Converting Nogovo To Arma II

[M.Andersson(SWE) 4]

Now im pushing. Any new alpha:rel in plans?

[luemmel 20]

;1634630']Now im pushing. Any new alpha:rel in plans?

yes, let us drive, too - please!

[MadMardigan409 10]

Ok guys, I'll upload it at whatever point it's at when I stop working on it today. There are no roads yet, I drove the red/yellow guide lines lol. Should have some city names on the map in the next alpha upload.

[MadMardigan409 10]

Alpha 0.6 uploaded, same deal just upgraded sat images, hand adjusted terrain height for everon only, city names etc. Still no objects or roads.

Like I said a couple posts back, I have to do this to all the islands before I can start placing roads.

[mankyle 372]

Awesome work, Madmardigan.

As I have seen, you have included a series of needed locations and objects in the map. Very good job.

Now some remarks and comments that would be advisable in my opinion.

- the beaches slope shouldn't be very steep (typo?) to make landing operations easier.

- The runways in the sat mask look a little bit narrow. Same happens with the silhouettes of the hangars and buildings in the airports. Anyway, that can be easily solved.

- I think the sea around Nogova is deeper than around the other islands. Could you check that?

I hope you have received my PM and you can include the updates in the next alpha.

Keep up the good work,

Edited May 25, 2010 by mankyle
Adding a new remark

[M.Andersson(SWE) 4]

Yup. Thisun gonna beee cooool

[MadMardigan409 10]

Awesome work, Madmardigan.

As I have seen, you have included a series of needed locations and objects in the map. Very good job.

Now some remarks and comments that would be advisable in my opinion.

- the beaches slope shouldn't be very steep (typo?) to make landing operations easier.

- The runways in the sat mask look a little bit narrow. Same happens with the silhouettes of the hangars and buildings in the airports. Anyway, that can be easily solved.

- I think the sea around Nogova is deeper than around the other islands. Could you check that?

I hope you have received my PM and you can include the updates in the next alpha.

Keep up the good work,

For the beaches I might have to adjust the terrain.pbl file levels. There are some really steep areas that I didn't want that steep all over the island. I'll see what I can do about that.

I'll expand them to fit the runways here soon. Maybe I can just place the runways before anything else. I don't think that would be much of an issue because the area will remain flat etc. Good call :)

Now, the novoga issue lol. The way I created that island is different from the other three. The elevation doesn't need to be eroded through visitor, it just sits like that. Unfortunately I have to erode everon, kolgujev, malden but I cannot erode novoga or it'll flatten the island out. The erosion process makes the ocean floor rise, is there a way to select only the islands and not the ocean floor around them? What I've been doing just for the time being is selecting all terrain verticies, then left shift+ mouse drag over novoga to deselect that area.

Also, there are a few things that are bothering me that I can't seem to fix. Sometimes the ocean turns brown, other times it stays blue. I want to keep it a deep blue color but I'm not sure what is changing it.

The terrain grid ingame on the map seems ultra high or something. I tried adjusting the zoom ability but it hasn't seemed to change.

The city names seem odd, like a little miss matched in size or something. Did you guys get the same feeling or is it just me?

[mankyle 372]

For the erosion tools I cannot speak. I have converted the wrp back to pew to see something about the map and I know the cause for the deep blue sea and the brownish tint. In nogova you have 75 meters of sea depth. Around the other islands you have only 25 meters. That means that the seabed texture can still be seen through the water so it turns the water brownish.

The grid is something I really don-t know much about sorry

You can manual edit the terrain by selecting a terrain vertex just by moving the mouse (and press H to show the cursor) and pressing U and J for moving up and down the vertex in 1 meter intervals and I and K for moving it in 5 meters intervals

Edited May 25, 2010 by mankyle
adding more information

[-martin- 10]

I tried both actually. You didn't set anything special for it? Like compatibility modes or anything like that?

Wonder if it's a open gl type of issue.

Try to set the compatibility of the program to XP (sp2), one guy on the forums had a problem with TexView2 and Win7 64bit and by doing that he fixed it.

Right Click Wilbur.exe > Properties > Compatibility > Windows XP (sp2)

[MadMardigan409 10]

@mankyle

Ok, I guess I'll have to do it the hard way and select specific verticies on the map when I output a beta. For now it's just easier to highlight the whole map and run erosion in the alpha stages.

@ Martin

I think this is a win 7 issue with quad core CPU's. It's kind of odd but when I save programs sometimes it gives me a "you do not have access" error but I can still save. I have the UA service's turned off. Other then that I keep getting a "program is not responding" error but the program continues to work. Same deal with visitor, it's still compiling but gives the error, so it works but just annoying i suppose. I'll try the win xp sp2 compatability thing and see if it helps. Thanks :)

EDITED:

I seem to have fixed the map grid. The first entry under the grid changed the value from 0.15 zoom max to 0.05.

I adjusted the placement of all the town names and sizes. Also added some of the missing town names. It's really looking good I think, at least starting to.

I keep seeing you guys talking about adjusting the beach's, what areas are you guys referring to? I checked st pierre's bay and drove pretty easily up it. The other 3 islands are still in the early alpha stage, I haven't touched them since the first alpha upload. I'll take a look around the island and adjust some of the other areas so beach landings are easier.

Edited May 25, 2010 by MadMardigan409

[-martin- 10]

Same deal with visitor, it's still compiling but gives the error, so it works but just annoying i suppose. I'll try the win xp sp2 compatability thing and see if it helps. Thanks

This happens to me too when importing the masks or sometimes running bulldozer, from the tutorials I have read they say we should expect this, I guess it’s a issue with Visitor or Windows isn’t too good at handling such large images.

But anyway, good luck with your project :smile: can wait to see some new screenshots!

[MadMardigan409 10]

Malden's terrain is currently being hand adjusted and has road network lines, forest textures and named city's.

I'm going out of town for a week or so and I'll try and get malden, kolgujev and novoga to a good terrain hight for roads before I take off here.

Interesting and odd fact... there is absolutely no named towns, villages or citys on kolgujev... :/

Edited May 26, 2010 by MadMardigan409

[MadMardigan409 10]

Starting to wonder the best way to go about object placement. What do you guys do and in what order?

My thought was to lay the main roads and get them smooth. Then to start in on populating the towns and placing buildings one area at a time and to lay down the city streets as I go. After that I would place the woods and shrubbery.

[mankyle 372]

I agree with that. In the map I have almost finished to beta Stage, the Skira Island, I started with the road net, and then added buildings and finished with trees and shrubs.

My advice would be to start with the sat, then mask and then roads, artificial objects and finish with natural objects, doing small adjustments to all steps depending on the problems that could arise during the island creation process

[shezan74 11]

I'm using another approach.

I start from roads, then place natural objects and finally the artificial ones.

in this way i will be forced to CHECK every single area where i place something, and i'm forced to remove disturbing objects (trees and bush) when placing objects.

Placing trees at the end of the process will result (in my experience) to miss something that is not easily noticeable and could create annoying glitches (a tree into a house, for example).

So i will CLEAR tree areas when placing towns.

my 5 cents

[MadMardigan409 10]

ah, good point. That sounds pretty solid, I'll give that a go. Thanks shezan and mankyle

[Banderas 0]

Hey Mardigan!

I've conducted some test landings, takeoffs and taxiing on the area of "Everon Intl. Airport", and I don't think there is enough place for two runways, either they would be too narrow or there won't be enough space between them. If you and others agree, I think to have a not too confined airport, there should be one runway on the place of the eastern runway-taxiway, and one taxiway and the aprons, ramps, terminal, hangars, ect. to the west of it.

Also to the North the airport, the hill is a little dangerous for the landings, forcing the pilot to make a high angled approach from that direction. Is it possible to flatten that hill a bit for safer landings?

[gossamersolid 155]

Hey Mardigan!

I've conducted some test landings, takeoffs and taxiing on the area of "Everon Intl. Airport", and I don't think there is enough place for two runways, either they would be too narrow or there won't be enough space between them. If you and others agree, I think to have a not too confined airport, there should be one runway on the place of the eastern runway-taxiway, and one taxiway and the aprons, ramps, terminal, hangars, ect. to the west of it.

Also to the North the airport, the hill is a little dangerous for the landings, forcing the pilot to make a high angled approach from that direction. Is it possible to flatten that hill a bit for safer landings?

he's not making an exact replica of everon, so I'm sure he'll find a way to make room for the second runway.

[Banderas 0]

he's not making an exact replica of everon, so I'm sure he'll find a way to make room for the second runway.

I know very well he doesn't do that, but the area that is now available for the airport is still too small for two runways. Either they'd be too close to each other or there won't be too much space for the other airport installations - aprons, taxiways, hangars, terminal, control tower, freight warehouses, you name it. Either the area needs to be enlarged or the airport will be very much overcrowded.

[MadMardigan409 10]

I was out of town for the last 4 days, just got in. I'll see what I can do, these islands have to be set in terrain height before I can start to place roads. Otherwise I'll have to re-smooth the pathway for the 600 miles of roadway every time I have to adjust shiz.

As far as the placement of the runways/taxi ways. They're just placeholders to give you guys testing, a way to mess around with the islands. Once I get the roadways all done, then I can get into refining specifics like building placements and shiz.

After giving this some thought, I just might extend the airport area and create a double airstrip in a 'y' shape. That could work well I think. I'll look into it some here after I get the other islands rehashed.

Edited June 2, 2010 by MadMardigan409

[M.Andersson(SWE) 4]

Sounds Awsome MadM...

Just a quick hint..

We need this island..I have an AWSOME idea for a mission..

A new kind of mission..

[-martin- 10]

;1641065']Sounds Awsome MadM...

Just a quick hint..

We need this island..I have an AWSOME idea for a mission..

A new kind of mission..

Nice to hear that the community is starting to use other islands, pee's me off to see so many isalnds out there and peple still use the BIS ones... like if all that hard works is worth nothing. :k:

[MadMardigan409 10]

Yeah I agree. Originally people told me that no one really downloads the islands so I planned on campaigning/marketing the shiz out of this. I think the easiest route is word-of-mouth but I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to do a couple trailers or so. I think it's also helping that I've got some good peeps testing and checking the map as I release alpha's.

I've seen some amazing work in these forums, I think the public just needs to know whats out there and how they can get it. In certain case's I'm finding it to be a painful process of hunting down addons so one of the goals here for me is to make the process of downloading and installing as painless and easy as possible.

Speaking of which, I personally don't think a self installing addon helps all that much but if the majority would prefer, I can create one fairly easy. I can set it to create a mod folder and put a short-cutt on the desktop. I would like to hear some thoughts on this, thanks.

[-martin- 10]

Speaking of which, I personally don't think a self installing addon helps all that much but if the majority would prefer, I can create one fairly easy. I can set it to create a mod folder and put a short-cutt on the desktop. I would like to hear some thoughts on this, thanks.

Lessons have been learned since the OFP days about creating installers for addons.

Installers take up space in the registry, in the add/remove programs manager and they are a pain in the a** because if I wanna download an addon just to see how it was made I have to install it, then copy the .pbo and then uninstall again. And if the instaler already has .pbos that I have why downlaod them again?

Someone should create a program that manages addons and insatlalles them from .7z or .zip archoves for example.

Just try to keep the addon files to like 2 .pbo's, one for the island and second for the stuff like I'm doing with my island, gonna start a topic about it soon.

But thats just the old-school OFP opinion on installers, what do you guys think now 7 years later?

[Rg 0]

^Agreed.

Also, 99% of mods/addons come as rar/7z/zip. If someone can't take a minute to figure out where a .pbo/@mod folder goes and how to run a mod by a shortcut or with with many very easy ArmA launchers available, then they can't play 99% of mods. Don't cater to 1%.

@OFPIE / Addons / ofpie.pbo & ofpie_[objects/anythingelse].pbo ...is all you need.