DualJoe

Okay it turns out it was not because of the medication that I could not see well with my uninfected left eye. I just never realized how badly scarred my left eye was till now. Luckily the infection in my right eye seems to be healing well and today my eyesight was good enough to do a bit of modeling. So I made a rough sketch/demo of my modular-map-object concept, with a base building (which would have all the roadway-, ai-lod and memorypoints and such) and some modular exterior parts. I wasted most of my time creating the procedural roof-tile texture, so there aren't as many variations as I had planned on making. Never the less, with a bit of imagination this should illustrate some of the possibilities of this idea. I've heard rumors that it is possible to scale buildings, which could possibly add another level of differentiation. As far as I understand how the RV-engine works, this method should allow for an impressive amount of visual variation for a relatively small cost in terms of data-streaming.

Depends on your videocard. Prices are ridiculously low, it's the same as my fx8120 was when I bought it. Evenso if my fx8120 has no problem whatsoever keeping up with my GTX560TI, you should probably be fine performance wise in Arma2. I looked at the benchmarks at Phoronix and I'm getting tempted to upgrade for those prices, eventhough I'm not having any performance issues.

Just got back from the hospital today where I learned that I have some kind of eye-infection with an impressive name. On top of my eyesight not being the best currently, the medication I now need to take makes it even worse especially with brightly glowing computer screens. In short, this means no updates for a while. I won't be spending much time behind computer screens for at least a week and hopefully by then I won't be prescribed a new batch of the stuff.

Thanks for the vote. Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been busy in a real life, helping renovating my parents house and being sick as a dog at the same time (weather didn't help and made things worse). Once I'm feeling better I'll start with the buildings. The thing about the buildings, it was more of a question to the addon community in general. Should spent extra time and effort to create a modular approach or just go with the default single purpose buildings? For the modular approach we'll need to define some kind of shared base onto which everybody can add their modifications. For example a 2, 3 and 4 floor base building, with standard floor-height, door and stair locations (possibly mirrored versions). These base objects then will have working stairs/doors AI-pathways and such, maybe even partial destruction. The uv-map should also be made for easy modification of textures. For the modular part I was thinking for example for each of these base class buildings, a set of one or more building facades (exterior with different windows, shapes whatever) and roofs, maybe even interior walls and such as proxy objects. I haven't tested this yet, but afaik it should be possible to select or replace proxies with a few lines in the config. Using this approach with minimal modeling work and some texture variations you should be able to produce a multitude of different looking buildings from a small set of base-buildings and modular-components. The thing is for this to work I need some feedback as to what addon/terrain-makers want to see/have ingame to work out these base buildings and workflow. Also we'll probably need a central repository with these base class objects with permissive licensing and either people add to this base object-pool or add their own (relatively) small modified textures and proxies to their own addon/missions. From what I've seen I suspect it should be possible to even work with modular elements from the mission-editor level. Hopefully this could work not only for buildings but for all kinds of ingame assets, sort of like a CBA, but for map-objects.

Well if those screenshots are anything to go by, your modelers for vehicles, infantry and weapons should have no problems at all whipping up a couple of buildings. Also you'd be surprised how easily those buildings can be turned into classic Dutch farmhouses. If buildings are still an issue my offer for easily customizable buildings from a shared base still stands.

Sofar I haven't seen anything which would make me think of switching to windows 8. There's only one input system I hate even more than I do touchpads and that is the touchscreen. While there may be people buying into the it's better because it's different line of thinking, I'm getting sick and tired of all these so called UI-improvements focused on phones and tablets. Tablets are toys and nobody uses them to get any serious work done, why should I be happy to turn 27inch screen into a toy-ui? Yes I know, you can tweak everything so it works like it should, but why should I have to tweak it in the first place? They can scream about the demise of the pc all they want, but for the foreseeable future pc's are here to stay. Good luck developing your "Appz" on a tablet. Btw this is not just a gripe with windows 8, but with all the major OS (guis), including Mac and on linux Ubuntu(unity).

Issue added on the CIT, please vote in the hope that we can have nice working water on high detail terrain, with reasonable performance. The real-life renovations are complete, but spending long days outside exposed to the elements, doesn't seem to be the best remedy for curing a flu and a cold. Meaning I'll probably need a few days to recuperate before I can continue with this project.

That mod looks to be for OFP, which probably means that it would be less work to remodel everything from scratch. Still they seem to have gotten quite a few custom assets running ingame. I won't have much time the next few days, because I'm doing 1:1 scale remodeling in real life, on my parents house. When I'm done there I'll look into the buildings. I had an idea about modular buildings to make producing different looking buildings easier and faster, which I may have mentioned earlier. I'll need a bit of time to experiment and work out a re-usable solution. Ideally I'd like some input from various map/addonmakers as to the requirements and wishes for buildings, so I can strike some common ground. Things like dimensions, number of floors and rooms and such, what parts need to be modular and what needs to be universal. In Blender I already use a similar system when modeling anyway, coincidentally they are also called proxies in Blender. For Arma as a last stage I merge all these proxies into a single model. But since I've been getting a bit more familiar with the proxy system in Arma I thought I might be able to transfer this method to the arma engine itself. This would allow for easy creation of different buildings not just with different textures, but completely different facades by (ex)changing a simple proxy model and little config tweak. As I said though this would require more effort for me than if I'd simply crank out a number buildings using a similar system inside Blender. In other words I'll only be interested in doing it if there is an interest in something like this in the addon/terrainmaking community here. Ideally I'd like to have/create a central repository with liberally licensed reusable stuff from which mission and terrainmakers could pick and choose. Not just modular buildings, but also trees, plants, clutter, roads you name it. Sort of like CBA but for models and terrains. You'd still need to make your own modifications like textures, addon-proxies and configs, but you'd have something to work from. Little heads up on the enormous amounts of generated shoreline-water-polygons being generated bogging down performance. While I have found a way to make them invisible, I have not been able to decrease their performance impact. Still a few things I haven't tried yet, but I'm fairly confident I won't find a workaround. After I'm certain I've tried everything I'll make a ticket on the CIT.

Indeed, very impressive terrain, well done. One of the first maps I´ve seen where it really does look like people could be living and working there. You can even tell how long the thrashmen have been on strike, the nerve of some people throwing away perfectly usable freightplanes.

Lol sounds like you're getting in the mood. On my map performance increases by a factor (Yes factors not percentages) of 4 or more without the weird water-planes, not what you'd call insignificant. I'd be surprised if Lingor wasn't affected by the same issue as well and judging from the screenshots Icebreaker hasn't been able to solve it. Don't know if anybody was even aware of the issue. I'll try to make a proper bug report on the CIT this evening and cross my fingers that a BiS-dev takes an interest. I was thinking along similar lines for the buildings. I'm seriously considering adjusting the 1:1 scale so I can fit the old town center of Wageningen. I'm really really tempted to try and recreate something like this before -> after. For me the texturing part is one of the bigger hurdles with addon making. I'm not that comfortable with 2d-image manipulation. Making the models for Dutch buildings and separate damage-models is not that big of a deal for me. The Cunera tower alone would be similar to modeling half a town worth of buildings, if not more. So if there are licensing issues with i44, I'd be more than willing to divert my attention into providing texturable models for people willing to contribute.

I discovered the reason for the sudden unexpected loss of performance on this terrain: It's the sea-shader. To be more precise it's the transparent planes that are created where the landsurface and seasurface intersect, and it looks like the water is creeping on the land (they are visible underwater as well). In the screenshots below you can see them at the edges of the water. To confirm this theory I raised the terrain above sealevel and got a silky smooth stutter free 60 fps at just below 2.5k VD and hardly any load on the gpu (1 Gig Vram maybe bottlenecking me). So I tried declaring empty shore-materials, which did indeed disrupt the shore-shader and gave me the same silky smooth framerate, but it didn't produce the effect I'm looking for: I then tried the simpleWater-shader from the rvmat list on the biki and also copied the rvmat-settings from the ingame pond-object into the ocean-material. All of which do produce results, but not usable ones. For example the pondobject shader only works for about 1km or so and then disappears, it also looks really ugly and unnatural on a big water-surfaces like mine. Finally I managed to make the sea-foam and shore-planes disappear by using a procedural transparent texture and using a detailmap-shader in the hope that these two combined would at least lighten the workload. So now I've managed to make all those transparent planes invisible, but they still kill framerates, because they are still there (just very transparent). I've just about run out of ideas and I'm calling it a night. I'd really appreciate it if someone had a solution to these weird shore planes. Anybody know how to disable part of a shader, like declaring an empty shore-shader class, or a very very high performance invisible shader? The same rules seem to apply as for RVMATs, so maybe someone figured this out for other objects/projects not necessarily a sea-surface.

Judging from your familiarity with a city like Amsterdam I think you can appreciate a bit of old school scenery. I know from past experience how much work texturing alone can be and I imagine it won't be less work for Arma. But I wouldn't say there's an immediate rush, digging those channels and especially smoothing them is a massive undertaking. Some angles are really awkward on a grid, so to make those look right takes quite a bit of manual coercion. I'm not even close to having half of the channels done yet. About the trains, now that you mention it, I never even had the urge to photograph a train, so I can imagine it being hard to find references. Maybe there's a detailed train-model catalog on the internet? I think I may have shot myself in the foot by posting the link with images above. I casually clicked on the Wageningen photos and I noticed that the main street of Wageningen is juuuust outside my current map region. I chose the current region so I'd have the hill central and a bit of room for Rhenen. But now I'm thinking of moving the area a bit to the east so you'd have two old city-centers on either side of the map. EDIT Nope, that just won't fit, either Wageningen or Rhenen is out. That or I have to adjust the 1:1 scale just enough so that Wageningen and Rhenen both fit on the map. Also you're right that I should get "organized". I'll make a google-drive document with a list of things to do and objects to make. Maybe even allow write access to people with good ideas and suggestions, instead of wishful thinkers.

That's one nice looking railway coach, are they enterable as well? I have made no plans for signs and such, so if you feel like customizing those signs, I'd be much obliged. Provided Marseille77 approves of course. I'm trying to recreate the tactical situation from May 1940, but I'm not going all the way in the details. That would be too much work for one guy. However if there's a choice between old and modern-look, I'd prefer the old look. That would give it a bit more character and would work in a modern setting just the same. Should you decide to texture the signs, I'm not sure if you have to add the names as well. Just in case grab google-maps and check the square area between and including Rhenen and Wageningen. There's a couple of villages north and south of the river as well, whose names I have forgotten. If you'd like a little fun, maybe you could help me with stuff for the "Ouwehand Dierenpark", the zoo on top of the hill. Don't know if I'll be able to, but the escaped zoo animals were part of the scenery during the battle and made the whole situation even more surreal. Might as well share an interesting anecdote about the zoo. Just before the attack German officers took their families to the zoo and used the occasion (and lookout tower overlooking the area all the way up to Wageningen) to scout out the defensive positions the Dutch army was digging just beside it, which they would be in charge of attacking shortly.

Trying different settings in visitor and different sat-texture-resolutions to figure out a way to optimize performance. Not doing a good job at it I'm afraid. I've changed something which really causes performance issues, but I don't know what it is. Either the land-creeping water is starting to become an issue, or I messed up the setting on the base-mesh in meters which I may have altered(wanted to see what it did). Most likely both. Still it's starting to look nice at 4.5 k viewdistance, if you ignore the dark horizon band which I need to find a fix for soon. I'm not feeling well at all, so I may have to take a little more rest. Also I've got some time consuming stuff coming up very soon, fingers crossed I'll at least be able to finish the windmill the coming week.

Wow thanks Bushlurker, you're a real Horn o'plenty of information. Will look into it as soon as I can.

Lol, that could be another thing to add to the ambient editor module which Bushlurker suggested I should make for things like working windmill, boats and such. Hell why not include the tram-line as well? Who knows maybe the public transport might even work, even though that would be very unlike the real thing. Once things quiet down around here(Ain't RL a bitch?), I'll start looking into things like Arma-materials and editor-modules and such. This might take a while because scripting and configs are not what you would call strong-points of mine. Then I'll hopefully be able to finish the windmill for a start with complete materials and a more elegant way to make it function then the current editor init-script workaround. I may also have a solution for my non-asphalt roads in the works. I'm waiting for my vbs-kit to be shipped, which among other things has a nice customroad-generator I'm told, that spits out road-parts ready for texturing. I'm fairly confident that at that stage I'd be able to make the bridge as well. Mondkalb has assured me that there's really not much to them. Btw Look at the dates on the files of my google-drive, I haven't been uploading a new island for every new heightmap. Not only does generating a new island take a lot of time, uploading them takes hours.

Short answer, pond objects look nice, but don't work for AI at all. Besides the river actually has a lot off water level differences, look closely and you can see the so called summer-dikes close to the river and winter-dikes further away. Water levels normally reach those winter-dikes quite often flooding the area between them. Unfortunately it's impossible to simulate water interaction like that in Arma2, who knows maybe in future versions. Although I've modified my terrain to fit the single waterlevel, my workflow allows me to fairly quickly turn it into a more realistic one in the future where waterlevels can be quite a bit above groundlevel. Which would add a whole level of dynamics which it does have in reality and why it was such an important area in past battles. As long as the RV engine doesn't simulate winter and ice, this area should hold up as planned instead of what happened when Napoleons troops walked all over it. It's been a while since I've tested AI on this terrain, but with some limitations the AI(commanders) handled it pretty well. Only problem is with things like wedge and line formations, where units will keep their position regardless of surroundings like the middle of the water, losing their gear in the process. The two solutions I came up with were: Use column-formation (should be your default formation anyway) and make sure that there are wadeable water areas. Actually because of the tides, the ai pathfinding finds different routes depending on water level, adding another level of unpredictability. One issue with AI is that they psychically know which areas are wadeable, whereas you as a player don't have the same insight. Still I suspect there will be loads of areas the AI will get stuck and I suspect I'll have to tweak things for a long time after I released. To be honest I was focusing primarily on human players when I started, but made considerable concessions and I'm putting in a lot of extra work for AI on this project.

Staggering amount of work you've put in there and amazing result. Unbelievable you did most if not all of this by yourself. You've really set the bar on this one.

Thanks for testing. Yeah this will be an infantry-map primarily and 2000 VD is pretty high in that case. I'm aware of the tide issue, but I don't think it can be turned off. I think I went for the best possible compromise. Most of the time you can wade through the channels but not all the time, so you'll have to watch your step. Sounds like the choppiness is mostly because of the sat-texture resolution then. Kind of figured 1m/pixel would be too high, but what's the point in testing if you don't push the envelope? Glad you like the ditches, they take a lot of time effort to create after all.

That's great to hear Dwarden, looking forward to enjoying increased performance and better graphics. I also don't understand why people compare anything to BF3, I really hope you didn't even take pointers from that piece of black and white excrement. BF3 is not even a rubbish game it is an insult. You just know that everything that's wrong with it, is that way by design. Someone deliberately made it as bad as it is. There's only one thing that game can be praised for: It's a very popular quartermaster game with sound.

On my google-drive there's a readme file saying which files to download, if there is any trouble. These are the step by step instruction for people not too used to manually installing addons: Instead of one big archive I've uploaded the separate building- and terrain-archives. (Terrain updates will happen sparsely in comparison, because even my mobile phone has a faster upload than I have on my regular connection) So I advice to create a @JDP\addons folder (I don't have an official tag yet). Download the buildings and teufelberg archives and extract them in that folder. Optionally download my windmill test mission from the youtube-video and put it in your arma-profile missions folder. Launch with an added @JDP to the "-mod="-list. Remember this is a very very high resolution terrain so adjust your settings accordingly: Viewdistance and postpro above normal are especially heavy on this map. Also terrain-detail has a very visible effect on this map other than just the grass. @Jakerod: Lucky for me then that the railroad-track is very flat, the vertical gouge in the hill (visible in the 3d-view screenshot above) was dug out especially for the tracks. I think I will have to make a railroad track at least for the bridge parts, because it will have to be crossable by AI as well. So I'll probably have to make a combined road/track object, for now I have no idea how to make either one, but I don't expect it to be more difficult than making a working windmill. I'd be happy to know what kind of performance crappy computers get too. I'm testing with a 1m/pixel sat-texture for now, but may have to go lower res for performance reasons. Just to be clear the sat map is not 1m/pixel quality I upscaled it to test performance, I will paint a sat-texture after I'm done with the first complete heightmap. I expect I will have to tweak that one quite a bit for roads and such, but I'll worry about that when I get there.

Had a couple of hours: Either I'm getting faster at this or I'm starting to lose track of time. Anyone tried the WIP-map on my google drive yet? I'd like to know what kind of performance people are seeing. It's one thing that it runs fine on my current average setup, but that's just one testcase.

The different challenge was what I was aiming for from the get-go, which is also why I needed the extreme resolution. However I'm really pushing the technical limitations of the RV-engine with this one. Fingers crossed hoping that I'm able to pull it off. There were numerous dubious decisions being made around that time. Indeed the shrubs which were planted for the sole reason to limit enemy advancement but had grown to block the view from the bunkers. Making some bunker completely ineffective just because they wanted to spare the environment, sounds very Dutch to me. It was by no means the only stupidity that was seen around that time. How about demolishing buildings for a defensive position, but leaving the building right in front of it intact to limit the destruction of civilian property. They were in their trenches with their faces up against a frigging house. German officers were baffled by the stupidity of that one. Or how about building a bunker on the enemy side of a water-obstacle, instead of the defending side. Or even better the construction of a new barracks for the soldiers manning the defensive positions, not behind the line but on the side of the enemy. It wasn't enough to give the enemy an advantage they even gave them brand spanking new lodgings. Lucky for us our current government really seems to have learned from the past, now we can all sleep well at night knowing there's no chance of history repeating itself.

There will be a railway-track which will run through the north-south slot in the hill and big bridge across the old-Rhine. I'm hopeful the roadpainter-script can be modified for that. Now that I think about it, on the road on the left in the screenshot there was a tramrail. The track ran from Wageningen on the side of that road, right along the southern edge of the hill. So there could be a second track painted on this map. Taking the fierljep-shot as reference, I only need some reed-clutter to make the channel look a lot more believable. Didn't Porto have some floating waterplants? Maybe those could be added as clutter as well.

Digging channels, digging, digging Around 2.5k viewdistance, but when I look at the entire map it's a disillusioningly small area. I keep getting reminded how this map isn't as small as I thought it was when I started. On the plus side this is the lowest level of detail I'll go, so there are signs of an end showing on the horizon. Now I know I can get a small stretch of 2 km with waterways done in an evening. To bad free evenings are hard to come by. Btw, you can really see your terrain-detail settings on this map, those watery-jaggies in the distance will vanish with a higher terrain-detail-level taking your framerate with them. EDIT I keep forgetting to show the depth of the channels, I wanted them to be borderline wadeable. Oh this brings me back, trudging through kilometers of this stuff, never before or since have I had blisters like that time, don't know if those still counted as blisters. What do you call the things you get to see after walking through your skin until you see something with a structure build up of loads of little diamond shapes? Ah dammit, never thought my feet would ache from making an Arma addon.