mondkalb

Make sure to have the virtual path correct of the addon. P:\mbg\mbg_killhouses_a3

Hello there! It's time for a teeny tiny update of the terrain work, as I have a happy announcement to make: The old vegetation from Arma2 is completely gone! But what am I using now instead, you may ask yourself? The vegetation from Altis and Stratis? The jungle from Tanoa!? The correct answer is: 30 new vegetation models specific to the biome of that exact location. I doubled down on the effort and started a month ago making trees. I have redone them countless times to get them right and to make myself accept them as a viable replacement. The new trees are up to standards and tested for performance in forests as well. I am getting no less than 54fps inside a forest, where a similar view distance inside a Tanoa forest only yields me about 40fps at the same graphic settings. This partly due to Spruce and Beech forests being tall and dark, leaving little ground vegetation to suck performance. :) Here's the collection of all the veggies I have eaten made: The lineup so far: Fagus Sylvatica (Beech) Alnus Glutinosa (Common Alder) Picea Abies (Norway Spruce) Quercus Robur (Common Oak) Salix Alba (White Willow) Crataegus Monogyna (Common Hawthorn) Corylus Avellana (Hazelnut) Phragmites Australis (Reeds) Typha (Cattail) Triticum Aestivum (Bread Wheat) This is quite a lot, and while there wont be any more trees in the forseeable future, I still plan on adding two more types of shrub/bush. Addtionally, I wanted to share a closer look at the terrain, so I prepared a 3000x3000px render of a custom styled 2D map created from my sourcedata in QGIS. (Its a 12MB file) Link here

1. One vertex at a time. Approximate the shape, compare with images from all angles and blueprints. Refine, repeat. You'll get there. 2. If you're willing to get deeper into this hobby, consider a Photoshop subscription. Its about 10GBP a month now. Additionally, look into Quixel. Its basically permanently 40% off (I just checked, and it was). It's a one-off 50GBP thing that will help you out a lot. However, Quixel does have its issues and problems, so if you have some extra cash, Substance Painter will really make the tank a treat if you are willing to sink time into that tool. But it goes for around 200GBP now. Wait for the next steam winter sale to get it for cheaper if you consider. 3. Export as FBX from object builder, set the export scale to 0.01. Export objects with _geometry to have them directly import into the geo lod for example. Try this with other extensions to have them directly import into the relevant lods in OB. 4. Its not well documented, because its a very uncertain thing. PhysX vehicle configuration is notoriously hard and random. Just taking a working config from the arma3 vanilla tanks doesnt help much, as the vehicle center of gravity and assigned weight in its Geometry lod influence the vehicle's behaviour. The offical sample addons are your best chance at understanding it. 5. Its not the correct area. These are: https://forums.bistudio.com/forums/forum/162-arma-3-addons-configs-scripting/ https://forums.bistudio.com/forums/forum/165-arma-3-modelling-o2/ Edit: I've pinged the moderators. They will move this thread for you in a bit. 6. A chieftain is very much Cold War gear. If you are interested in that topic/theme, drop by here on this discord. You'll find some others working on projects of the same theme/era and it will likely help your motivation seeing other's work and progress and sharing your own there. Maybe you can join some existing effort, too. :)

We're ahead of you there, then. It's fully working, too. You can even stack bridges to increase the reach.

What Pufu said about the armor system hits it quite accurately on the head. It is compatible with RHS by nature of how the armor system works in Arma3 and is applied. We'll see what tanks DLC will do this, though. Our mod is 100% standalone, no outside dependencies. No CUP, No RHS, absolutely nothing, in large cases not even Arma3 itself. We do all the models, textures, configs and surrounding work ourselves. It is the principle we founded GM on. That is also why we do not accept model donations or similar. We are building this mod because we enjoy the process of building and refining it, not because we want to have a specific list of things thing done for someone to play with. This is a fundamentally different approach to modding than other people may have. Please understand this. This means that if you want to use our NVA units with other mod's weapons you will have to set this up in the editor or do your own compatibility addons. "The journey is the reward."

As stated above, I have joined the GAF team to initially help out with terrain work, but then I started filling other roles as well. First I dipped into character art creating West German equipment. Regular summer outfits, autumn jackets and then full winter attire. The various worn equipment went along with that. Since the scope of our project was to create both east and West Germany, the NVA troops soon followed. With a short detour into making a P1 handgun I then returned to my origins: Terrain making. A big 20x20km map covering the Inner German Border in all its detail. My requirements are to create everything myself and not to use any Arma assets. Only the vegetation are Arma2 models that I have heavily modified to fit the terrain, all the other objects, items, houses and suchs have been newly built. They are prepared for partial destruction and will have ruin models, too. A great deal of research work went into this, with the goal of recreating the Inner German Border in the highest accuracy possible. To do so, I am accessing various historic sources including original maps printed in East Germany that were classified at the time. Currently I am working on the terrain, creating detailed crew animations for every interaction. Oh also I am currently working on the most iconic East German vehicle there is... Check this imgur album for a preview of my current work: https://imgur.com/a/ukE30 Check this album for some Terrain WIP images: https://imgur.com/a/neXSr

Oh my, great to hear that there are more people with their heart beating for the cold war era of warfare. I think it would be a good idea to gather everyone who is interested in this topic together - to keep each other updated with the various and plenty projects around Arma's birthing era (Back then as OFP). So if you are interested, please PM me and I'll try to set something up. These days a discord server is pretty good at bringing people together, think of it as a fancy IRC. I've just now set up a server titled "Arma Cold Warriors", here you can join it right away: https://discord.gg/VhdaJu5 So if you're a cold-war enthusiast and know me, you'll want to be there. :D I think we will be able to pool news about cold war related mod development there, I'll certainly try to gather them there, as I am following quite a few projects as well as developing my own. So I guess there you wont miss any of it, and you could add more infos that you come across as well. Big thanks to Scimitar for his list and mentioning our efforts here.

Heya everyone! I wanted to share some more details today, as the projects have been progressing at a tremendous speed currently. First off the pictures for those of you with short attention spans. :P By now a majority of the settlements on this massive 20.48 x 20.48km terrain have been assembled. In fact, 32 of 46 in total are built. As I am progressing through these I am finishing up my assets as well (All buildings have fully modeled interiors and I have already begun making partial destruction states). While I am loving all the progress I am making and and I am indeed steadily approaching the final state, I get more and more worried about how this massive new library of assets will be abused by the various people who do not care about content owner's rights and will plunge in happily exploiting my work on their monetized roleplay server communities. This makes me multiple-sad, as not only will my work be exploited for monetary gain, but I am also very sure that stupid, disrespectful - and worst of all - very inaccurate "escape" missions trying to "simulate" an escape from East Germany into West Germany will be made. Or other related RPG events around this, along the lines of "East German Life" and other such things. I absolutely WILL NOT allow any of these. My heart in this project is military cold war gone hot, the original Arma/OFP type of game... And it really sickens me that I am already receiving requests about "free use" of my terrain from these types of communities. Worst of all, I don't know what I can do against this other than not release it, which I don't want to do. However, I am still on the fence about this. I have studied these border fortifications very closely, and I am extremely satisfied with their authenticity. I am actually so confident about these that I have planned to write and produce a small documentary about the Inner German border in this sector during 1983, the time where the fortifications were the deadliest. I believe this border complex is a very unknown part of history. It is - if at all - just briefly mentioned as a side note in history lessons when the Berlin Wall is brought up as a topic, which is again not done everywhere on the world. Actually this is one of the big reasons I am actually making this terrain: I want this to serve as a great new medium for exploring history: It is visually present, easy to access, explore and interact with. I have also plans for a small interactive "museum guide" for this terrain that will be bundled with the terrains release where you can learn about the fortifications and all the background information I have gathered over the course of this project. This does stand somewhat contrary to what I said earlier about the "escape simulations", but please try to understand the difference here: One way is using this map as a time-machine and museum park to go exploring in, to make it visible what once existed so clearly and crassly across germany and is now almost completely gone, while the other way is a pretend re-enactment of a situation that is impossible to accurately recreate in arma. This is not due to technical limitations with Arma, it is a problem with immersion and abstraction that does not allow recreation in any way other than actually having to live through it. Reliving any of this is should never be the goal. The goal should be to make visible what disappeared and decayed over the course of time. I am absolutely fine with missions playing out a NATO vs Warsaw Pact invasion across the border in a cold-war-gone-hot scenario. This "traditional" military scenario is very interesting and Arma is (will be ;)) absolutely suitable to make this a believable and intriguing experience. But a "Border troops vs. Civilians"-Scenario is the worst possible thing in my eyes. For one because of Arma's technical limitations, but mainly because there is no way to make the players on both sides of such a scenario understand and assume character in/of what was going on. There is no game design on this world that will convey to a player the desparation needed to risk a likely death by attempting to clear through this border complex. A similar thing has to be said about the Border Troops: In East Germany military service was mandatory if you wanted to have any progress in any more sophisticated choice of career, especially if you wanted to be eligible for higher education. This military service included with a certain probability to be assigned the border troops and be posted at the border. I don't see a good way to convey the dilemma these soldiers would face when they found themselves in a situation where it was their responsibility to stop an escapee by any means necessary. It is such a topic full of canned worms that I really don't want to take this lighly, or worse: Judgemental. The entire complex of political indoctrination, that was such a massive factor in keeping the walls up for so long, cannot even be fathomed. So just don't do it, even though my digital museum makes it very easy to do. It may not be so obvious with this map here. If you had a concentration camp recreated in Arma, It's the most obvious thing that you wouldn't do a camp simulator. That's the point I am trying to drive here. These details are what I hope to shine a light on in my "documentary", which hope will be used as a substitute by anyone who has the urge to make any kind of GDR Secret Police roleplay missions. Oh wow, what a wall of text. But I wanted to voice my opinion about this early on and that it is actually something that keeps me thinking and re-thinking a release of this project.

Oh wow, this is a very nice tool! The UI/UX immediately sticks out here, which will make working long stretches of time with it not as tiring/frustrating as with similar tools. And after throwing a quick look at the github link, I am impressed at the modularity of the tool allowed through config. A solid framework that makes me say that this is seriously good engineering seldomly seen. Keep it up! As I am clubbing my way through almost 50 villages on my terrain I found that assembling fences is always the most time intensive part. Do you have any plans for rapid fencing of areas that includes matched edges and corners?

All I did was take the original movements and adjust them. Took about a day for all speeds and stances. It is not _that_ terribly work intensive, but certainly requires a lot of knowledge about the subject to not fall into the many pits. Especially on the config side. A WW2 style animation movement set falls into the same category. About 500 anims would need to be motion captured for a reasonable movement set. The adjustable stances are a minimal contributor to that number. It's certainly not impossible, but the mocap would still need to be paid for.

Congratulations for pulling through with this project! Glad to see feedback being incorporated before the release, too. You declared this as version 0.5, may I ask what extra work you have planned to reach 1.0?

I'm still alive and kicking. :) Just recently I have uploaded this on steam workshop to provide a legitimate upload, albeit unchanged since release. No further work on this addon is planned.

Hello everyone, here's an update of what many of you were probably very curious about: The border fortifications. I finished with the many villages in the west and I am now tackling the border strip before I go into building up the east. So far I have only completed the enemy-facing part of the border, but it is already very spooky. I'm still working daily on this. :)

Sorry for digging this ancient thread out, but through a random chance I stumbled across this here and began digging. When I redid some of the Nogova structures for CWR2 I had access to the original photos taken for reference back in 2000-2001 and with some little detective work was able to actually do find the original source building that stood in for the Lipany city hall. - In street view - In OFP I hope this bit on ancient trivia makes up for digging up this old thread. OFP Vets will appreciate it. :) Edit: Found a bonus in Milovice:

Heya, Almost half a year ago a purely curious adventure into Arma3's animation setup got out of hand and turned into what this is now. However, I haven't actually worked on it since last September, so after a conversation reminded me of this again I quickly wrapped this up today. The main reason for this release is to get the sources out for others to learn from. It's a fully independent character setup in Arma3 using all the things there are. Animations, Ragdoll, Weapons, Clothes Swapping, Head and Face textures, lip movement and of course hats. The sources are provided as they are. I sadly do not have the time to properly write up documentation for these. So I'd say only sort through them if you have the basics of Arma3 modding already learned. Imgur Album Here, have some animated stuff, too: Brickman walking away Brickmen falling apart Brickman talking Brickwall exploding Brickwall being Cool-Aided Content: One head piece Two face textures (Normal and Sunglasses) Four chest pieces Three pants Three caps Basic bricks with PhysX simulation Other Features: Change brick color in 3DEN Change brickmen appearance in Arsenal Can use human weapons Units and bricks in Zeus Server Key and addon bisign Big Fat Master Caution: Mixing Brickmen clothing and human clothing either way will lead to a direct CTD. Arma3 can't handle the mismatching skeletons! Edit: BI fixed that bug! Yay Bohemia! Intention: The idea here is mostly to demonstrate how versatile the engine is. Also to provide a working and "cleaned" sample to reference for similar projects. What should be done: The Artwork required here is fairly low. A new chest piece is really just one texture change and an extra config line. So you can add new Heads, Faces, Chests, Legs, Hats and whatnots here. Zombie Brickmen? Check! Police Brickmen? Check! 1980's-something-Spaceman? Check! The supplied full sources will make it easy to grasp the concept behind this project setup and the usage of baseclasses. Duplicate and change the obh_chracters addon to be the basis of your own customization for these figures and their parts. Credits: Thanks to Rasmus for the initial Brick! Thanks to Snippers and Rowns for cheerleading! License: Do what you want with this, but make sure it is known your work is based on this very release here today. Download: Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByGPADa-tp-lQnNSUlFpU1JXcUU Steam Workshop: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=854964321 The sources: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByGPADa-tp-lUW40dVFnUnIzRDQ Edit: Cold-Footer: I'd just like to make it clear: Obviously this is an unofficial addon, neither BI, BISim nor LEGO or Megablocks were involved here. I won't continue developing the addon either. It's a one-off thing really. Of course it's all non-commercial, too. And should LEGO get concerned about this, I'll remove the content download links. (Just to be sure and hopefully safe)

Heya, sorry for the late reply @morthon. The pivotsModel parameter in cfgMovesXXX points at a .p3d file. In this .p3d file's memory lod there must be memory points with the name of each bone (technically skeletal joint in this case) at the position of each joint. This information is crucial for layered animations (Commonly called "Gestures" in Arma) to work. I export my .rtm files via FBX2RTM (beneficial in batch processing), so my rig makes use of export helper boxes that already track the joint's position and rotation. To make a skeleton pivots I simply export this and collapse my export helpers, then merge them into a new memory lod. CollisionShape is a simple P3D with geoLod that is used for computing the collisions with the character and the environment. It's what allows you to crawl through narrow openings and prevents you from walking through them.

Happy lunchtime everyone, let me take you through the village of Rennau. :)

Regarding frequent = 1:

Indeed, the cold war does get hot. Currently the temperatures around 30°C do make the work a bit more tiresome, but nonetheless I'd like to share some info on the terrain project. The obvious choice is of course the northern plains of Germany. In this case, we'll be fighting directly, smack on, just before and just after the Inner German Border. Located at the border between the towns of Weferlingen in the East and Grasleben in the West, the area of almost exactly 20.5km x 20.5km will be the stage for grand mechanised warfare that even invites Artillery for a suitable tango alongside. It is scaled so that 1 meter ingame equals 1 meter in reality. Arguably the terrain grid of 5m does make this not entirely accurate, but this is OK for me. Now, seeing that this meant to be the cold war, the terrain will be 80's-tastic, along with old signs, flowery wallpaper and, of course, the Inner German Border in all its brutality. I am taking this project as an opportunity to create a digital museum of this end-of-the-world construction. This means that I am doing extensive research into how the area looked like and what was where in and around the year of 1983. To do so, I am currently sitting on a big fat stack of books around the topic of the Inner German Border, as well as one 1:25 000 scale map depicting the area how it was in 1984 as surveyed by the Government of Lower Saxony. Additionally, two original maps printed for the East German Border Troops help me complete this picture. These maps help me accurately place roads and villages as they were in the early eighties. A lot as changed since then. Rather gratefully, I am also supported by first-hand witnesses of the Border Troops who served there in the early and late 1980s. Their knowledge and input on the engineering of "the wall" greatly help me accurately placing assets and to make sure they are of the correct kind. I will top all this off by a visit to the Federal Military Archive of Germany later this summer to gain access to explicit documents about this installation, including what I hope to be (formerly) top secret maps of the installations. The ones I currently have were only declared "Secret". What this means: The map is literally divided. Not only by rivers and railway, but also by one of the most known, yet actually very unknown in detail, structure of the 20th Century. Along with this big massive 20x20 terrain, I am also creating completely new assets. Houses, factories, sheds, fences, lamps, bridges, rails, road signs and other incidentals. So far the enterable structures count 26 unique files on their own. Currently the status of this terrain is the final asset creation state. There is no point in starting cities and villages without all the assets ready yet. I plan to finish these soon and then making them available to individual mapmakers who wish to start using these in their project prior to my release. Please PM me in these cases. Also, PM me if you need something from the Military Archives. While I'm already there, why not go digging deep. :) I hope you can truly appreciate the magnitude of this project, and that I am already halfway done.

Yes, its a real place. Where exactly will be obviously clear soon, for now, it's safe to say we're in Lower Saxony again. :)

The M16A1E2 was made from a pick-n-mix of my M16A1 and M16A2 models. So it all exists in all combos and variants. Patience, please. :)

Anim configs are notoriously difficult to debug by proxy. So here some basics to help you understand the tech you are dealing with. This symptom means that the cost values are not balanced. The cost values are the values behind each animation state name in a linking parameter. (interpolates and connects). An A* system uses these cost values to find allowed and the most direct path to a new state. In your case ACE_LauncherProne links to all your movement states back and forth correctly. However, it may be that the transitions are too expensive. IIRC the standard cost A3 uses is 0.02. But be warned, messing with cost values and available links can easily break other animation-chains you weren't even thinking of. A classic example I every now and then encounter is that the transition from standing unarmed to prone unarmed transitions through a free-fall state instead of a correct transition animation. You will need to set up correct links to allow for this. For example: In your action map (LauncherStandActions) you have correctly defined the lying and playerProne parameters to link to your new prone animation states. However, does your playerProne animation state (ACE_LauncherProne) know it can transition from the standing animation? The animation state that LauncherStandActions's default parameter links (From memory this should be AmovPercMstpSrasWlnrDnon) must also be connected to your ACE_LauncherProne state. So ACE_LauncherProne should have either an interpolateFrom entry linking to AmovPercMstpSrasWlnrDnon or connectFrom a correct transition animation that serves as the bridge between LauncherStanding and LauncherProne animation states. I know this sounds complex and uses a lot of specific terms, but RV animation configuration is a complex subject that requires extremely tidy work, which brings me to this: class Interpolations { Class interpolations is a thoroughly bad idea to use. While does get the job done of neatly creating interpolateWith links between all items in there, it makes debugging animation links so much more complex its not worth using it. BI themselves aren't even using the -With type of links in regular animation states. Also, class Interpolations is so obscure and unused, that I believe the origins of this Launcher-Prone animation config come from SLX Mod for OFP/Arma1. That was the last time I saw class Interpolations being used. Cheers, I hope this helps. Don't hesitate to ask specific questions when you're stuck. :)

Just a small update from today. :) :O

You're welcome! :)

You can change the default world config that is being loaded in two ways: Using the -worldCfg=yourCfgWorldsClassName startup parameter in the buldozer link Changing the initWorld=; parameter in those core configs to be your world config