oktyabr

THAT is strange. I ran the new tools myself this morning and will give binPBO a whirl myself, both checked (the way I usually do it) and unchecked and will report back here. ------ On a tangent do you not copy the configs from P:\CA to P:\<your tag>\ca like in the other tutorial?

Good to note that a new version of Arma2P is out (03/12/2011) and the readme says: "Arma2P from mikero version 1.09 reversed order of extraction so that A2 (if present) is extracted last. this, because, OA has stubconfigs which over-write the full configs of A2 version 1.08 corrected error in making a p3d list of type 49 p3d's as final output version 1.07 extractpbo and convertp3d.exe are required (along with the dll of course)" Might be useful to re-run with this newest version!

This can't be stressed enough and is the reason why I cringed when I read you were doing a 5120x5120 map! My current project started out that way with a 5m cell size (1024x1024 terrain.png and 5120x5120 sat and mask lco's) and the best I could set was 20x20. I found performance so sluggish that I actually rebuilt my entire island to support 1024 @ 10m, 10240 sat and mask so I could select "40x40" as Bushlurker suggests... my fps went from 25 to nearly 40 in the same area on my island! As a fringe benefit my surface textures tile twice as large (2x in each direction so 4x actually) so visible tiling isn't as bad either.

Very cool! Thanks for taking the time to do that. I'll see if I can't add this to my list of "must do" things on my next map :)

Me too! I just watched a special on the Wake Island operations from WWII on the Military Channel last night. It was a great show and one that I have seen before but like many episodes in the series it was their use of camera magic to show an animated map of the battles that just made me drool a little bit... had to come check this thread first thing this morning!

Thanks Shezan! Works great!

Anyone have this working with one of the later builds (32bit Win)? I'm having very mixed results and don't remember which one worked... sort of.... EDIT: Just a correction, the beta you link in the first post Leopotam works just fine! Don't know why I'm messing around with experimental builds (b-mesh, sculpture?) But I am having a problem with the scale of objects imported into O2, similar to what you show happening at the end of your "goggles" video... what's the trick to getting the scale right for export in blender? EDIT: Thanks to Commander for finding and then pointing out the solution! It was right in the video, just didn't know simply clicking two buttons that don't *look* like they do anything to your model in Blender could have an impact in how they look in O2! "ctrl+a" then click "Rotation", then "ctrl+a" and click "Scale"... Export! No more strange stretchy stuff :)

Hmmm... did my export script hang or does it just take awhile to work? My blender console says "Export to P3D started..." It's said that for about five minutes now. Not a huge model (under 1000 faces), all closed, all quads. EDIT-- Never mind! For whatever reason I had to restart blender and reload my mesh, then it worked. I lost my "pan" ability in it today too so who knows...

I used to use the Blender 2.4x series a couple of years ago and the big changes in the UI in the new 2.5x series scared me at first so it took Leopotam's plugins as bait to lure me back into to learning it! If you find the changes in the 2.5x interface daunting... or have never used blender before... I found a series of great videos to give you a crash course in modelling with this new software (English only, sorry!): Give it a go! We need more modellers ;) And more video tutorials! Thanks again Leopotam!

Follow the directions? Works the same way for A2 or OA.

Nice guide! I haven't had a chance to go through it step by step to see if there are any problems but it certainly looks like you did your homework! Thanks for sharing!

Interesting thoughts, rivers... If you follow the above directions do you end up with a 'river' that is actually just ocean? Does it have waves, sea sounds, tides? Or is there some trick with V3 to actually create a river that moves downhill?

Ok, I think I actually found the answer myself. The amount a surface texture will tile is directly related to what you set your "Base Layer" ->edit to. I know the tutorials say to use 40x40 but they also work with a 10m cell size too. In the case of my example island I used a 1024x1024 terrain with 10240x10240 mask and sat lco's set to 5m/px, not 10m, (giving me a total island size of 5120x5120). By doing this I removed "40x40" as a "valid" option when editing the "Base Layer" setting so I've been using 20x20, the largest it would let me use. As an experiment I compiled my island with this set to 5x5, the smallest valid value, and my surface textures tiled MUCH worse than before... in other words, they were much, much smaller tiles and repeated much more often. This also cut my FPS in game by about HALF! So as a rule of thumb, if you are concerned about FPS use the highest setting in "Base Layer" -> Edit that it will allow (it will show either "valid" or "invalid"). I never tried it with an "invalid" setting... I only presume that this would cause some error. I also wonder why exactly it prevented 40x40 from being used? If I had used the same size sat and mask (10240) and set my cell size at 10m instead of 5 I should have been able to use 40x40 with less tiling but my island would have been 4x larger than I wanted it to be. If I would have used a 512x512 HF and (10x that) 5120x5120 sat and mask, with a 10m cell size, it should have let me use 40x40... my textures would not have tiled so badly but I would have also lost terrain resolution. ~shrug~ Anyone have any tips on how to get the best of both worlds? Since I already have a 1024x1024 HF and a sat and mask 10x that size I think I'll rerun it with a cell size of 10m instead of 5 and see what happens... ;)

Hi, I've been through Beton's tutorial on ground textures (thanks Beton!) and he expresses the ideal size to be 2048x2048 as smaller (1024x) will tile more? I've also read the V3 documentation and still can't seem to figure out the answers to these questions: 1) is the size of the texture the only factor in how much it will tile? If not what other factors? i.e., what methods can be used to stretch a ground texture as far as possible, thus reducing that artificial tiling look? 2) what is the largest that can be used? What's the largest YOU have used? Thanks in advance!

I know the answer should be staring me in the face but I keep running into problems with missing textures in buldozer! My P: directory is setup according to tutorial with: P:/CA/roads2, plants2, etc. And then my personal work directory is P:/<namespace>/<mapname>/<stuff> so it looks like this for real: P:/OKTY/del_fuego/source, etc. The one I'm tripping over is african foliage. If it's dePBO'd into "brg_africa" should this be in P:/brg_africa/, P:/ca/brg_africa, P:/OKTY/ca/brg_africa, P:/OKTY/del_fuego/Data/brg_africa or somewhere else??? I assume it will be the same path for most non-BIS addons but I'm really struggling here. I can add the tree type to my Nature Objects in V3 and place them on the map but I always end up with something like "Cannot locate texture /brg_africa/data/something_something_co.paa" or similar when buldozer gets fired up. I'm not really that new. I got one map working with strictly BIS trees and the like (from P:/CA/... ) and on my own, "del_fuego", I've got custom terrain textures, BIS objects and even have Worldtools planting a forest of bis trees for me as well as Homer's Road Painter which just completed a scenic two lane black top all the way around the island, all of which shows up fine in V3, buldozer, and Arma2 (@Del_Fuego). What am I missing? Thanks in advance!

So what factors actually control how much a terrain tiles or rather the size of the tiles? I'd be surprised if there was no way to decrease the effect. As I posted earlier that island is a 1024x1024 HF @ 5m with 10240x10240 sat and mask images so I figure that each pixel of the mask must cover 2m... but if those were in fact in direct proportion like that it would seem to make more sense to use a lower resolution mask so each pixel covers a larger distance (in my case a 1024 mask would be 5m per pixel) or a smaller HF with a higher scale to make up the difference? Especially in the case of the mask image, where variation is more or less quite limited it seems like there should be a way to easy stretch a texture to cover more area. Still hoping someone will pop out of the woodwork with a method(s) that will tile terrain textures larger?

clicky things: My rvmat for that rock stuff (note: changed the "1"s used in those screens back to "10")

Ya, that is what my textures are set to by default. I haven't played with them yet but rather than 10x10m they look more like 1x1m!!!!!! :( ---------- Post added at 10:11 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:16 PM ---------- tried changing the numbers in the rvmat from "10" to "1", just as an experiment. Deleted the contents of my "Layers" folder, fired up V3, reimported the sat and mask lco.pngs, let it rebuild, fired up buldozer, no visual difference at all, for better or worse! Binarizing it right now and will try to get a screenshot in game.

I'm having problems with the xyz format. Export as png from V3, touch up in L3DT, export back as xyz, import into V3... changes are there but my sealevel always seems off from it's original level... not by much, maybe give or take 1m or less. What is going on here?

Top shelf stuff!!!! Thanks Leopotam! One of the beauties of Blender is I can do a lot of my modelling on my wife's faster... and linux powered... computer! I've been learning how to map but am running into a lack of the models I want and with this I might just have to get back to modelling again :D

Ok, so I'm getting close, "over the hump" anyway, on a map for Arma2 and wonder what it would take to make it OA/CO compatible? I've searched some for a tutorial or guide or something but haven't found the real answers. Mostly I'd like to use a few of BIS's buildings and such from OA. Thanks in advance!

Thanks Old Bear! I was trying to keep it "vanilla" for compatibility sake but would really like to use a few buildings and such from OA. I'll be giving those links a good read ASAP

Yup, I have the same problem. Also seeing some flickering in some of the _shrub and _canopy. This is on a pretty small test section... maybe my video card is dying? :butbut:

Well... I'm really not that far yet, spent most of my time trying to get the HF to look something like what I wanted (it's completely made from scratch... no DEM datas were used) and then the last two days tweaking road networks. Now I'm messing around with african foliage and see first hand how difficult it can be to use them optimized and still have some of that tropical feeling! Also looking for the right buildings... Anyone have any simple grass huts they can spare? But how can I refuse a request from an artist who's work I admire so much? ;) (I've spent literally days in Lingor and Duala... and Mana... trying to get a feel for what is possible yet still playable.) clicky thumbnail things:

I'm finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel on my first map... "Isla Del Fuego". It's loosely based on Montserrat in the West Indies and a good deal of inspiration comes from Icebreakr's Lingor as well as Prowler's Mana.