Nicholas Bell

You have to construct road networks manually - the auto function does not work. Please use the search function in this forum looking for "roads" and you will find several threads with good explanations and tutorials on how to do this.

As mentioned in another thread, this tool works great and was a lot easier than my usual cut and pasting of screen images: http://www.aaaasoft.com/gmid/ I bought the program to enable me to get the close-in zoom levels and was well worth the cost in time saved. Plus the distortion issue with the edges is a non-issue. If you send me the long-lat corners of your area I might be able to help out.

Here's the file: http://www.sendspace.com/file/yxe012 Please note that the reason I posted this initially was to get help on a specific problem. Not looking for beta testing at this time because it's absolutely no where near that - it's an incomplete mess, really. But feel free to have a peek if you are inclined.

Getting this message in V3 after I installed an additional faster hard drive and reinstalled both ArmA and V3 on the faster drive. The error occurs when I attempted to drag a box to select a number of objects. Not really short memory, have 2.3 gig available (have 4 gb on the system). The .pew file is only 24 mb in size, so I don't think I maxed anything out. Bulldozer works fine. I can select single objects. Looked at the V3 config file to see if there was anything I could adjust, but I couldn't spot anything. Mostly Greek to me anyway. I've uninstalled, cleaned the registery, reinstalled - on both the old C: and the new F: drive. The error also appears on older backup .pew files on one map, but not at all on another map. Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks...

Thank you Phaedon! This is very nice. If you happen to stumble on any other neat key combos please let us know Not sure I'm up to learning 3D modeling, though. Got enough trouble getting my head around V3. But a good idea nonetheless.

I think that would be a perfectly good work around for a few buildings, but to do it for dozens or even a hundred or more structures would be a bit overwhelming. I was not aware of being able to adjust structure height while in Bulldozer. Unfortunately Pageup and Pagedown does not work for me (all it does is change the viewheight, even when an object is selected). Is there a specific condition necessary to make this work? It would be huge help. I have manually adjusted podesta's by going back and forth between V3 and Bulldozer, changing the elevation height in the object properties. What a pain in the behind that is. Took me many hours to do the fishery dock:

In short, the buildings do not have basements or deep enough foundations. The models do have extended foundations or watertables to allow for some change in grade, just not enough for the slopes on this map. I just didn't know enough or think this through before selecting this town to do - my bad. Here's an actual shot of a hill in Bluefields:

Sorry for the slow response. I was alway. This sample shows the problem with sidewalk disappearing under the grade where the slope changes. The building is half buried on one end and hanging in the air on the other. Terracing the grade so the buildings sit level is a no-go because of the problems with sidewalks and roads. And using the shortest pieces of sidewalk and road can solve -those- problem, but then increases the number of objects to a probative level. Of course I can lower the overall height of the terrain and smooth out the slopes to eliminate these problems. But then it isn't as realistic as I had intended. I'll have to get over that.

The short answer: No. The long answer... Some time last fall I read a comment (I think Planck wrote it) that V3 was not designed to recreate actual terrain (I'm paraphrasing here). I thought it an odd comment to make, given my limited knowledge of the engine at the time. It seemed like all the tools were there to be able to make really realistic maps - something I do "for real" for HPS Simulations for both their commercial and government products. Of course I understand that there limitations in any program, and in the case of attempting to reproduce the topography of Bluefields with actual datum, I've gone outside the capabilities of the engine. Simply put, the program is not designed to reproduce an urban area built on steep slopes. At least not 2-3 square kilometers of tightly packed roads and structures. Roads, sidewalks, and structures require fairly flat or consistently mild sloped terrain to work. In the terrain I've built there are problems with roads and sidewalks disappearing under the surface, portions of buildings below grade, etc. I've also received an error message indicating "too many objects in grid", which results in bulldozer crashing. So I've set this project aside while I consider what to do. In the meantime I've completed much more in a fraction of the time on the Schmalfelden, Germany map I have been working on concurrently. I do plan on working on the Bluefields project later, but at the moment the thought of basically having to totally redo the height map, roads, and objects for a large portion of the map is frankly quite depressing.

You have to do it manually, unfortunately. You can import natural and man-made objects using Project | Import Templates.

One downside of doing this, however, is that the Road Smoothing Script probably will not work. If they are really short roads, maybe.

I've thought about this too. You would have to use 1 meter cells to get the proper trench effect. Otherwise the engine will slope the sides of the trench and they won't be vertical. Creating the firing step and parapet would be a problem perhaps handled by using objects instead of the map. The small cell size might create a host of other problems which have been alluded to here in the forum. It might be possible for a real tiny map. I think the best way to recreate trenches would be to create an object. If it were created with sloped glacis it could sit on the ground without appearing to be built up too high. Also, since objects can be placed below the surface, it would be possible to sink the trench object. Obviously the actual area of the trench would have to have the elevation reduced so that the ground doesn't "fill-up" the trench when it was set lower than the terrain. But the trench object would hide the slope of the elevation change (in the case of using cell size more reasonable like 5 meters. Hope this makes sense - it does in my head anyway Unfortunately I have enough trouble managing Visitor and lack any ability to create 3d objects.

Wedge, these are excellent. You should really start your own thread so others will spot them. Buried in this thread they are a hidden gem.

Yeah, tons of fun. Lately, V3 has been deleting entire roads on it's own

Script Central Thread

Thank you, Fasad. That is what I was looking for!

Thanks. I misunderstood the purpose of the script. I thought it was to eliminate having to add the objects manually - useless to me.

A question not answered in the discussion - where should the file be in order for the import script to load it? In V3, all I want to do take the objects from one project to another. Export works fine - I created a large .txt file. The import script produces an error saying the script requires the template to be "already in the document". I've placed the txt file in every folder in the new project without result. Obviously I am missing something really basic. Thanks!

Sorry, I am stumped on this problem. Never seen anything like that.

You can unpbo the Sara.pbo (in the main addons folder) to extract a lot more textures than are available in the BISample Map.

The adjusted height in the updated version looks spot on. Nice. I'm quite sure YOU would not enjoy doing a 250,000 square km map

My experience has been that white grid squares indicate more than 4 colors in your mask file in that grid. I've made that mistake myself. I understand you have only one texture - make sure that your mask is absolutely one solid color. A little bit of dithering will add hundreds of colors.

Have you exaggerated the heights? Those mountains are too steep. I've spent a lot of hiking in Nevada over the years

Sidewalks Seriously. I've been working for 2 weeks on sidewalks. There are a fair number of photos available on the net showing the locale. Real estate websites too. I was expecting dirt-poor, mud roads, etc. Not so. Even the poor sections of town have curbs and sidewalks. The way things are going I'm going to down-grade some areas, otherwise I'll be doing sidewalks for the next month. For anyone contemplating doing "large" urban areas, keep in mind that sidewalks are not designed to represent all real life intersections! Anything except right angles is going to be a royal pain the rear to cobble together. Nor do they handle towns that are built on slopes - the sidewalk pieces do not follow the contour of their subgrade, instead apparently setting themselves at the lowest point in their shape. In areas where the elevation changes quickly this results in the sidewalk being below the surface of the ground in parts. All this makes me appreciate more what Opteryx accomplished with his Sakakah map. I'm spending 1-2 hours a day on this. I can only imagine what he has put in (and continues to). More information than you probably wanted. But there is it.

From Biki - maybe this is what you're after?