchange there idea. Visitor 3 is going to be a REVOLUTION. For the moment we know that :

The new Visitor 3 can convert satellite data to maps, including their height-maps and surface textures. Again, a Visitor light, token away some of the features, is meant to be released to the community. Due to the new streaming technology the size of the maps isn’t limited in any way. Rastavovich showed us a map with a size of 82x82km, mapped with satellite pictures and meant for the military. BIS experimented with cell sizes up to only 5m, but this will probably represent a problem with large maps. The new version of visitor also supports .png import.

The above-mentioned functions can automate different processes in Visitor. We were shown different examples: Objects were randomly placed, power poles were automatically created along roads. The most impressive thing we were shown was an automatic process to fit streets in the landscape. To make them look more natural, the world around them gets flattened or cut, streets going up a hill in serpentines actually look like real streets afterwards. Right now, it is rather unlikely that rivers will find their way into Armed Assault.

That is an extract from the last Mapfact.

We must prepare ourselves for that revolution. And that topic should be used as a think tank. How to design realistics environment ? How to find sattelite data ? How to create islands that fit perfectly with real location ? Questions are so numerous...

[NeMeSiS 11]

How to find sattelite data ?

Quote[/b] ]The new Visitor 3 can convert satellite data to maps, including their height-maps and surface textures. Again, a Visitor light, token away some of the features, is meant to be released to the community.

It doesnt literally say it but i think that the satellite to map feature is Visitor3/VBS2 only.

[rundll.exe 12]

In the WIki I read something about support for DEMs and a "legend" to put large statalite data in to game data.

I think this could be a great help to island makers, as they can make parts of the "real" world!

[VladAlex 0]

link please...

[rundll.exe 12]

BIKI

I did a little course in Geodata processing, and this looks like its possible to use satelite images:

and create an image that represents the various types of landuse.:

This is verry common to people working in the geodate/cartography sector. Software like ArcGis is capable of (semi) automaticly making those landuse images.

If all of this works it seems to be amazing how good we can make real world islands

[Daniel 0]

Parts of the real world have already been transferred accurately into OFP, check out Smiley's Afghanistan map. The trick is to get all the scaling right so that everything is as close to 1:1 in game.

But like you say, not much we can do for ArmA until we get the tools.

[Messiah 2]

lucky i've got access to edina digimap and cartography resources - should prove usefull.

DEM's are easy enough to come by, it just involves $$$ - and if you dont have a satelite photo of your island, I've been told that you'll just have to create your own (now thats gonna take some time)

[Daniel 0]

To be honest, for the size of islands possible in ArmA (I "think" up to 1600 sq km IIRC), the DEMs don't cost that much. I suppose Google Earth can help for satellite data in some areas. Hell, I looked up my mates house in Yorkshire the other day and zeroed in on her freakin treehouse!

[UNN 0]

Quote[/b] ]If all of this works it seems to be amazing how good we can make real world islands

I have my doubts about satelite images looking any better, in game and close up. It's major advantage seems to be the time saved creating real world locations.

Quote[/b] ]I've been told that you'll just have to create your own (now thats gonna take some time)

Yeah thats what worries me, I want to design an island that has balanced terrain features for at least two sides. At a push, perhaps we can use programs like Vista Pro and the World Creation Kit to generate texture maps automaticaly from 3D data.

[VladAlex 0]

An other important questions is how to place objects with precision ? I expect that visitor 3 allowed us to work with a layer satelite image...

[Daniel 0]

That would be cool.

[VladAlex 0]

Quote[/b] ]

This is verry common to people working in the geodate/cartography sector. Software like ArcGis is capable of (semi) automaticly making those landuse images.

I've got ArcGis Desktop, but how to transform a sattelite image into landuse image ?

[Balschoiw 0]

DEM´s can be found on the internet for free.

In OFP we were already able to use DEM´s to create islands with some 3rd party tools for importing and converting.

[berghoff 11]

I wonder what features will be taken away from Visitor3 for public use.

[Pierrot 0]

Do you know SRTM(Shuttle Radar Topography Mission)?

SRTM has maps all over the world with 90m mesh and espescially with 30m mesh in United States. All these maps are opent to public and you can use it freely.

http://srtm.usgs.gov/

[shinRaiden 0]

Elevation :

90m elevation data is - aside from laser-leveled flat car parking lots, imho useless for OFP/ARMA dev. I never use anything more than 30m resampled to 50m, and 10m resampled to 50m is noticablely better quality. Frankly, you need 10m source data -real or artificial - to really make it worthwhile.

Texturing :

There's two sides to the coin here, yes, with the megatexturing development system for Gen2 software every cell can be unique. However, that means every cell is indeed unique. A 512^512px paa texture is about 171kb. That may not sound like much, but it adds up in a hurry.

If you use the OFP standard of one texture per cell, you're looking at 11 gigabytes of paa's for a 12km map. The fact that we haven't heard screams of agony from the czech players suggests that whatever's in ArmA, isn't that horrendous, but still maintains unique texturing. It would be of interest to the map making community for some reports from those that have ArmA as to the size of the content involved in the packed and trimmed map data.

However, this does not resolve the issues around map content development. The source images are still going to have to be processed in a graphics editing program like photoshop, and from the community wiki we can see that there's several layers involved as well across multiple files. If you plan on using satellite imaging, may heaven have mercy on your system, because the TIFF files involved will bring any computer to it's knees.

Objects :

As if this wasn't bad enough, let's talk objects. Reports out say that the ArmA map has nearly a million objects. Has anyone managed a million objects practically in any map? I made one in WRPtool with 1.2 million higher poly VBS1 objects, and it slagged to edit due to the heavy system load. I don't have time to manually place 1.2 million banana trees in Visitor to test it's comparable capacity, plus it's all in czech.

Now for ArmA, the objects quantity and detail are going to be much higher. Again, we need some packed and unpacked numbers so that the community has some idea of the monster involved.

Summary :

Like with every other game out there now: Doom, HL2, BF2, GRAW, etc-etc, if you're not already doing this as your day job, your ability to effectively develop comparable level content is a joke. At the very least, map making especially will crush your system most likely.

Oh, and stay away from SDTS packaged DEM data, it's noisy. Grab NED if you can, or classic DEM. And microDEM will only punish you, accept your master.

[Messiah 2]

I have a funny feeling that we'll only be playing on sahrani for a long time to come

[klavan 0]

I have a funny feeling that we'll only be playing on sahrani for a long time to come

I've got the same impression: looks like both addon and island making difficulty level is increased with ArmA. I'm not saying it's impossible naturally, but I think it will take many more hours of work to put something of high quality ingame compared to OFP.

Maybe it's just me.....

Klavan

[metalchris 0]

lets wait and see , sure it is much more complicated to create a good map , but the potential is far greater than Visitors2's.

I bet , after some playing around , we will see some pretty good maps.

And for addons , the only thing that is more work is the two additional textures (normal and specular) , but from my experience they are done quite fast

[Heatseeker 0]

What i find interesting about Sahrani is its diversification in regards to decoration and content. There are desert/dry terrain textures and building styles, green grassy fields and rocky hills with a more eastern european urban and rural style.

I think that with all this much stock content terrain creators will be able to make diverse environment styles with no need (or small need) for aditional art work. (chechnya, Afghanistan, etc).

For example tropical islands, ME style desert/dry environments or EU (flashpointish) maps with dense forests and the likes.

Unlike OPF its all in there .

[fasad 1]

Ground textures and ground objects are definately the biggest increase in workload for island making. However, if we re-use the detail surface textures and types of Sahrani, we would only need to create a new satalite megatexture and layer map, which is not *that* much work. These only seem to have a resolution of ~1 pixel = 1m^2, and the layer map is essentially a simplification of the satalite map.

The rest of the changes are relatively minor :

terrain heightmap resolution has only increased by 1.2 ~ 5 times. Irrelevant as nobody manually creates terrain anyway.

Object count is at only twice as dense as OFP. (mapfact noe 2 has 777,777 objects on less than 100km^2). Also ground clutter is automatically created by the "layer map" rather than manually placing, removing some of the object workload.

Assuming you are using only sahrani ground types, I don't think it will be any more than twice the work per km^2 of OFP.

[Messiah 2]

yeah, i guess making new maps using the existing stock will be fairly simple, making good maps with new stuff will be the challenge.

[smiley nick 51]

Thought i would add my $2.

I dont think we need to worry too much about extra islands, sahrani will do us all just fine for a very long time.

I think with ofp, making islands was very user friendly, it was simple, hence why we had a very large mixture of terrain environments, some being realistic, some not, but it had the same genera with models, you get good ones, you get bad. Thats the diverse community that we are part off.

But seeing the added information from BIS regarding terrain editing, i did take a *gulp*, it appears they have gone down the route that i have always wanted, and thats to have layer masks and cell textures, but what comes with that feature is a hell of a lot more work. More money, and more time consuming.

I have a very grave feeling that any land masses that will be created from Arm A will have a high standard of work and quality, due to the extra features and time scale, in ofp you could make a island in what, 10 mins?

In a way this is good, as it "filters" out the "cant be bothered" type, yet it will decrease the limit of variation i think.

(bare in mind all that applies to "new" terrain environment, new elevations, new objects, new textures)

@shinRaiden

You obviously have great experience with terrain environments, and editing them, and experience with the programs, but i beg to differ the 90M STRM comment.

Yes 90m is still quite big, but i wouldn't say its not worth the while, as 90m can be used to good effect, all my dems i have used have been 90m, and they fit just right into the ofp engine, and with the 10m cells in Arm A, that 90m should fit in even better.

As for the "finding" of dems, and satellite images, there are a few free places on google, but i mysefl use Mapmart

they are an American company, and they have global data, ranging from all variations of maps, images, dems, vectors ect.

Now that Arm A can support satellite overlays its going to be very costly, and i think the landscapes that are (if any) created by whom, will be very passionate and dedicated to the project, as your average jo blog won't be willing to buy images and dems from a company and then release it for free? (correct me if im wrong)

All in all, the new tools sound fantastic, but i do think that the increase it options given to us now will filter out quite a lot of people who wish to make islands.

But we will only know when we all get our hands on Arm A and start playing around.

Nick

[bravo 6 0]

im not on this area, so i only can wish good inspirations with that especific edit so we can have also good inspirations for missions.

cheers to all colaborators and fans!

[Goeth 0]

in ofp you could make a island in what, 10 mins?

More like a month.