RhodesianScout

The Rhodesian infantry spots a camp fire in the distant hills and a patrol goes out to check it.......... with this mission there are many things that may randomly happen. 1.... ZAPU or ZANU terrorists have set up camp here and will be easy targets to take out. 2.... The camp is abandoned and the terrorists have recently fled 3.... While searching the abandoned camp the Rhodesian infantry come under fire from the surrounding trees cloaked in darkness 4.... The terrorists are found to be holding hostages in the camp. or as in option 2 above there is nothing found in the camp. There is also the possibility something else may randomly happen such as incoming mortar fire.

This version of mist in my map is closer to the color I want but needs to be more grey than blue

Some of the missions that will be released along with the map will involve missions where the Rhodesian Infantry or the Selous Scouts are patrolling an area covered with mist in the early morning. For this map I am doing a tonne of research using books written by Rhodesian National Service Officers or by other veterans, even one book I found by Wilbur Smith called "Vicious Circle"........ I was not even 18 when I left Rhodesia so reading stories by people who were in the actual war along with my memories of the location this map is based on will hopefully make this map as true to the bush war as possible. Each and every story I have read talks about morning mist rolling across the Matabele plains clinging to the branches of the taller trees and therefore mist is an important effect I want to have in the map for early morning missions. To get the mist effect that I am after I use a reference picture as seen in Picture 1 below to give my results to date as shown in picture 2.

Goats among the thorn bushes

Depending on where in Rhodesia you went there were some areas as bare as what is shown below.......... Of course if I made my map look like this it would be finished next week......but to make it more challenging the map will have only a few areas completely devoid of trees or cover

While on patrol in the map you will find yourself in areas like this................ nothing of interest here right? However, it always pays to look around as you never know what you may find. Below for example is a flashlight dropped in the long grass by one of the ZANU terrorists who had been in this area recently. A very handy find with night coming especially if your flashlight is low on batteries. Some things you may find in the grass are items like extra ammo...... or the terrorists may have placed a landmine for you to step on. Perhaps even a piece of paper giving a clue to where they have camped or where they are heading.

ZAPU regrouping after a raid on a local farmer........ soon they will disappear into the early morning fog before Rhodesian security forces arrive.

Nothing to see here but rock....... there are plenty of these around the map.

Two different views from different areas of the map.....................

Last night I finished work on the mask image v2 and applied it to the map which now looks a lot better.

December is my busiest time of the year and I am hoping to make enough sales this month to buy a new car..... I sure do need one. The last few weeks has been pretty busy and the time I have been able to spend on the map has been cut by 50%........from next Tuesday it will be cut to 80% and then completely cut for a week from the 20th. I have being doing some small fixes on the map trying to get some small little issues fixed.........still looking at a release of the map in early 2016.

Thanks for that link.... I hadn't come across that one before. Will have a good read of it over the next few days.

I am also looking at using Medusa Pro to create the granite rocks I need for the map......... the picture below shows the export options for getting this model into Blender. Some of the rock templates with this package may even allow me to build a shallow cave that I need for one of my planned missions for the map.

The easy part is moving the trees into blender........there is an export tutorial at the end of https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgZxWv-eELiEzH45fpaSAA The more difficult part is getting the tree model into Arma III using the Arma III tools...... there are tutorials out there on how to do this. If you want to try this I recommend you try racticing with some of the trees in the lite version of forester pro before buying.

Actually forester pro makes this a fairly easy task...... best 60 dollars I spent.

I had a difficult job to try and get the clutter appearing in the map........ did not have this problem in the first test map I did using a tutorial. I needed to look at the layer.cfg file and the Surfaces.hpp file to check that all surfaces mentioned in the layers file were present in the surfaces file. Turned out my issue was caused by using a few capital letters in the lines starting with material = "rhod\rho.........". in the layers file. If you are creating a map and can't get clutter showing remove any capital letters in the material= line of the layers.cfg file.

It has been a little bit of a slow week with development.......lots of work on my plate in real life world at the moment..... Below are two screenshots ...one taken at sunrise and the other at sunset...... showing a part of the map after some clutter is added for testing purposes. I am still creating trees and grass as per my last post in forester pro.

One of the Acacia trees I have created in Forester Pro complete with long sharp thorns. This tree has been converted from high res to a low res tree and will be imported into Blender and from there into Arma III. I will be creating various versions of the baobab tree.......still trying to get the branches looking right...... acacia trees, acacia bushes and thorn bushes using Forester Pro.

Test shot of map in early morning

Some last minute tweaking of the terrain before adding clutter later today.

Over the last couple of days I had been looking at what was causing the issue with the video. It seems the issue is related to the software which was recording arms III so I am looking at an alternative for video recording. Once I have that resolved there will be more videos added showing the map.

That is very true.....hopefully I can show some results over the weekend what it looks like with clutter added.

I recorded and added the replacement video and pasted the link in the previous post. This time the video looks a little better though there is still a little issue with the audio but not really noticeable. Will have a look at what is happening in Adobe Premier Pro to cause this slight audio issue. This new video follows almost the same path I took with the prior video (which has now been removed) however there is some new scenery towards the end. The video is now just over 9 minutes long and has improved sound and editing for those who saw my first attempt. The sounds you hear in the video are what you would hear in the Rhodesian bush and I have over 32 different sounds of birds and background animal noises that you will hear throughout the map. I have bloom set to high in my video which you can see in the video. Will test this to see if I keep these settings for my next video. Next video will hopefully be added in a few days time .... by the weekend at the latest...... and hopefully I can add some video previews of models I am working on for the map and testing.

I have recorded a completely new video and I have added the new version of the preview video onto my youtube channel and pasted the link below. Still having some issues with the audio but much better than the first video I did yesterday. Video quality is the same as seen in game if you leave the youtube video window at the size it appears in below...... larger video windows reduces the quality of the video.

I have completed and edited together a video showing a preview look at the Rhodesia Bush War mod for Arma III which is very much still in development. Early this morning I got to a stage where I was happy with the results I was seeing with the hills and this now allows me to move on to the next step of the project. The video is just over 12 minutes long and has being edited and is currently being published to youtube. This will take another 2 or 3 hours to finish which may stretch out to four hours as I need to do some real life work in the mean time before doing final checks and publishing. Please come back a little later to see the preview video which I will link in a following post and add my channel to my forum signature.