cctoide

I'm afraid I already know the answer to this, but is it at all possible to use roads from roads_e with the current version of Visitor 3? When trying to add an OA road piece to the V3 road list, I get the "object doesn't follow requirements for road object (are there all named points present?)" error. Putting aside the fact that I have no idea what OA did that required changing how roads work, is there any way around this? I saw someone post information on a way to hex edit P3Ds to decrement the ODOL version number so the A2 Buldozer could view OA objects, but I don't know if that would help in this case since it seems like it can read the object file but isn't finding the points it expects from A2 roads. Has anyone run into this before, or has nobody tried using the new roads yet? Or is this expected and the reason people are asking for new tools?

I'll concede the point that they took some liberties with the towns; one thing I noticed looking at Panoramio photos there is that there's a lot more multi-story apartment buildings in the region, while in Chernarus the only place these pop up is the large seaside towns, where they reused a few Sahrani apartment buildings. It's pretty fun looking at the Panoramio photos and seeing buildings, telephone poles, etc. they used as reference for game models. Apart from radically downsizing the towns along the river, and removing the ones at the edges of the map to make for a better transition into terrain synth land, though, it's remarkably accurate, down to individual hedgerows. I've never found a high res stitch of the ingame map like DrE made for Sahrani, but I'd like to redo that KMZ with a higher res image so you can see how much work BI put into matching the real area.

I'd been following the ARG, so I knew it was probably Lemnos. I brought the island up and started searching along the coast - I was looking for places with two tiny islets jutting out from a small peninsula. The first time I searched for a few minutes and didn't find anything, so I gave up thinking it must be some other island. The second time I was actually just looking around to see what the terrain and ground cover was like, and checking out photos on Panoramio, and at one point I suddenly realized I'd found it. Credit goes to Blu3sman too, he narrowed it down to Lemnos going off of nothing but "image no. 5" and a piece of info from earlier in the ARG.

Uh... I'm pretty sure Chernarus' terrain was 1:1. If you overlay a map of Chernarus over the actual region it's based on in České Středohoří (like so, open in Google Earth) it will be 15.36 km on a side, like Chernarus' landmass. Some of the towns even look close to 1:1 to their real counterparts. Lemnos might have been scaled both for gameplay and software reasons - both the tools we have, and the game to some extent, aren't fans of 4096 pixel heightmaps, and to recreate the island, which is roughly 30*40km, at 1:1 scale with a 7.5m grid would require one. Though I'd have hoped they'd fix at least that in A3 when VBS2 is getting support for gigantic maps... Based on the "2.4 times the size of Takistan" comment, I'm guessing we will get a 20*20km island (or slightly bigger) but with a 7.5 meter grid. They might be taking advantage of a feature mentioned in a recent VBS2 presentation, too, which would let them use heightmaps which aren't necessarily a power of two, meaning it doesn't have to be one of the sizes we're used to from ArmA 2. Just speculation though.

Choppers, the road (too clean and perfect, looks like a repeating texture, no shadows from the grass), the poles (jaggies on the cables, pole on left resembles Chernarus poles). Plus the road people assume this was taken from is unpaved and has no poles, unless it was upgraded after the latest satellite imagery. Also looks like the entire sky might have been swapped out, as the lighting in the grass seems too even and devoid of shadows for what looks like a mostly clear sky. Looks like it might have been taken on a much cloudier day.

Nice find. It hit me that if two screenshots happened to be across the island from eachother, it might mean we'd indeed get the entire island to play on (either that or two maps of two different places on the island). Seems these two are both on the west side of the island though, only 7km apart.

No idea if I was beaten to the punch, but I believe I've found the location of the first screenshot: (edit: 39° 53'57.80"N, 25° 4'16.28"E in case it's unreadable)

Hope there's clarification on some of the bullet points listed above soon. Though I'm guessing it'll be some time before the next round of official info is released...

I suppose the next question once the initial excitement has died down is whether that image of the coastline can be matched to a point on Lemnos.

Nice. With screenshots, to boot. :) edit: Well, before the site died, anyway.

Preparing for an explosion of rage in the thread when it fails to materialize at 15:30 sharp. :p

You can also get a valid Czech phone number (515417711) by concatenating the numbers in the answers to the last question. Would be in the South Moravian Region according to Wikipedia. I really doubt this is relevant though. :p

I think the thing that looks "off" in that image after a closer look is the almost complete lack of shadows, apart from the ones cast by the two poles. Even the cable crossing the road has no shadow to be seen. It might just be a side effect of all the mangling the image has suffered, though. The cable's shadow might have gone the same way of the cable going out from the lamppost to the left, which is still barely perceptible when you zoom in. Could also be that they simply rendered the asphalt road and poles and worked them into the original photo, as the place where the image was apparently taken lacks both a paved road and the poles. The latest imagery of that area on Google Earth is from 2005, though... and I'm not sure what the point of altering the road would be, anyway.

Sorry, my numbers were off. 235 sq. km is the total map area for Chernarus (15.36*15.36 km), 180 sq. km is the land area. That makes Lemnos around 2.6 times larger than Chernarus. But I agree with Jakerod, it's just speculation at this point. It's probably just meant to give us a hint as to what the story involves. I'd love a huge island and a ton of new assets for map creation, either way.

I have my doubts that they'd recreate Lemnos in its entirety. Sahrani's land area was just over 100 sq. km, Chernarus is 180 sq. km. Lemnos is 477 sq. km. Unless they've been working on it for over a year or reinforced the terrain team, it seems unlikely. Or they could be replicating it at half-scale, I suppose. edit: my numbers were off

The traffic sign in that photo looks like it has a yellow background... might just be the lighting, though. Could be useful for narrowing down where it was taken, if it is.

I think the three symbols may be closely related. The "V" symbol may actually be the logic symbol for logical disjunction, while the "X" symbol looks like a Venn diagram, at the point where two circles overlap (or almost overlap) slightly. edit: they're probably all clues for the same thing, though, and, given we have the final image already, likely irrelevant.

Thought it looked like a Ka-50 but upon closer inspection it looks more like a Mi-28. You can see what looks like a chin turret, and the vertical stabilizer is swept back, while the Ka-50's is closer to vertical. I'm not sure how that helps though.

The crappy quality made me think at first they might have embedded a message, or other images, into these images by means of steganography. It seems more likely it was just done on purpose when combining the two images, though.

The creator(s) of the Thirsk Winter map may be able to help as that island is quite convincing. They already sorted out the issue with making realistic snow ground textures (and they actually sound like snow, too). However you'd probably want to winterize buildings too, and that's a bit more problematic as you're looking at editing hundreds if not thousands of textures (many of which use multimaterial shaders and are rather confusing to figure out). The real problem is really what ArmAriffic said, though, as you'd need to edit the satellite texture, which only BI has the source files for. In theory it shouldn't be impossible to stitch the sat texture back together and edit it, but I don't know if BI would like that idea, and besides, it would still be a big undertaking to winterize the entire 16x16km texture with decent quality.

Road pieces can't be selected in Buldozer (if they were placed as roads). I've noticed some of the roads2 konec pieces are probably missing a geo LOD, so they are invisible in Visitor. Try to track down the exact place on the map where it is placed, and then draw a selection box around that area. You should see the konec piece selected in Visitor's info bar at the bottom - hit delete and it should go away.

My guess is ground texture scale is probably related to the uvTransform class in its RVMAT, though I've never messed with it on purpose so I can't say for sure. class uvTransform { aside[] = {10,0,0}; up[] = {0,10,0}; dir[] = {0,0,10}; pos[] = {0,0,0}; }; While we don't get to see the RVMATs for BIS' own island textures, these values seem to be what most custom islands use, and since the BI tools usually work in meters I would hazard a guess it makes the in-game texture size 10x10m. Try messing around with the numbers and reloading Buldozer and see what it gets you. Note that you need to change the values for both stages in the RVMAT, unless you want them to be different sizes on purpose.

Hi. I was pointed to your mb_veg by another map creator and I found that your vegetation has just the right look for my map, even if it isn't the same species you'd find there in reality. I was wondering if you plan on adding more bushes to the pack, as it would introduce some nice variation on maps that only use this pack - which will probably happen with mine, as using the standard BI vegetation around your trees ruins the summertime look. Good job! :)

I'd always wondered what was up with the slow sidestepping move, good to know I wasn't the only one. These should come in useful.

chernarus_data.pbo, utes.pbo, takistan_data.pbo, zargabad.pbo, desert_e.pbo These PBOs include the data folders of their respective BI island projects, which is where the textures will usually be. They obviously share textures among themselves, but some are only found on the smaller islands - Utes for instance has some textures that are specific to it. I would not recommend swiping textures from other 3rd party islands as they may contain non-BI content. Remember to re-tag the textures you copy from BI projects so you don't break clutter on CA islands. For help with making your own ground detail textures if you need to, see Beton's ground texture tutorial (PDF).