Terrain editing

[smiley nick 51]

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

More like a month.

Well obviously it depends on what island you are making, and how much effort you want to put into it.

But the actually process of getting a island into a game takes a matter of mins.

And this could all change in Arm A.

Nick

[Daniel 0]

Yeah this is all getting more complicated, but I don't really see it hindering island releases as much as some people seem to be saying. Hell, if we want an isolated scientific outpost in barren arctic wasteland, that isn't going to add up to much more than some simple elevations, a simple snow texture and a few scattered objects, no matter how complicated things get. We can build up from there, the same way we built up from retexturing BIS islands in OFP.

[oneoff 0]

personally i am hoping the map mathematics for vbs2 and arma will be similar and they can give us a few slices of theres, after all ofpr was a big recruiting ground and r&d for vbs and not much ever came back our way( some things did) , the traffic will hopefully be a 2 way street this time .

p.s i am ware of scale /detail/costs secracy etc. thats why i said a slice

[jakerod 254]

My 3 Main Islands:

Saint David: 3 Months

Lorient: 2 Months (My personal opinion of it is that I made it suck)

Avignon: 4 Months (And I still don't think it is that great)

And keep in mind those are 12.5km x 12.5km and not any of the massive ones plus it had quite a bit of ocean around them as well.

[Daniel 0]

Yeah, but those islands, while being extremely well made (St David being one of my favourites), they didn't venture too far from the original Nogova in terms of style. I don't see the point of making islands that replicate the terrain of Sahrani. Just because we can make 1600 sq km islands, doesn't mean we can't create an extemely detailed tiny island as Elliot Carver's islands demonstrate. Likewise, it isn't mandatory for huge islands to be as detailed as Sahrani. We just need to be dynamic about it.

[dm 9]

personally i am hoping the map mathematics for vbs2 and arma will be similar and they can give us a few slices of theres, after all ofpr was a big recruiting ground and r&d for vbs and not much ever came back our way( some things did) , the traffic will hopefully be a 2 way street this time .

p.s i am ware of scale /detail/costs secracy etc. thats why i said a slice

I doubt that it'll happen, nice as it would be.

Especially considering that people like the USMC and ADF pay for specific terrain areas, I recon they'd be pretty pissed if the content (even some of it) was made freely available to joe publics like us.

To be honest, I wouldn't have any hope for any form of "2 way traffic" between the VBS developers and the ArmA community. Probably best to just forget about VBS to be honest, I know I will.

[klavan 0]

Probably best to just forget about VBS to be honest, I know I will.

Sounds good!

Btw i'm sure BIS don't want scared modders and i'm still in a positive mood when thinking about future 3d users party releases.

Within few months we will probably get good tuts (both officials and unofficials) to start experimenting with in the right direction.

So for the moment we have to wait and see.....although nothing prevent us to start collecting usefull infos, links and to discuss projects and so on.

Klavan

[Vectum 0]

Heh , just thought about this , it might be possible to recreate The Netherlands in Arma? Don't know it's surface but it could be around 400x400 km2 :P

[Daniel 0]

Hey, if you fancy detailing it, go for it!

I think for good quality elevations the limit is around 40x40 km.

[oneoff 0]

Quote[/b] ]Probably best to just forget about VBS to be honest, I know I will

i agree and i did

but to save confusion,the creator of sahrani said it is based on actual satelite data and shaped to fit the campaign/story/game.

therefore i would hope that when the recruiting of arma community

stars begins for vbs2 ,some of those will feed back more to the arma community.As my footnote says i am aware of cost etc, but knowledge should be shared ,its what kept ofp going for so long .

[llauma 0]

Daniel @ Nov. 14 2006,20:36)]Hey, if you fancy detailing it, go for it!  

I think for good quality elevations the limit is around 40x40 km.

But on otherhand.. The Netherlands doesn't need any elevation at all. All you need it a flat surface.

It will take forever to create NL though. Even a Sahrani sized island requires an enormous amount of work, at least if you plan to create a populated area.

[VladAlex 0]

Its why it would be very usefull to create an tool that places object semi automatically. For exemple its possible to extract the road system from a map with ArcGis, then you just have to associate a specific color to the road system and it will place all the road needed for an island. Then some automatic script will place different object near the road (like electric polls, trees, fences ect ect...).

[Ian Malcolm 0]

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.

Well.. i just extracted the pbo with textures for the "desert" island, and the "satellite" textures in it are indeed 512x512, but each one seems to be used for covering area 500x500 meters. Here you can see example of two merged textures (there was small overlapping), containing the airstrip, wich is in game 627 (+-) meters long:

So the so called satellite map has way smaller resolution and there seems to be another set of textures used for detailtexturing.

[bravo 6 0]

ho man, this game is so damn realistic.. look at that pic

[fasad 1]

Ian Malcolm,

Could you please find some of the ground detail textures and tell us the resolution? As far as I can tell each ~1x1m pixel of the "layer map" defines what detail texture and ground clutter is used for that pixel. It's essentially a hi-res tile map.

For example, grass could be "\data\grass_lco.paa" (from the BI wiki). They might be defined somewhere "Layers.cfg"?

[Ian Malcolm 0]

Ian Malcolm,

Could you please find some of the ground detail textures and tell us the resolution? As far as I can tell each ~1x1m pixel of the "layer map" defines what detail texture and ground clutter is used for that pixel. It's essentially a hi-res tile map.

For example, grass could be "\data\grass_lco.paa" (from the BI wiki). They might be defined somewhere "Layers.cfg"?

lco maps seems to be those wich are telling the engine, where is what kind of detailtexture/ground clutter...

There are also detail_co textures wich are in 1024x1024 resolution:

Those have corresponding normalmaps and also something called mco, wich looks like this:

[fasad 1]

Thanks mate! : )

texture types are defined in the BI Wiki

Quote[/b] ]

* _CO - color (difuse map), sRGB color space

* _CA - color with alpha (difuse map with alpha), sRGB color space

* _NO - normal map

* _NS - normal map specular (with alpha)

* _NOF - normal map faded (mipmaps fade the texture in distance, usefull for terrain)

* _NOHQ - normal map high quality

* _NOVHQ - normal map high quality

* _DT - detail texture, average color should be 0.5, texture has got fade out filter in mipmaps

* _CDT - colored detail texture, average color should be 0.5 in all R G B channels, texture has got fade out filter in mipmaps

* _SKY - sky texture

* _MC - macro texture, sRGB color space

* _AS - ambient shadow texture

* _SM - specular map

* _SMDI - optimised specular mapa for better bitdepth

* _LCO - layer color map, texture used for satelite and mask textures on the terrain

* _MCO - multiply color map, texture used to multiply with color map (as cdt) without fade out filter, average color should be 0.5 in all R G B channels

I don't really understand what the mco textures do either..

edit : I think the mco has something to do with the intensity of the colours under diffuse (coloured?) light sources?? Eg, for shading the terrain at different time of day. Any graphics guru's out there?

[rundll.exe 12]

You just pointed out what I was about to say Ian

The ICO maps are they key to the "quick" terrain making. (appart form the objects)

As I said, you can make those ICO images with 3rd party software (dont ask me how. I have 3 books explaining this step by step lol. )

The sattalite image (1st one Ian posted) might be the image used at higher altitudes? (when you fly heli)

[dmitri 0]

As I said, you can make those ICO images with 3rd party software (dont ask me how. I have 3 books explaining this step by step lol. )

Some combination of posterize and colour range selection in Photoshop would do the trick.

[fasad 1]

Going by the screenshots i've seen, the "satalite map" texture is used to represent terrain that is more than 10~100+ meters away, no matter what height the viewer is at. It all depends on graphics settings and load. With lowest settings, it may be possible for middle distance terrain to look worse than OFP (1 meter pixels vs 10cm pixels).

It is important to note that the satalite map should be visually consistant with the ground detail textures. This basically means that the satalite map is limited to the defined detail terrain types, of which there are (possibly) ~15 types = ~15 basic colours. Any real satalite images will need a lot of processing before being used in game.

Another potential drawback is a sudden change in terrain types. OFP uses ~40m for transitions, where ArmA uses only ~1m? This could potentially look pretty bad without appropriate intermediates or dithering.

[nubbin77 0]

I could be very wrong, but didn't it seem like the island and the terrain portions of the engine were the first things completed by BIS for Arma? (not talking about little details like rearranging where things are). The details about the island were basically the first pieces of information we got. (believe me I'm not discounting the effort that went into the island by anymeans. for all I know it took 20,000 man hours).

But I don't think it will be an impossibility for a mod team to create some islands. Hopefully teams will be able to employ some sort of collaborative effort to bring islands to life. I think a team like Germany 1985 would be able to accomplish something like this. If the creation of the island w/o objects doesn't turn out to be a deal breaker, the placement of objects can be done. It might be tedious for such large areas, but that's why you could break up the placement of objects among different team members to prevent burnout.

Hey if we get one or 2 really good quality islands a year out of this I'll be more than happy.

[jakerod 254]

Hey if we get one or 2 really good quality islands a year out of this I'll be more than happy.

When I get the game and the tools I will try my best to make one of those islands for you. It does seem to be getting a bit more complicated but a good challenge is always a good thing.

[Vectum 0]

Daniel @ Nov. 14 2006,20:36)]Hey, if you fancy detailing it, go for it!  

I think for good quality elevations the limit is around 40x40 km.

But on otherhand.. The Netherlands doesn't need any elevation at all. All you need it a flat surface.

It will take forever to create NL though. Even a Sahrani sized island requires an enormous amount of work, at least if you plan to create a populated area.

You could take the shape of the Netherlands and just randomly fill it in.

A Detailed map of the Netherlands would probably take years, that's correct.

Let's hope the tools come out soon , can't wait. ( 14 days to ArmA!! )

[cbfasi 4]

I do hope that Visitor 3 can still import elevations via ase as most of my maps have no dem publicly availabe, at least with data under 1km resolution (one location is only 14km across which 1km is nex to useless)

Attempts to get srtd or equiv have failed big time and I have even talked to those at Ordnance Survey and the the MOD, these locations are not available publicly freely at the resolution reqd.

One location I am doing, OS was asking for in excess of Å100 for the dem data.

Other than this it seem my terrains maybe possible but with a lot of work.. (but should look even better!!