Map Making (A to Z)

[Allie 0]

!!!!!!WORK IN PROGRESs COPY!!!!!!

I have had some Big crashes and lost a lot of stuff, i had to reinstall everything.

I'm now at the point of reinstalling all arma tools and start setting up a new island.

Maybe its a good plan of recording all in as much as possible pictures and try to create a nice manual out of it.

Well here's my start, sorry it will all be in PDF format.

Part 1, (Visitor3 installation)

http://www.delta-automaten.com/public/VisitorRC3Tutorialprt1.pdf

Part 2, (directory structure/textures location)

http://www.delta-automaten.com/public/VisitorRC3Tutorialprt2.pdf

Part 3 (Base satellite picture to Sat_lco.png)

http://www.delta-automaten.com/public/VisitorRC3Tutorialprt3.pdf

Part 4 (Terrain.png and visitor)

http://www.delta-automaten.com/public/VisitorRC3Tutorialprt4.pdf

This way of making a terrain is not the way for creating a realistic representation of that terrain, this is just a way for creating a terrain out of a sat pic which is not based on acctual terrain data !!!!

Part 5 (Mask_lco.png, and texture works)

http://www.delta-automaten.com/public/VisitorRC3Tutorialprt5.pdf

Part 6 ( Next Week ) (RVMAT conversion, Road placing in Visitor)

http://www.delta-automaten.com/public/VisitorRC3Tutorialprt6.pdf

(just started on it, going to take couple days)

It seems when using the BINPBO tool from the RC3 tools pack in the end to packup your island for distribution, it WILL convert the paths names inside the RVMAT files.

I still not 100% sure myself, havent tested it yet.

So it seems the RVMAT files from the LAYERS folder do NOT have to be changed manually !!!!

Shit have to rewrite part 6 then, just remove stuff from it.

Later,

Allie

This tutorial will explain the creation of an ISLAND, i know u guys like to have just a piece of land without sea, i myself dont like that but it should be the same as making an island.

There is still a lot to explain, for instance, road placing, object placing, forests, sound, dust and bumps settings for textures, some music, a custom object packed with your island, Packing up the island to a PBO file so you can play on it ingame, so we will explain the CONFIG.CPP too dont worry.

[icfhoop 0]

Great Work Allie, this might be better because it is up to date unlike Opteryx tutorial (no offence great tutorial opteryx!. But keep up the work Allie!

[opteryx 1562]

Yeah I think it's a great idea as there's more knowledge now that has accumulated now on the forums and probably your personal experience too. Also it great in pdf format with detailed picture illustrations!

[imutep 0]

Thanks! This is a great idea.

A good tutorial for island making is what i've searched for.

[ProwlerWolf 0]

My only suggestions would be to see if you canshrink the text up a little bit to fit more into one page as it seems a bit spread out. Also you should add page numbers and some page headers. You may also want to shrink some of those images down a little bit. But apart from that I like the idea and think you should keep it up!

Personally I would like to see a more in-depth tutorial in the use of the config.cpp as well as a better description of how importing your map into Visitor works. Also it would be a good idea to throw the roads tutorial in there. I like all my information in one place.

[Allie 0]

Just wait it out, and just stick to whats done up to now.

I said A-Z, so everything.

But.... there is different ways of getting there, this is just my way of doing this weekend map thing ( Maybe short week)

Again this is a working copy, there will be changes and in the end i'll make it look nice with better aligned pictures and stuff.

Or maybe better somebody else is gonne let it look cool.

This tutorial is sort of realtime created, because of me better instal everything from scratch.

I do have one question for some wise guy, my last install was created over the old install, for the old install we had to extract the ROADS too, for now i'm sticking to the latest release of the tools, this will give you the UNPBOed roads with the instal.

Now my question is, do i have to extract the CONFIG.BIN file from the arma addons version of the roads PBO ??

My opinion would be that we have to extract the CONFIG.BIN from the arma addons version of the roads.pbo.

Please some input on that, that would be helpfull.

Check part 1, its updated, i did extract and unrap the BIN file from the ROADS.PBO from the addons folder of Arme.

Later,

Allie

[baddo 0]

Hey thank you!

When you have finished the tutorials please consider submitting them to http://www.ofpec.com/ It's The Place for storing your tutorials.

You should make a package having all files needed for the tutorials, excluding the tools not authored by you, and submit it to OFPEC.

[imutep 0]

This Tutorial is well explained and clear for everybody. Step by step the beginning and learning in the island construction.

It helps me. Great job and thx

Now i take a look at Part5

Edit:

Quote[/b] ]Oh shit i did something wrong with the pictures in part 5, oh boy, days work down the drain, pls keep me informed about part 5 whats not understandable, please, i dant want to redo it, i'l make sure next pictures are better.

Sorry, but can you make the Screens a bit bigger. I can read your wroten things not good. Thx

[Allie 0]

Part 1 has been updated with important things !!!!!

Allie

[ArmaVidz 0]

Great stuff

[Allie 0]

This might take a bit longer then i anticipated, i have a lot of work here at the office and do not have that much time left to go on with the manual.

Hope to have couple hours tomorrow to go on.

Have a nice day,

Allie

[ProwlerWolf 0]

Waiting for #6 to figure out how to mass edit the rvmat's was torture but well worth it.

[Auss 208]

I use Notepad+. Shift click a huge chunk of them and do a mass edit in one hit.

[[aps]gnat 28]

I find TurboSR very nice for MANY of computer tasks like that.

http://turbonote.com/TNTurboSR

[Allie 0]

Due to a overseas project at work, i wont be able to finish it right now.

I'll be gone for at least 3 weeks.

I'll finish it as soon as i'm back.

Really sorry for the Inconvenience.

Alphons

[imutep 0]

I wait

[ProwlerWolf 0]

no worries, you have done a great deal already and we thank you for that.

[ZIKAN 0]

Hi, thanks for the tutorial.

But im struggling, and i wonder if anyone can help.

(If i may, im refering to part 4 of the pdf tutorials, and using the provided downloaded files as an example, to work through).

Im having trouble with buldozer it seems. I have followed the steps to the letter. I haved saved the pew file etc.

However im not seeing anything , other than a small box, half submerged in water, when i open it up in buldozer. No land mass or spikes as shown in the tutorial  .

Any help would be much appreciated

Thanks.

*Edit*

Problem solved lol.....

I just didnt move the cursor to the land mass

[ArmaVidz 0]

Any chance the PDF's could be moved and linked to other locations as well? Yesterday, I couldn't get them at all from two seperate computer systems and today, it's taken 45 minutes to open two of them

Maybe FileFront, OFPEC, ArmAholic? Thanks for the tutorial, I'm goin through it now.

[imutep 0]

I've uploadet all parts and a rar-file (incl. all parts) to our server. Here you can download all released parts and the future ones.

Mirror from Assault Mission Studio.

Map Making (A to Z) by Allie

Regards

Imutep

[Sergei_Q 0]

The part 6 tells to edit the rvmat files with a text editor. But after Visitor has made them, the Material editor cannot open them, and in text editor they are gibberish, like this:

raP       B   

PixelShaderID Terrain2

VertexShaderID Terrain

ambient

fff?

fff?

fff?

Buldozer shows sat and mask properly, but if I then proceed to take them in-game, I get an error message that the rvmat's can't be loaded. So what gives? Should I be using a hex editor?

[VladAlex 0]

You just have to select the option TEXT (and not binary) when you import your sat and mask !

[Sergei_Q 0]

Doh!

Btw. instead of UltraEdit you can use the free software Notepad++. With it you can load all the rvmat files at once, replace inside them all with a single click (no need for macro).

[ArmaVidz 0]

Everything was going fine, I can see the textures and map with the terrain I want in bulldozer, but when I pack it and load it ArmA, it always says cannot open p-000-001-l02.rvmat, none of the textures show up...doh! lol

I've tried renaming the .png to .paa extensions in the rvmats(using turboSR), changing the paths from ca\mapname\data\layers to \mapname\data\layers to mapname\data\layers. I've checked the layers.cfg prior to importing the sat mask, layers.cfg has the path ca\mapname\data\layers...tried changing all the capitals to lower case, copied all the _nohq _co etc. textures from the BI sample map, copied the rvmats and changed the paths and file extensions, redownloaded rvmats...re-imported sat mask and tried changing the grid size 10 to 20 to 40 and reimporting the sat mask/layers.cfg/mask_Ico.png each time..exporting the world to wrp and repacking...just nothing works...still just a big snowy white map...doh... i've double and triple checked the texture names are properly named in all the rvmats in the layers folder and in the data folder...

Any suggestions would be great

Vidz

[Daniel 0]

Guessing trying to import sat textures more than once messes things up? Tried using the TEXT setting, and all i get in bulldozer are the close up textures.