NordKindchen

Hey thanks for your fast answer! To be honest I am completely new to this theme. But from what I read in your comment it seems after the procedure I will have a file to use for 3d? Because I am looking for an easy way to get the heights of the map as an image to lay over my Photoshop files so I can better follow the form of the terrain with the texture. Mh...is there any possibilty someone could render me the heights? Like a military map would do it. As I said - I am making a midrange replacement addon. I think there are many people with potential interest in it. Maybe even you? Here is an example of how much more detail is possible to put into the map. And here is an example of how the final product MAY look like compared to the vanilla one. As I said - if I had height maps it work speed up the work a lot and make the final product much more fitting to the ground since by now I have to go back into the game all the time to check wether the textures lay right. That takes 5 minutes each time. I would really appreciate if someone could deliever me such a map - or a tutorial for it since I am sure at the moment I am not able to use the programs you listed so gently for me. Thank you for your help Best regards!

Yes thats the reason why I said its only a showcasing texture. The final ones are more like the current ones. I try to recreate all patterns of the islands with higher resoluted ones. After that I will most likely put some more textures over it where I find it fitting. I have to say - once I have created the basic patterns it becomes quicker. I think Stratis is a fair amount of workload. Its quite doable. Altis however will be a lot more work. Still - I cant play the game with the current midrange so I will work on that too.^^

Ah ok - you are talking about the "3D" zoomed scopes. I was of course only referring to the collimator sights. Greetz

Just wanted to say that. The 3d reticle is actually a fully realistically installment. It allways keeps the aim where the weapon is aiming. You can try that out by freelooking away from it. I would recommend not changing that system. Jump to 10:40 min.Pls dont change it back.

Heres a new screen showing how much more detail would have been possible....(I have to point out thats not the final texture I use. Its only for showcasig and to bumpy) I am working on a midrange replacement now. So far the results are pretty nice while still really timeconsuming...the worst part is that I have to height maps to compare my working files to - so if I wanted to check if the texture I draw is actually ON a hill or on its side, I am allways forced to pack the addon and look at it ingame. Anyone here who can help me with getting the height data as an image? It would help A LOT. @wiresnsnakes Jeah I know that problem since long time. It could be easily fixed by imlpementing sth like: "if unit in shadow then darken unit at range" The soldier model could simply get darker in its whole. No need for fancy realistic shadows at that distance. It would increase camouflage a lot. Now you could say "well what if only his left feet is in shadow?" Well then simply add sth like a percentage filter. More than 50% shadow - then this system kicks in. Anyway i dont think this will ever happen Best regards

Of course its a mod hes running;) Still - what I wanted to point out with it is that ARma 2s effects with mods look better than Arma3 vanilla. Thats shouldnt be the case=/ Greetz

This will be another rather big thread of mine. This time I will focus on the effects and on how to improve them. I will deliver example pics videos and quick mash-ups I made with photoshop to visualize my thoughts and for yout to get a feeling of my ideas. I will be updating this thread every now and then and bring examples of how certain effects should look in my opinion. It is greatly related to this tracker-entrance. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Effects 1. Minigun bulletimpact Introduction: While the tracers look already nice, impact wise the effects lack power. Even OFP 2 had better bullet impacts than Arma 3 atm. Examples: (switch to 3:05 sec) REMOVED suggested by Bee8190. Switch to 1:30 sec. Result: 1_Before 1_After 2_Before 2_After 3_before 3_After -------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Smoke trails rocketpods/rocketartillery and backblast Introduction: The current smoke trails of the rocket pods are basically little smoke blobs that get rendered every few meters. On the rocket pods that doesnt matter - it still looks good since the smoke is very fade. On the Rocket artillery on the other hand this system shows its drawback. If the texture for the smoke trail would be "longer" - then the space between the rendered effects wouldnt be that much recognizeable. Also - rocket artillery has a huge backblast which we have missing at the moment. Examples: Apache firing rocketpods - only watch the smoke trails here. Heres a MLRS firing in slow motion. Here is some syrian artillery system firing. Watch the huuuge backblast. The backblast is of course to big to implement in the game. But it shows that the ingame backblast needs to be rather large. Results: First I would suggest this video - maybe some of the techniques can be brought over to Armas particles. Before After The mainthing to look at would be the rockettrails and that they dont fall apart in little dots. After that it will be important to make sure that the smoke is blowing over the vehicle as well and is big enough behind the tank. On top of that: For the explosion which appears when a rocket is launched - it is most easy to use some sprites which only appear for a quarter of a sec each. This is how most explosion effects are done in games like BF3 and comparable. It will deliver a great result if done right. Towards the smoke: JTDs Smoke and Fire improved the smoke to a whole new level. I think we can anticipate even sth better since its 4 years old. At the moment the smoke consists of little blobs - this system needs to be reworked. Take a look at link above. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Next: Rocketpods/50cal/Mortar WIP and to be updated Best regards

I like where this is going. Will have to try it out!

Greetz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL2nl1FbbFc 1:30 Even these explosions in Arma 2 look better than the current ones in Arma 3........

I am very much impressed!

Awesome news!!! Btw: I know you implemented a system with different sounds based on the terrain(eg. shooting out of a house) I just wanted to inform you that Bad Benson (he is active in this forum under the same name) .Maybe you two could share some work there? Would mean you had less to do. Of course I know you can do this by your own too;) Best regards!

Well......they didnt fix a lot.... Here comes some whining. Honestly - you dont have to look at it. Its just the things that frustrate me in the game graphic wise. I really love what Arma wants to be. And Arma allways lived through his mods. The content came mostly from the community. Therefore I feel that BIS needs to deliever the backstone. Namely well done graphics and well done basic systems. And the possibility to add new stuff easily. Sadly I feel that the community even needs to improve the basics before the game becomes worth it=( The best example is the midrange. @-Ghost-TF Nope they havent. @Minoza If I find the result satisfying enough - and Arma3 still worth the time - I will most likely do the same for Altis. @marcai: Everything is at ultra. I only disabled the midrange texture and replaced it with the red squares you see on the ground. What you see is the ultra satelite texture. Yes...its ridiculous low resoluted. Well...it would be ok if we had different midrange textures to use - but the way it is atm it is plain ridiculous...=/ @VanZant: Totally agree with you. And I can assure you - the satmap will have the same resolution on Altis. Official Example 1 Official Example 2 Sad - isnt it? Oh and thanks for your help again;)

No worrys Kylek! It didnt took it down the wrong pipe;) Actually - because I lost my hope in BIS fixing the issue I took the hard way and am now working on a midrange replacement(a big thanks towards VanZant for inspirationa nd advice) with 16times the detail. Sadly even 16 times more detail than standard arma is still less than BF3 for example has as default. I am planning on recreating a small part of the island first and then I will decide if its worth to continue the work or not. Anyways - here is a first peek at the difference the detail increase brings: Heres the big one Greetings

Indeed....it seems the community needs to fix this issue by itself...

In my verion of the game it correctly leads moving and non moving targets. Greetz

Today they changed the effect of the APDFS impact. ...well....I cant say this is what I expected...

Wow I have to say I am very positively suprised to see such system implemented! Btw: It doesnt only compensate for bullet drop but also for speed of target.

@Kylek29 I worked as a professional artist in the gaming industries for 3 years creating background environments for adventures and several related stuff;) Thanks for your insight in photoshop but I can assure you I know 90% of all shortkeys by heart. I am very familiar with texturing. But I havent worked on a map for Arma yet. I can tell you that saving a satmap for stratis with 16px/sqm did not work on my pc. Apart from that it took up to 4 minutes to save the largest possible file format for that satmap. The thing is I am not that experienced with map making in Arma 3 and therefore dont know which is possible concerning the satmap. I would however love to take on that task. The nice thing is: Its possible to take on this task bit by bit. You could change small parts and leave the rest like it is. Oh and: I cant say how disappointed I am about BIs that they release a game with midrange textures, explosion effects and vehicle wrecks like this. Id love to not say this but I just am. I was allways optimistic but the quote of the actual sitrep says it all: "Internally we are going to be on a development lock down very soon and up to release. This effectively means we will only make important fixes to release content."... I still hope they will improve it in later patches. But...well...

The effects: You call the effects an improvement? O.o O.o O.o Wow......srsly....wow....the explosions and impacts are the WORST Ive seen since ages! Even Arma 2 with warfx had better effects. And I wouldnt call warfx good up to date anymore. Just wow.... Here (BIS Forum) and Here (Forum tracker) are topics to improve the effects And destroyed vehicles: The ugliest UGLIEST piece of modelling Ive seen this year. I so hope they are WIP. Feedbacktracker entrance And the landscape? Its a two edged sword. Pretty nice close up but after 100 meters the midrange texture is not milli percent better than Arma2. In fact its the ugliest midrange we get in a graphic wise comparable game. Forum entrance Feedbacktracker entrance

Hey Chris - you have a lot of great AI videos in your channel. However it doesnt get clear if its a mod you made or if its vanilla AI. You should mention it in the video description if you used (and or made) the "smart 'ai'" mod. Anyway: The things we see in your video are great and either they are made possible through a mod or not - this behavior is what we need for the ai If the behavior is forced through a mod then even more since it shows that even part time community members can integrate this behavior. Of course if you/the creator of the ai mod is a professional ai scripter I will take back my last few words;) Either way - the videos show very very nice ai featurs that are a must have.

@tremnarch theoretically it would be possible to paint the whole island. If the resolution was high enough than it would even be "quite simple" to take the satmap - increase the resolution and lay over the according textures like I did in my example. This way you wouldnt need to paint all by hand. Still theres the time factor and some hardware reglementations. Time: For example to look at your work: I had a look into map making some time ago. Its quite possible that it takes AGES to be able to see your changes to the texture ingame because of the time it takes to compile the map. That means it could take extremely long to be able to see small changes on the map. Even if the work itself would be easy and quick - this would make an adjustment of the texture take ages. However maybe the bulldozer view is good enough to see the details of the map ingame - we need an experienced map maker to answer that question. hardware reglementations: The workflow I followed to create a map needed the satmap to be put into the machinerie IN ONE PIECE. Now a satmap of stratis of the size needed to put in all details is 3gigabyte of data minimum. I was not even able to save the file without error because windows doesnt support this file size... Now Altis is about 10 times bigger... However this map would then get cut into little pieces of 1024 pixels each. A workaround could be to insert a satmap with smaller resolution and then increase the resolution of each little piece. IF THIS WORKS...well I dont know. Then again: The examples we saw above were made with 16 times the resolution as he said. The current resoltion is about 1 pixel per sqm so his one is about 16px per sqm. I think the resoltuion he used is quite good. But Stratis is 10 times smaller than Altis. We dont know if it will work with Altis. In the end: I would be more than willing to create a big satmap with more details - as long as I get somebody to tell me how to get it work. I am an engeneer student and need to do a lot for the university. I think I showed enough how much I love what this game wants to be. I put allready more than 30 hours into figuring out how to improve things in Arma. But I have other things to do in my life too. So if somebody can tell me how to alter the textures and get it running (and if its doable) - then I will do this with great pleasure. Greetz Ps: Lets not forget guys that I even pointed out this system and its possibilites in the Opening Post^^ Just saying that I really thought this through well:P

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=5408 related to this tracker entry

Ok guys one month till release....

Actually there are a lot of people liking my examples and agreeing with me while I see a lot of people reacting to you the same way as I do. Thanks and greetz and no stop of pamphlets PS: But I have no interest in continuing a forum fight with you. So I suggest as a way to stop this insanity that you stop commenting anything that I post and I wont comment anything that you post. This way we can still get a good discussion out of topics without going on each others nerves anymore.