mikebart

thats amazing!, im really starting to feel like i've gotten into terrain making at the right time, hehe :)

Nice work guys, downloading.

hey this is looking really great Senchi, you've got some very nice atmospheric scenes happening here. I noticed some of my grass that you edited in there and have previously credited yourself for making. Look, im not going to demand that that you remove it from your terrain or report this to a moderater or anything like that, but I would like you to know that when I take the time to build a high poly, model hand paint textures in photoshop for that model, set up lights and then projection render it to texture and then you just overlay some snowy texture over it and credit yourself for it, it kind of pisses me off. like i said im not gonna make a big thing out of this, keep using it if you want to, I just hope you give credit where credits due in future.

this is looking great arb, keep up the good work!

nice stuff shezan!, thanks

yeah, one day hopefully :)

looking good, im assuming you adjusted the water colour to make it that blue? looks nice.

Hey LJF, really like this map, good job on making the jungle look dense without too much slow down, nice attention to detail. Although, I could be one of the few who actually play around in the armory, I just thought i'd mention this bug. You might already know but when i load up the armory, i spawn about 500m in the air and fall to my death, when i accept a challenge, i spawn on the ground but my objective will be 500m's up in the air, its a shame, cause i find the armory a really good way to experience a new map, cheers for the hard work!

bit of a long shot, but from looking at NZDF CRASH's model the other day, i noticed there were alpha channels on the main hull texture of the chopper, might be worth a try and making sure your _co's are 24 bit

thanks for all the info Bushlurker, Beton, thats really helpful and explains a lot, I managed to get my island working by removing all the capitals from my clutter files just like you guys have said and I also dropped those extra "/". My $PBOPREFIX$ only works if its "mikebart\mb_manaisland", it was also finding "nozwrite" in my grass .rvmat, and that was spitting out an error, so that might have been a contributing factor aswell, but im kind of not entirely sure exactly what was causing the error, its quite temperamental though, theres been a few times where i've broken something since i got it to work and had to revert back to when it did, although the last few times ive managed to fix the problem myself, which is what i should be doing :). I've just been running around, having fun in the armory since i got it working though, but I spent some time making some colour tweaks and clutter tweeks, i posted up a few screenshots to say thanks for all the help!

I've pretty much tried to stick to how sgt Aces tutorial is set up, i tried emptying my bin_temp and re binarized and it got a little bit further, it took a long time to load but it eventually launched arma2. I could select the island in the armory but not in the editor and when I launched it from the armory, i had a crash "couldnt find mb_manaisland.wrp", it also couldnt find "\mikebart\mb_manaisland\data\ui_selectisland_mana_ca.paa" although its correctly defined in the config. I've tried binarizing with and without *.wrp in the list of files to copy over directly and still get the same errors.

just posting up my config, might help, thanks class CfgPatches { class MB_manaisland { units[] = {MB_manaisland}; weapons[] = {}; requiredVersion = 1.03; requiredAddons[] = {"Utes"}; version = "2010-3-14"; fileName = "MB_manaisland.pbo"; author = "mikbart"; mail = "mikebart1980@hotmail.com"; }; }; class CfgWorlds { class CAWorld; class Utes: CAWorld { class Grid; class DefaultClutter; }; class MB_manaisland: Utes { description = "Mana Island"; worldName= "\mikebart\mb_manaisland\mb_manaisland.wrp"; pictureShot = "\mikebart\mb_manaisland\data\ui_selectisland_mana_ca.paa"; centerPosition[] = {2720,2462,500}; seagullPos[] = {2720,2462,500}; longitude = 30; // positive is east, in degrees? latitude = -45; // positive is south, in degrees? class Clutter { #include "cfgClutter.hpp" }; class Names { #include "mb_manaisland.hpp" }; }; }; class CfgWorldList { class MB_manaisland {}; }; class CfgMissions { class Cutscenes { class MB_manaislandintro { directory = "mikebart\mb_manaisland\data\scenes\Intro.MB_manaisland"; }; }; }; #include "cfgSurfaces.hpp" ---------- Post added at 03:48 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:43 AM ---------- actually there is an error when i run arma2.exe, i get "Include file config.cpp not found"

thanks for the quick replies guys. That fixed the error Beton, cheers:). I now have no errors in my log but my map still wont load, it just hangs on the last 2 boxes on the arma2 loading bar, and then crashes with this error, "Include file config.cpp not found" does that ring any bells for anyone?

Hey guys, some of you might already be aware of these things if you've checked out the thread that Abs created over at Arma 2 Editing\ Arma 2 O2 modeling\ How does one create custom trees? if not have a look if you're interested in finding out what they're all about and how to make them work. Basically im using Maya 2010 to transfer the vertex normals of a sphere onto a peice of foliage, so that it looks like this: Im really intending this tree to be a learning example for guys making trees along with some info on how to apply this technique to their foliage as an alternative to lightmapping, as its easier to set up (as long as you have Maya) and should perform better than an A2 tree seeing as it has no 2nd UV channel. I'd appreciate it if island makers could test it out for performance and asthetics, I also want to test out some other things like, "does a tree perform better when it has only one material for all the lods?" and "how much does a light map effect performance", so its a bit of an experimentation thing aswell It comes with a config too so that you can place it in the editor, just for viewing, but its really intended to be used by island makers. Below is a comparison between the standard vert normals (unified) on the left, and the altered vertex normals (spherical) on the right, you'l notice that the tree on the right receives light more volumetrically than the tree on the left which apears quite flat. In the two screenshots below you'll see how the trees compare in a group situation, the altered vert normals give the tree a bit more bang for its buck for no extra cost Im hoping that this could be a more performance friendly alternative to lightmapping. Standard Arma 2 trees use a lightmap on a second UV channel, which also includes some colour variation aswell as baked in shading. Although the altered vertex normals are'nt quite an equal alternative to a light map, there are some things that the altered vertexes can do that a lightmap cant, such as receive light dynamically in the same way, for example you couldnt get a forest shading quite like this just with lightmaps: something i'd really like to try is the combination of the altered vertex normals and a lightmap for ambient shadow and and colour variation and then find out exactly how much a light map affects performance. hey guys, heres the final release, i've updated all the geo lods, the trunk and added a lightmap just to the trunk. Download mb_elmSmall1.02 -fixed $pboprefix$ -added surface types 'foliage' and 'wood'

hey jojimbo, is that the original .rvmat for the grass?, i picked it up again the other day just to see how it looked in arma 2, but i couldn't get it looking anything like that :), does it still sort in front of smoke and other effects? its been a while though, I might have broken my version. Top notch looking stuff though guys, ill have to re install arma just to spend a bit more time with the first I44, i really enjoyed the intro, it was like watching a movie.

Yeah they're pretty weird looking trees. The South Australian figs are everywhere in Sydney, they could be an interesting tree to model, they'd definitly be something i'd like to have a go at some time. Almost finished with the larger elms, they're working really nicely with the smaller tree, im gonna make one more large version with a very tall trunk and all its leaves on top, just to act as canopy, this way we'll get much more visability in the deeper areas of the forest, heres a few shots from the ground:

thanks bushlurker, no plans for jungle trees at the moment, im sticking with the western Europeans for now, deciduous forests, the kind found in france and england, so should still be good for WW2 but not so good for WW2 pacific. were you thinking of a fig tree or something?

cool!, congrats on the mod guys, cheers for all the hard work.

phew, thanks KeyCat, I've just been working on some larger versions of the tree, just placed a few down on Utes, you can see how they still recieve light kind of the same with low video settings. They're pretty fun to fly around, the taller ones are quite dense you can easily hide a helicopter behind walls of foliage, i had some fun with some AA placed around and the larger trees really do provide effective cover. low video settings high video settings the larger elms are still pretty cheap considering their size 5600 verts, should be ready for release soon.

looks great LJT, the jungle looks very convincing.

So this is just a simple installer version with no six updater required?

nice one beton, gonna check it out :)

no idea, I just remember reading somewhere 'Faces/move to top' etc, was related to alpha sorting

nice one, is that in bulldozer?, I didnt spend too much time with it, but I had a go with a 1000 vert peice of foliage and it took a very long time to process, but the results were the same, did you try importing to O2? my normals were unified in oxygen when i imported from .3ds, and O2 crashed when i imported as a .obj.

please tell me this one works, Download mb_elmSmall1.02 -fixed $pboprefix$ -added surface types 'foliage' and 'wood' Yeah Utes is probably a bit dry for them, they're probably more suitable for a summer map, but its really up to the terrain artist to tweak colour's to suit their terrain, like i said in the readme, I really dont mind if you adjust colours to suit your needs, I might release some masked .psd's to make it easier to adjust, so that you can isolate diferent components e.g. leaves and branches and change colours individually, like i did with MB_grass