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Squeeeee!! :D :D :D So good to see a new update on this. I'm more excited about this map than anything else Arma related. It looks beautiful

You should put this in your signature! I had no idea you took donations. Expect money incoming. :P

Nights don't need much work, just a small change to the default aperture e.g.

Eh? Not all the materials were reworked, so still work to do. Just pointing out it *can* be done. Also, check the visual upgrade feedback thread here: https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/189808-visual-upgrade-%E2%80%93-feedback/page-27 Lots of people posting ways to manage improper lighting there.

Well I'll be. What the heck was I thinking of? Could've sworn it was OS who this whole drama was about a year ago. Oh, it was the main mod apparently not BC-tracers. Interesting. I'll edit my comment to reflect that, apologies for the misinformation.

You are amazing, this is what I was looking for.

Here's an old post of mine detailing aperture changes and how they could affect the nighttime lighting, the key point being that a correctly configured aperture at nighttime with full moon look pretty darn good in dev build lighting http://i.imgur.com/wTPmB2n.jpg Link to post: https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/189808-visual-upgrade-%E2%80%93-feedback/?view=findpost&p=3010301

I'd much rather we move on to the new lighting parameters, once the objects are fixed. But perhaps development on this map should continue in pre1.60 lighting until that happens? To give you hope, the Esseker team has reworked a bunch of A1/A2 assets to properly use the new lighting, video can be seen here The lighting on foliage is completely different to any A1/A2 asset lighting in dev branch used in the current build of CUP or AiA, in their changelog it states they reworked the SAT texture and some object textures in order to adapt to 1.60 lighting. Seems like they did it fairly quickly, hopefully the change is reflected in CUP at a later date.

The main issue for me seems to be the lighting issue (shadows not dark enough on objects compared to terrain). I've found it exists on many OFFICIAL ASSETS!!!! Lighting is not consistent amongst official assets or mod assets currently. To look at an asset done right, take the concrete construction buildings littered around altis/stratis, shadows are the same brightness as shadows on concrete ground outside, some shadows are baked in (turn off AO). however electrical boxes and (some, not all) trees have almost no difference in shading between bright, sunlit sections and shadowed sections, whilst some shadows are baked in others are clearly not. More objects with brightness issues: Pallet of bricks, shipping containers, white freco walled buildings (all are too bright in shadows, appear to "glow") _____________ Many grasses used in mods also suffer from shading issues, creating weak looking shadows - terrains themselves (the various textures for detail mid and sat) need their brightnesses adjusted. Almost the entirity of A2/A1 assets via AiA and CUP are lit incorrectly. This will take a lot of work or a batch change or something.

Uh, could anyone possibly test and screenshot their map with NO alteration to this setting? I've freshly installed my game and I now get midrange textures out to infinity (or at least 12km) WITHOUT changing this variable. Which is... interesting... but kinda stops me from being able to work on modifying it as it seems the second factor is a multiple (and no matter how low I set it, there is no change)

The same problem mentioned can be seen here, look at the trees and shrubs, they look 2D (almost no shadows)

Well, thanks for that at least. I've actually figured out which lines to change to get the lighting parameters change/do what. But gotta sleep (work in 3 hours now, yikes) before I test it all out. Got one of the tree models to look "right" (shadows fit terrain shadow) Take a look at the diffuse colour for each object, turn it waaay down for trees/shrubs from A1/A2 assets.

Words cannot understate how shit I am at this. I can't see a variable in the map info, I get that you've patched the middetailtexture, which is easy to search for. But I swear I've read all the damn entries here and it's not included. Perhaps the transition distance is global? Seems I'm looking for setDetailMapBlendPars? For a fixed value (for now) in meters. Will test if the pure script still works in 1.60

This seems to be an issue with assets rather than the new engine (or a change in the engine revealing flaws in old assets). The assets have their lighting set up incorrectly, trees should be shaded almost the same within the new engine (same for terrain at close, mid, long). The game is more sensitive to crazy values in the lighting config, and a lot of old assets just fudged it and used shit values because the old lighting system didn't care anyway.

The visuals are purely an HDR update. Here's the changes: (I don't get grainy houses, weirdly) The HBAO (ambient Occlusion) is set to max black, the new HDR renderer means max black isn't used indoors anymore at daytime. So you get weird shadows when using HBAO (solution: Turn off HBAO, switch to HDAO medium or Off for the time being) - Dev solution would be to adaptively change the HBAO black level based on lighting conditions or globally increase the black level to grey it out. Midrange texture range was reduced to 1/3rd of before (no idea why) LOD's are now streamlined, means sometimes you'll get increased pop-ins (but better performance) HDR is now photo-realistic in terms of light level compression @ daytime. Yaaaaaay. Colouration is *fixed*, yaaay (no more neon ocean and purple sky) Sunlight has been tweaked, no more radiant pink fog at sunrise/sunset. (Yaaaay) Under water (amazing) Terrain lighting parameters now have much larger impact - so badly configured terrains will look shit until they get patched. Object lighting parameters (and mismatch between e.g. buildings and terrain lighting parameters) have a larger impact, so differences can look awful if materials are meant to match. In summary: Lots of aesthetic changes (the new lighting), new bugs associated with them (AO issues mainly for me), mod maps need to be patched like CUP has done in order to make use of the lighting properly. Some performance improvements. Overall a great patch :)

Yeah, I just checked it for myself. Stable branch renders midrange textures out to 350ish meters, dev branch to 125m. This affects both vanilla midrange textures and midrange texture replacement mods. Going to delve into modifying BB's midrange texture mod and see if I can increase the range. But I'm pretty shit at the whole mod thing so it's 50/50.

Not sure if it works for 1.4, and I'm not quite sure how I would even go about integration of the wrapper and opentrack TBH. Any link to source?

The mods referenced in this thread haven't been updated for 2 or 3 years. Are you referring to bad benson's mod, Gamma's midrange textures, or the Stratis experimental terrain replacement by Nord? Bad Benson's textures should still work. Both BB's and Gamma's mods *only affect the midrange texture* and always have, so above 300ish meters they will fade out and the old vanilla long range textures will start to fade in. In dev branch the midrange transition distance was decreased a little, not sure if it's staying that way.

The material properties are not properly set up for the new lighting engine, the mid terrain texture properties do not contain the same lighting properties as the close terrain texture (hence the transition). This is not due to BI, it is due to the fact that these textures are (fairly poor) ports of textures made for Arma 2. Not that hard to fix though, I expect either CUP or the guy who made the CUP -> Dev lighting mod will patch it up to shape.

I'll save you the effort, we still don't have headtracking support (opentrack). It's a priority feature for the opentrack dev however he's busy at the moment and so an update including it has not been released. Without headtracking it's not playable (as a VR game, you can still play it like you have a giant 3D low-res imax screen but eh...) So no, no Arma 3 VR currently.

You don't have permission to post it, as it's OS's material. He very strictly stated that the mod was not to be edited, and the editing of his mods are what drove him away. If you want to make a tracer mod you'll have to remake it from scratch, we don't have a "expiration of permissions" ruleset in this community (yet). I wholeheartedly support any mods that you want to make, but be very careful with stuff you don't have permissions for as you may piss off the big players on the mod scene, without whom we wouldn't have the great, high quality mods that make arma amazing. Was thinking of a different mod and the kerfuffle was huge. Ignore the above as it is incorrect Sorry! :rolleyes:

No support there either, it hasn't been updated for a long while. So no headtracking.

Opentrack is currently not updated to use Rift v 1.3 drivers so no headtracking. But Vorpx is working as well as ever (whatever that means)

Agree! I was just testing this and the cloud cover is VERY high up, cloud cover on overcast days where I live is usually between 300-1000 meters ASL in altitude. During storms and rain it can be as low as 200 meters ASL. Regarding brightness/aperture and contrast (range) in dev lighting. And some general notes Day time sunny looked fine - used this to calibrate the others. Night time clear sky looked best to me at 4.6 aperture (contrast was *ok*, I think the range could be expanded a little to reduce the sharp falloff from lights). This also gave a great effect on a full moon. Perfection! Day time cloudy/overcast was also too highly contrasted in the mid-range (i.e. clouds to light, ground too dark. Normally biased towards everything being too bright) and could do with a higher aperture (darker image). Sunset at partial overcast it seemed the sky was too bright including clouds, lessening the interesting sunset colours and lighting on the clouds. (Clouds and sky look best at aperture 16.15 pre-sunset for example, current aperture is fine for the ground/objects) General notes: Shadows were great on ground (midday, sunny) but were strangely bright on buildings leading to an obvious cutoff between shadowed building and shadowed ground. Likewise, on a moonlit night, buildings were lit up but similarly coloured concrete road were strangely dark.This leads to the weird "over-HDR'd" effect where the whole scene looks poorly shaded. The lack of specularity on some object is very strange, e.g. leaves and palm fronds. The lack of white highlights on these objects makes them look very muted. All forms of Ambient Occlusion are far, far too dark during daylight hours. HBAO+ High is the worst offender! It still look amazing though :)

I agree to an extent, the default feels undersaturated. However those screens of yours look oversaturated. I think there's a few things causing this, one is that there's not much colour diversity so saturating each colour channel leads to oversaturation of some textures/objects and makes others perfect. E.g. the grass in your shot looks a little radioactive green, but some of the trees look perfect. In the default game the grass looks quite dry and brown but the trees (except those obviously brown trees - forgotten the name... cyprus?) are not green enough. Likewise the sky and sea aren't blue enough, but if you vibrance or saturate the blue channels you end up with overly blue other things and night time can get a bit wacky.