Island preparation waiting official tools

[boumboumjack 0]

Hi,

I would like to know if some oy you are already thinking to create their own island, and if yes, have you some tools in order to do that. Are you using STRM, GIS or other DEM data?

I talk about that because I am searching for 2 weeks now how to develop an island for arma before the release of tools... (any date?)

So, have you some goos advice and tools?

[smiley nick 51]

Depends how much effort you want to put into it. You can make a "fun" island as i call them, nothing too realistic, just creative ideas, with some basic layouts and areas, with jelly top hills

Or you can do some research and spend quite some time researching you landmass, if you are serious about doing it.

I think this is a good idea, as there are a lot of budding terrain artists out there with equal qualities, and it would be nice to share ideas, solutions and just talk, preparation, using 3rd party tools.

I personally use DEMS, for any environment now, but due to the larger scales of arm a standards, i think we will see a slower output for islands, but hopefully all being more higher quality.

A few things i would add

1.) Really think about what area you want to do, as you can really represent real life locations now.

2.) Get a very vivid picture in your head, of what you want to see. Whats going to be your selling point? Good urban areas? Life like foliage placement? Ect

3.) Check MapMart for a huge source of information and dems, the people who work there are very helpful.

4.) Start thinking about if you would need to make any custom objects, or can you ulitize the ones from stock arm a?

5.) Decide who this island is for? Is it your own personnel goal? Or for the shear demand of it?

6.) Look at google earth for reference points such as road networks, town placements ect.

7.) Look into what recourses you have, do you have the money to buy STRM Data? To really bring it to life.

8.) Check out 3rd party tools such as Terragen

3d Dem, they can all help you create and preview your dems or landmass.

9.) Start small, get a decent road network down, and build everything around that.

10.) Make sure your having fun. As thats the most important

Hope that helps!

Nick

[fasad 1]

Unfortunately, I've not heard of any community WRP tools being created. The new tools will probably be released until well after the 505 release. I suggest you become familiar with visitor2 and buldozer and some basic czech just in case.

I feel that the best thing you can do now is to learn about the new engine and all its limitations. Think about the way terrain and objects are used in the game. Become familiar with the BI art and objects, chances are that is what you will be using.

The only content you can realistically be creating now is :

Heightmap - create or import. I suggest working with a maximum of 10m between data points, scaling down is much easier than up.

Textures - if you want to use new textures, you will need to create 3 for every terrain type.

New Objects - objects should be relatively easy to update once the new tools are released.

Things that would be a waste of time :

Satellite Map - this should be the very last thing you work on, as it contains footprints of every road, tree and building. Without object placements you cannot do anything worthwhile. If you are mad enough to try to use a real satellite photo, you will need to remove all shadows and objects, and change all landscape colours and tones to suit the BI artwork (or create new art).

[boumboumjack 0]

I have already found some data and tutorial. A tutorial with maya about displacement wich seems relatilevely precise Tutorial maya/DEM ; but I did not arrive to make it working.

I found the website too, I think that the best free site is this one Seamless data distribution.

With terragen I do not arrive to make any displacement...

My final goals is to modify the French Reunion island (est of malagsy) or Maui (Hawaï for a jurassic like island. Before putting anything on it I want have the perfect ground...

The DEM I ve found are 90 metters precise. But I have no idea of how use it (what I tried does not work). I have a .adf and .dem.

[smiley nick 51]

I would suggest you get 3dem, as you can preview your dem, or you can get Wilbur, another great tool used a lot in ofp island making. You will then be able to see your height maps but you wont get anything into the game without the tools or 3rd party tools from talented individuals such as PMC chaps.

Nick

Wilbur

[general 0]

lidingo in sweden:O

I'd love to have lidingo in arma.

[nigelbland 0]

Just been reading up on this visitor 3 tool. Sound great if you can import real world data. I wrote a good tutorial for Battlefield 2, the file is no longer available on the original host, but you can find it here:

http://www.trtournament.com/downloa....1_0.doc

The original release forum post is here, some nice pictures of what some people had done

http://bfeditor.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=1210&st=0

Not sure if there's a picture in that forum post at all but importing a map of cyprus into bf2 was great. Oh yeah it exists http://img373.imageshack.us/img373/1739/cyprus1fy.jpg

I had to make it small cause my PC would chug on those high maps.

Getting good quality DEM data is the hard part. I imagine it will be the same in Visitor 3, the map tweaking will be easier than finding the perfect map :P

Hopefully, Visitor 3 should be able to read the dem files without having to convert them to heightmaps. This cuts down on possible noise problems. Sometimes when exporting from terragen it used to create huge spikes along the edges of the map. This I can only put down to noise (black and white speckles) at the edge of the file.