kenoxite

Patch v1.0.1 released! More info and download links on the first post. Changelog: v1.0.1 Vehicles NEW: Harrier and Harrier LGB ported from A1 (uses sfc.itzhak's cockpit and scripts). ww4ext_harrier.pbo no longer needed FIX: Fixed dshk not turning in lower LODs of Toyotas CHANGE: Added legacy classes for BAS helos Weapons FIX: Fixed dshk in vehicles like the Toyotas not being able to engage infantry. CHANGE: Revised engagement distances and dispersion values of all vehicle HMGs. CHANGE: Revised ROF and engagement distances of all infantry LMGs. CHANGE: ZU-23 now able to engage planes again Other NEW: Dozens of new flags available. See related pdf file for a list NEW: Wooden ramps and walkways FIX: Ladders of scaffolding 4F now usable CHANGE: Some of the available objects can now be walked over The ported harrier: https://imgur.com/a/KvdRa You can safely delete the ww4ext_harrier.pbo file found in WW4_EXT_VEH after applying this patch.

Patch 1.0.1 released! Changelog: v1.0.1 Infantry FIX: Off-duty BDU and BDU desert units should be working again Other NEW: Material definitions for CW units

@JdB: Thanks again for the mirror! (and all the rest!) @ProfTournesol: Yes, it has the new tweaked vegetation material properties. I have yet to update the OFP materials thread with the updated version. Right now my hands are full with the remaining tweaks and fixes for EXT v1. Meanwhile, you can use the ofp_matdef_core.pbo found in main EXT if you want.

And I agree on that, so I personally don't expect anybody to do so. We are as surprised and annoyed about this issue as you all probably are. We will keep looking into this but, for the time being, v1.0 of WW4 Extended and the rest of related addons are only A:CWA v1.99 compatible. I updated the first posts a couple hours ago to reflect this. Also, it'd be good if players using CWA report if they have any problem with v1.0. Just to be 100% sure it's a problem with the outdated engine and not a problem with EXT proper.

Of course it wasn't planned... of course...

You quite likely have overwritten the previous EXT version with the new one. This won't work, as v1 requires a clean installation. You must delete the previous EXT folders you have in your hard drive. Alternatively, install v1 in a different folder and launch it using that one. Other than that, there shouldn't be any conflict with OFP v1.96 other than a couple scripts using setPosASL. Unless BIS changed something about how the #include and #define works in 1.99 without telling us about it. v1 makes extensive use of those two in all configs.

I really don't want to add any further units to main EXT other than the stated, and they'll be exclusively ArmA ports. For all intents and purposes, main EXT (including vehicles) is feature locked. If you really want that vehicle to be compatible with EXT you could create a new config for it. One of the goals of the whole restructuralization of the configs was to make it easier to anyone to both edit and add new units on their own. Check the ww4ext_veh_cfg.pbo for reference. The creation of new units or features for EXT are both allowed and encouraged, as long as they are released as standalone. As I did with v0.8, I should release the MLODs and textures for all v1.0 models, excluding those by 3rd party authors that aren't explicitly public domain. I think this also excludes the ported BIS models and textures. Can someone confirm?

@JdB: Thanks for the mirrors! BAS helos: Support for those vehicles has indeed been dropped, as I mentioned already previously in this thread (second to last paragraph, last sentence). The only reason those helos were supported was because they had better looking models than vanilla OFP. The rest of the features I personally didn't care about, although I included support to them as I knew some of you would ask about them. Now that there's an A1 port of a black hawk they aren't needed any more. The same will happen if there's ever a public domain version of the Mi-2 or permissions are granted to use the current ones. With that said, I should have placed some class "redirects" for the old BAS classes, so users can open and edit missions using them without having to resort to a text editor. That was an oversight, and one of the few exceptions where I didn't provide backward compatibility. But, well, they weren't part of main EXT after all. MCAR: It uses the latest MCAR version (0.9.4), although a modified one. There's a couple new lines I needed to add for MCAR to work properly with EXT's shtora and aircraft countermeasures scripts. --- About version 1.0 This new release has been the most complex and feature packed of all EXT's history, so further patches are to be expected. Those patches should only fix minor things, mostly related to visual and aesthetic aspects. No major bug has slipped in v1 that I'm aware of. The last weeks and, particularly, days, have been quite crazy. The fact that there was a triple release on the same day (main EXT, Cold War and Arctic) hasn't helped easing things up. One of the aspects affected by this is the changelog, which isn't particularly up to date and might actually include outdated information (deprecated features, etc). This is mostly due to the change in workflow with the introduction of krzy in the development process from the last couple months on, where I dindn't keep track of the changelog on a single text file anymore. For the curious, this is the whole changelog as it happened: http://pastebin.com/62tYiETM (warning: I've made no effort to edit that thing). This version should be the final big one for this project. There won't be any more major additions or changes. Further updates will be focused on bug fixing, as mentioned already. The only exception to this would be finally adding the USMC Huey, which is a vehicle I've been longing for since the start of this project, and maybe another ArmA port. As you might have noticed already, all the Cold War era units and vehicles (BDU, KLMK, jeeps, etc) have been moved from main EXT to the Cold War module to reduce bloat and keep consistence. Now main EXT is closer to my original intention with this whole project, which was centered mainly on USMC vs Middle East insurgents. The separation also allows the CW extension to grow on its own as seen fit, without forcing an update to main EXT. Finally, a public thanks to krzychuzokecia, who has helped cut development time quite considerably.

WW4 Extended: Arctic updated to version 1.2! More info and download links on the first post.

Yes, all EXT related things have now the new materials defined and enabled.

WW4 Extended updated to v1.0! More info and download links on the first post. I will post something more meaty later today.

Snow: It only happens when the sun is low. Check this album for a time lapse: https://imgur.com/a/NhSgM Yellow tint: It's due to another limitation OFP's material system, from what I could gather. Hotspots (the "shining" of materials) default to the environment light of OFP, which is a quite hard yellow. I was the first one trying to get rid of the yellowish highlights, but there's no way around it. If anyone knows a work around for this let me know. Vegetation: OK, this seems to bother way too many people now. I think we can all agree that what's more bothering is all those yellow highlights/hotspots, correct? I've lowered specularPower (glossiness) from 1 to 0.55. That's about the limit for vegetation to react somewhat to lighting. With values equal or below 0.5 you could as well set it to 0. Time lapse album: https://imgur.com/a/lNsGM I was planning on releasing a small update today to include a more commented config template. I could also include these tweaks there if you agree on this. In general, as has been mentioned by Maczer and myself, there's no way, or no simple way, to make vegetation look good due to their simplicity. Other than that, if someone comes up with some killer material values we can all agree on being significantly better than the current ones, then I'll be happy to include them.

The russian OFP scene is really incredible. Great job!

@ Maczer: Thanks, man. It's probably the most insane task I've done in my time around here, that's for sure. The amount of textures needed to be tracked, copied and categorized has been considerable. Then there's the creation of the custom materials themselves and endless sessions of testing. But, well, it's for the best. OFP looks better than ever, and all the grunt work I've done will surely help others. If someone doesn't like one material or another he just needs to tweak some values, not create kilometric lists of textures. Easy work. @Shadow: Glad you like it! @noob1: Playing with gamma and brightness only artificially brightens or darkens the whole scene. By using materials you can define exactly which models or parts of a model will react to lighting, its specularity and even its emitted light. There's no other way to achieve results like this other than by using them. For anyone curious, it turns out there's a BIKI page dealing with all this materials thing. It's for Arma, but things like specularity and lighting are already present in OFP. I wish I had known about that page earlier TBH :P https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA:_RVMAT

@ Rożek: Thanks, man. @ ProfTournesol: Gear material should work good enough. It's the material I resort to when no other material fits. I actually use it for the wooden boards found inside the cockpit of the BIS Camel and it looks fine.

No problem. I you want to use this in your projects I think it'd be better if you create a new exclusive addon just for it. Alternatively, the pbo holding the user made addons is numbered as 1, as you can see. The intention is collecting any texture listings provided by others to eventually release a new #2 version which would complement the already released material pbos. For reference, I'll provide for EXT its own material definitions as a separate addon, placed in the same folder as the rest EXT ones. I'll also provide a version of the OFP materials one set to Low Contrast, as EXT has a lot of built-in spawning (support calls, rucksacks, etc). Anyway, I think I'll update the zip file to include a more commented version of the template. Probably tomorrow or so.

@ =SappeR= : Ah, yes, vegetation... It's been by far the trickiest to get to a decent state. Even then, it's no perfect, as you've noticed already. The thing with vegetation is that if you increase contrast and glossiness/shininess (specular and specularPower) they turn yellow, if you lower it too much then you could as well setting those values to zero, as they're barely noticeable. The same happens when going too high or too low with the ambient lighting values. Setting it too low they become almost black, setting it too high removes any contrast whatsoever... So, well, that's the closest I've been able to come up with to give vegetation enough contrast and lighting reaction while being noticeable and not being overdone. It also doesn't help that all vegetation is built by crossing planes, so lighting is going to be quite bad for them one way or the other. If it really bothers you you can change the lighting settings yourself by reducing the values of specular and specularPower to 0, which is what I feel you find more offending. But also note that they only look this way when the sun is really low. The rest of the time the glossy effect isn't noticeable. @ ProfTournesol: I'll try to give you a quick breakdown: OFPbuildings: exterior and interior of buildings (houses, forts and other structures made of matte materials) OFPmetal: anything metallic that isn't a vehicle or a weapon (a metal door, metal pole, etc). This doesn't provide hard shinings compared to the other metal definitions, but it's still brighter than say, the buildings material OFPmetalVeh: any vehicle made of metal should have this applied. It provides some nice hard glossiness (metal shining) when the faced directly against sunlight, without making the vehicle feel like it's wrapped in cellophane (like the default OFP metal material does) OFPriflemetal: same as with vehicles but for infantry and vehicle weapons. It has a more subtle glossy effect, though OFPterrain: the material applied to the ground of any island, independent of the terrain type. It reacts to lighting quite noticeably, particularly in or close to sunrise and sunset. OFProads: I could as well deleted this, as the majority of roads have vertices set to OnSuface and can't use materials. But, well, IF they'd work they'd be the same as the terrain material OFPvegetation: the one applied to trees, bushes, etc. Has lighter ambient light and reduced glossiness compared to the terrain one OFPWater: used by the sea and some objects like fountains (Montignac, Morton...) and water particles. More glossy than vanilla and reacts to lighting better (starts darker and gets lighter as sun goes up) OFPparticles: used for almost all the particles like dust, smoke, etc OFPshining: same as particles but for shining ones. It just makes sure that the textures defined here will always be shining, even if the author forgot to set the vertices to "shining" in Oxygen. OFPglass: windows, vehicle windshields, etc, anything made of glass. Has a similar effect as vehicle metals (so hard shining areas but smaller compared to vanilla) OFPvehinterior: it's basically a glossy-less material, to make the interior of vehicles (such as the cargo area of an M113) particularly dark, and without any "shining" effect OFPskin: used for faces, arms, etc of infantry units OFPclothing: usef for clothing of infantry units, and similar textures OFPgear: a slightly glossier version of the clothing material. Used for things like vests and boots, but also useful for vehicle wheels and basically anything close to plastic About a tool to deal with all this, there's none that does exactly that. Actually, half of the work done for this addon was made by manually browsing, selecting and copying the OFP and Res textures one by one. It was extremely crazy and time consuming. That's until I remembered about that PaNTool thing, which is what I ended up using. So, PaNTool is the closest you'll get that I know of. Browse to the addon folder you want to include, right click on every listed texture and paste it to the corresponding class. The do a Replace with Notepad++ or similar to change all the unneded pathing to leave it as <name of addon>\<path to texture>

Thanks guys. BTW, if anyone wants to create more comparison screenshots or just pictures showcasing the new materials feel free to post them.

Of course it's real! D'uh!

This is simply brilliant. Kudos!

@ Revan9190: Thanks. That'd be great, actually. @ MartanCJ: Yes, it does. @All: There should be a release in about two weeks or less.

No problems with vanilla WW4 or WW4 EXT either when using the latest AEC (from ofpr.info). I was in fact fooling around in that terrain the other day while testing some things. But you say you're using custom wrp files. Maybe some data has corrupted?

OK then. I thought you might want to release that, in which case it might have needed some coordination between us. But if it's done to be used privately then no problem. 1) No, that's not planned. It's mostly due to the existing arctic vehicles being too old for modern infantry units. 2) I'll see what I can do. The new 1.99 commands you were talking about must be getposASL and setposASL.

@ Maczer: It ain't over until the fat lady sings! @ Spirit: It seems that there might be a bit of overlapping then. Are you planning on releasing your ports publicly? Vehicles already ported: - M1A1 (A2) - M1A2 (A2) - T-72 (A2) - T-90 (A2) - M113 (A1) - BMP-2 (A1) - Mi-24 (A2) - Mi-8T (A1) - AH-6 (A1) - MH-6 (A1) - UH-60 (A1) EXT vehicles that will be replaced with Arma ports: - Supercobra - LAV - A-10 Those are the ones that will be ported for sure. There's other vehicles I might end up porting, but those are all low priority and it will depend on how much time I've got left. New vehicles that I would also like to port are the zodiac (or any other water vehicle) and the huey. Again, that's low priority. 1) Depends on what you mean. The configs for infantry and vehicles need to be updated to be compatible with the new EXT version, but no ArmA ports will be done for Arctic. 2) I will look into it. I need to revise the rucksack scripts anyway, as they are still buggy in the dev version for other reasons (and have been since last year). I might end up cutting some features but it will depend on how the bug fixing goes once I bring myself to get my hands on it. 3) No, that's not planned. -- Some old recording done while testing some new scripts:

I'm porting those vehicles myself, all done from scratch. I wasn't aware of the mod you mention, actually. In fact, I'm trying to focus on BIS stuff, so the models can be used or modified by anyone once all this is released, without having to worry about permissions and other legal stuff other than the stated by BIS. I might actually release a version of the ports separately, without any dependencies with EXT. Anyway, each ported vehicle model and textures have their own pbo now, so using them for other projects should be as easy as to copy that and provide a new custom config. The ported vehicles should behave in MP roughly the same as the vehicles from VIT pack, BAS, or the ones already present in vanilla WW4 (HMMWVs, AAVP, etc). They actually should be more MP friendly than some of the existing EXT vehicles. But, if some vehicles prove to be too demanding for multiplayer they could be tweaked further after release.