major_desync

@dakaodo: Yeah - the black sky did look very apocalyptic or like a plane of Oblivion! :) The water effects are the best part of the 1.60 update. I've spent quite a while just boating around sightseeing. If I can just get the sat map and textures to play nice together, I'll be able to relax fully and enjoy it properly. :blink:

It depends - the updated config that james2464 put out post-1.60 is set up to automatically inherit config changes, but updated textures would need to be changed by hand. For my part. I'm going to hold off any further changes to my maps until there's a stable lighting set up.

That must be those lazy map modders flailing around in the post-1.60 dark (so, you know, really dark) with no NVGs or documentation explaining why their maps suddenly look like the morning after a particularly psychedelic rave in a paint factory. :P Man, I hate those guys. ;) Seriously though - I'm not having a go, but it is going to take a while to get modded maps looking splendid again. Doubly so if there's rollbacks and tweaks coming in 1.61. Triply so if there's no official documentation about the new lighting settings and how best to customise them. Even after fixing the sky and updating to the new texture settings, I now have sat images that're far too bright for the underlying textures, which produces really ugly effects in the middle distance. Looking at Stratis and Altis, it's obvious that their sat images have been significantly changed to match the new textures, so it looks like a lot of map mods will need to do the same - once we get a stable lighting set up. So yeah - take a knee and smoke 'em if you have 'em. :)

Thank you for all the crunchy, gory details - they're certainly a help to me (the config especially) and I'm sure to other mappers! I think my circumstances are a little different to yours, as I've got one A3 only map, and another that gets its A2 assets from CUP Terrains. Am I hopeless optimist to assume that A2 assets will inherit the great work that the CUP guys have already done if the map is run with CUP Terrains as a dependency? :) Having already updated the config and textures, the main job I need to look at I think is narrowing the gap between the new texture colours and the sat image (one way or the other). Anyway - enough inside mapping baseball on a Kunduz thread! Great terrain and great advice! Thanks again! (And, yes, Eliteness is an essential tool if you're messing with configs and rvmats - the lint check function is a real sanity saver.)

Hey Jone_Kone, Is there a particular part of the map you have in mind? I'm guessing you're talking about the areas enclosed by the roads leading to Tidewater and Burnside?

What he said! I've no issues with the update except that documentation on how tweak the new settings and update custom maps has been thin on the virtual ground so far. Now - I realize that tutorials don't grow on trees, and I know that the community always works it out eventually. However in the interim, the terrain pain is real for map modders (understandable given the number of hours that people put into maps). So any documentation BIS can provide to help will be gratefully received. Pretty please with sugar on top. :)

Hehe - you have not known true terror until you become an Arma modder and see a new update start to download on Steam. :P

The new update looks great and you seem to have solved some of the ugly issues I still have post 1.60. How many of the updates in the changelog come from just updating the config (thanks for that BTW - it was a lifesaver!) and the terrain texture PAAs and RVMATs? What work did you do in addition to that? I'm guessing updating the clutter assets? And doing some photoshop surgery on your Sat image? This might not be the right thread, but could you share your process for fixing up Kunduz for 1.60? (Just the stuff relating to the visual upgrade, like the tree shaders - I see you've done some other maintenance in this update as well.) It might help ease a lot of the 1.60 terrain pain out there at the moment. :) Cheers!

I second that - I've changed my Gorgona config to match Stratis 1.60, which has got me my sky back, but my dirt roads and forest floors are odd shades now (roads too dark, forest floor textures washed out) when compared to the same in Stratis 1.60.

Update 1.60 has broken the sky in Gorgona. Efforts to repair are under way. Keep calm and carry on. :) Update: Good progress on understanding what's broken - not just the skybox and lighting, but also updated surface textures. Hotfix coming soon.* *: Your concept of "soon" may vary. ;P Update II: Gorgona v1.41 (hotfix for 1.60) is live on Steam right now. Other mirrors shortly Changelog: TWEAKED: Config and surface textures updated to 1.60 standards. This fixes the 1.60 Black Sky bug. ADDED: Some clutter objects around the helipad. REMOVED: Target range objects from the military base. Unfortunately these were crashing MakePbo for some reason. I'm not happy with how Gorgona looks with the new darker Stratis surface textures. I'll either have to figure out how to lighten them or darken the sat image, as right now Gorgona is not looking as good as it might (or did pre-1.60). The new water effects are cool though....so there's that. UPDATE (29/6/16): Visual optimisations are in progress. Spoiler alert - there will be some substantial changes to Gorgona - textures, clutter, some vegetation - in the next major release (which will be soon after the official Apex launch). However, I'm keeping Gorgona Apex free - that is no Apex objects, textures etc - so that it will run for everyone, whether they have the Apex DLC or not. While there are some objects from Tanoa that might work with Gorgona, I don't think they'll add that much to what we already have. It's a Mediterraean island, so the assets from Altis/Stratis will do just fine.

Update 1.60 has broken the sky in Sugar Lake. Efforts to repair are under way. Keep calm and carry on. :) Update: Good progress on understanding what's broken - not just the skybox and lighting, but also updated surface textures. Hotfix coming soon.* *: Your concept of "soon" may vary. ;P Update II: Beta v1.21 (hotfix for 1.60) is live on Steam and is coming shortly to the other mirrors Changelog: TWEAKED: Config and surface textures to come up to 1.60 standard. Fixes the 1.60 Black Sky bug. Thanks to james2464 and Makhno for the necessary know-how. While I'm still not sure about how the new textures work with the sat layer - the issues seem to be less obvious on SL than Gorgona (but I think some tweaking may be required). The water and night lighting effects, though, are pretty awesome.

Thanks for the tip, Aus! So to be clear, is this your process? 1: Export objects from TB to object export file. 2: Rename the problem objects in the config (do you have an example you could share?) 3: Rename the problem objects in the object export file to match. 4: Reimport the updated object export file

Cool - thanks for the explanation! I'm 99.999% certain I've pointed PboProject at the right place, so I think the land class is missing. I had a go at making one, but I was kind of fumbling around in the dark, and it didn't work. Will have another go armed with this information. It's always helpful to know you're going in roughly the right direction. The weird thing is - in this case, all the objects are A3 - so, while I had CUP issues before, this time it can't be CUP. Strange indeed. :) Cheers!

So I've had a recurrence of this problem when trying to update Gorgona. Similar issue - MakePbo reports missing files that are very much present in the A3 folder on P. And these are not new objects. They've been in Gorgona since version 1, but now are throwing up errors. Deleting them is the easy fix, but I really don't want to do that. Is there a way to get these objects working again? Output: <snipped..> s_satout_co.paa gorgona.hpp : ignored or merged gorgona.wrp scanning wrp checking for missing files... checking land_xx... missing land_target_popup_large_f:house missing land_target_popup_f:house

Cheers for the feedback! The underwater barrens are something I hope to fix in a future version.The problem is that in a delta you can't really throw down rocks and there's not a lot of good underwater vegetation currently (corals don't really cut it - although...). I'm hoping Tanoa has some new water vegetation (the trailer seems to hint at that). But wrecks (cars, containers, a few more boats), trash (barrels, pipes and industrial stuff), some tilted/rotated dead trees and stumps are all good ideas, and maybe some more stands of short reeds in the shallower flats. So yeah - now that I think about it - plenty to do! :)

Hi rebelvg, Yes - my bad and apologies. I'm having trouble uploading a stable branch version at the moment, but I'll keep trying and see if I can fix it.

I have a noob question about Terrain Processor: I get that it's designed to take real world data and make it usable in Terrain Builder (to put it very crudely), but what if you have a fictional terrain? Someone mentioned above about vectorising the surface mask and importing that (perhaps via QGIS) into Terrain Processor - can the same be done with a satellite image? If you've got your forest floors defined in the surface mask anyway, is there any advantage to using the satellite image over the surface mask? Vectorising a surface mask - what's the best file format for doing that (naively, because I am a hopeless optimist sometimes, I'm assuming this is a "Save as..." job in Photoshop)? I assume from the (very funny) discussion about roads, that TB-created road.shp files can be imported into TP via QGIS (and then back out to TB for the smoothing magic)? Again - sorry for the noob questions, I'm only just starting to get my head around TP. :)

I'm happy/relieved to announce the release of Sugar Lake v1.2 (available on Steam, Armaholic, & Pw6). Man, this was the update from hell! Nexus, Eden, switching to CUP Terrains, upgrading to Mikeros Subscription tools (worth every penny) - lots of variables changing, lots of running just to stand still (hence the modest change-log). v1.2 FIXED: Ugly artifacting on dirt textures due to new parallax mapping. FIXED: Various misplaced objects (floating garbage bins, sandbags etc). TWEAKED: Sugar Lake now uses the CUP Terrains models for all pre-Arma3 objects. It is still compatible with All in Arma Terrain Pack as of this release date. TWEAKED: The following objects incompatible with the latest versions of MakePbo have been removed: Shooting_range_acr, seacat, garbage_metal, powgen_big, TWEAKED: The positions of some of the army_hut, hotel and yellow bungalow house objects, and objects around them to compensate for inconsistent positioning in CUP Terrains. A few objects got moved around in the switch to CUP, and while I think I got most of them, I may not have got 'em all. Next up - probably some tweaks to the height map and maybe the surface mask too. And of course, we'll need to keep rolling down that road to Apex and Tanoa... :moto:

Just an additional note/tip to this. I had some trouble getting my dirt textures to "flatten" enough using the method on the BIS site. I wanted a very flat texture, but if you tweak the output levels too much, the texture darkens and starts to look very strange (this may be something to do with my cell size, or something else I don't quite understand, so your mileage may vary). In the end, I just decided to flatten it completely (since I wanted it to represent well-beaten down dirt). I copied out the white_nopx (this is just a flat texture normal) from the A3 Map Data folder to my terrain data folder (with the rest of the texture files). I renamed it to match my dirt texture (yourtexturename_nopx). Once you pbo up your project, this will make your texture flat as a pancake.

So - I had to patch in a fixed Config to resolve the error. I also replaced all the AIA sourced objects (and configs) with their CUP counterparts, but I then hit the kind of missing files that Aus mentioned. I think I've fixed that, but am now stalled because the new BIS Binarize appears to be borked. Getting there though :rolleyes: - thanks again! Update: Actually the "missing" files issue was not fixed - the offenders being garbage_metal, powgen_big and shooting_range_acr. The p3ds for all of these are present in my Ca folder on P:/, and had all the correct paths in TB, however no joy for whatever reason. In the end - I just removed the objects from the terrain. Not ideal, but it works.

Sweet - thank you both! I'll give that a whirl and let you know the results.

Hi all, Wow - you wait ages for a comment and then four come along at once. :) First - thank you for the kinds comments! Glad you're enjoying what you like in the map. Now to the things that you don't... :) @Von Quest: It's a fictional map based on real locations in Louisiana; but rather than say it's those locations and invite a lot of "it's not like that in real life" comments - I put a fictional "skin" on it. Channels - most, if not, all of the larger channels are designed to be navigable, and should be, with a little care and the right boats. However not every channel is designed to be navigable (not every navigable channel is navigable to the bigger gunboats, or SDVs). If there are any channels that look like they should be passable, but aren't, let me know. Underwater - there is some variation in places (deeper channels in mudflats - see the water areas south of Camp Burnside for example), but it does need some more work. That said muddy river channels and tidal flats tend to be fairly smooth and featureless, and you can't really fall back on stock terrain fillers like rocks. I'm hoping Tanoa might have some new (under)water vegetation to make that a little more varied. @PrivateEvans: Infinite terrain - This is a comment that comes up a lot and it's something I've gone back and forth on myself. The outside map terrain is beyond ugly (and I've been looking at it for several months more than everyone else! :o). However, just watering off the top of the map would leave the north end of Sugar Lake township looking weird as well without putting in levees, ditches and some broken highway bridges, Even then, the whole thing would then look like a bunch of marshy islands in the middle of the ocean, rather than a river delta. So, on balance, I made the call to keep the delta feeling, at the expense of having to see the ugly terrain when up at the north end. Thanks again for the feedback - I've been on a sanity break from mapping for the last couple of months, and also been stymied by a technical problem that's prevented me pushing tweaks and updates. However, I may have found a solution for that. If so, then I hope to get a v1.2 with some fixes out in the (vague) near future.

I'm having the same issue with my (published) Sugar Lake terrain. It seems to have happened after the Nexus update, and is still there post-Eden. Similarly, all I did was make some changes to object placement and road alignments, but MakePbo craps out when it gets to the terrain layers. I posted all the logs here: https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/187761-makepbo-crash-with-a-terrain-project/

@Shomu1: the main taxiway is certainly fairly bumpy because of the drainage ditches beside it. I thought the main runway was better, but maybe not. I'll add that to the potential fix list.

@Dakaodo and Shomu1 : Thank you very much for your kind comments! It's great to hear from someone who's been in the real world location that it captures the feel at least somewhat. I've not had the good fortune to visit that part of the US (yet), so all I had to go on was Google Maps/Street View. The kiosks, supermarket signs and Red Burger stalls are all A3 vanilla. I think if you look closely, they have the Altis currency symbol on the price lists. As to the uneven roads - I'd love to say that was deliberate, but it's probably more of a happy accident from working with the leveling tools in Buldozer. Oh and cheers for the heads-up on the sandbags. I've noticed a few other glitches (floating garbage bins in the port, for example), but right now Make.pbo crashes when packing updated versions of the map. I'm not sure what's causing it (something weird in the textures since the Nexus update, I think), but until it's sorted I can't push any updates. Have no fear though, I'll bank these bugs reports and when it does get sorted, I'll do a mass bugfix and there will be a SugarLake v1.2 Thanks again - good luck and good gaming! PS: I've also ramped quite a few vics over the embankment at the end of the straight. I really should put some wrecked vics on the river bottom there ;)