Proctoron

Early on i saw that if i just used the BI buildings, it didnt look like i was in Norway at all, so to change it up a bit i asked Beton, Aplion and Mondkalb if i could use their amazing models for my terrain so it would look a bit more familiar for those who have been/lived here.

I wanted to make some buildings and did look into it, but i used a lot of time trying to learn how to do that,i managed to do like a shack .... but decided to leave it for now or i would never finish this terrain if i were going to do both.

Update. Hello those who are interested. It has been a while and it has been a lot of work and there has been some breaks but i am still working on this terrain. It is a tremedous undertaking, but i am doing this at my own pace, and i just had to do major rework on my satmap and mask, as there was just too much stuff you could see from the air that wasnt there, plus i couldnt get the textures to fit with the satmap. So i have well, simplified the whole thing, you probably spend 95% of your time on the ground anyway, so if it looks booring from the air now, i am ok with that. Its just sooo much work to get the textures right that i just gave up eventually . I love doing what i do, but you need breaks now and then or you go nuts, there is times when you think youre never going to be done, especially with such a big map as this, and this is my first time ever trying something like this as well so stuff does not look amazing, but that has never been my goal. So here is some new screens of how it looks now, it is 1 year 7 months in the making now and i have no idea how much more it would take, and i am glad i dont have a deadline. phew...

Merry Christmas folks. We now have a test server up and running, there is still a lot of work left on the terrain, but we would like to see how the mission we are building for it currently will work with some people on. Due to currently having signature key and log in issues we had to re sign them and now all the current needed addons are under the @Stjordal folder until we can sort it out the proper way and get our own Addons in, replacing some of the ones we are currently using. As for issues with the terrain, yes we know all of them at the moment and are not looking for someone hunting errors, this is mostly to tune our mission for a MP environment. If you want to have a look, head over to this site. http://warlords.no-ip.biz/ Best Regards Knut Erik Holte

Thanks for the feedback guys! really appriciate it.

Since January 2013 i have been working on this project of making a terrain based on my hometown Stjørdal in Norway. It started first and foremost from a childhood dream of playing on a terrain from home, and secondly it used to have a air force recruit school as well as a flight school and now it is a base for the home guard. In addition there is several places around with american millitary gear stocked, though reduced since the cold war. Alongside making this terrain i have a friend who is a great programmer who is making a multiplayer mission we call "Cold Response" (name based on long known multinational millitary exercises in the country during winter) Another friend is testing it and giving me comments and ideas, it is good to have someone from the outside telling you what is wrong with your work, hehe, well at times it is at least. :-) World Tools are used for the majority of the forests, and Road Painter 2 by Homer Johnston for the roads, buildings are from ARMA, Beton, Apilon and Mondkalb, and the training cessna that the school used to fly around in all day over my head are made by Gnat. A special thank you to all of those above for providing great content for ARMA for us terrain makers to play with. As you can see in the flyover movie, there is lots and lots of things left to do (the curse of using RL images, i started out with a different background image as reference and later changed it and the roads i already had made did not fit anymore...), but in any case am pretty proud of how far i have gotten until now, and we already have a test server up where were checking things out. Challenges now is to get the satmap right where i have an insane amount of work to do to make it perfect, and i am still banging my head when it comes to several of the groundtextures to make them seem "right". And not to forget about that runway going on top of a road. I did try out oxygen 2 and managed to make something, but it just takes up too much time right now so i am focusing on other stuff before i have to learn to make objects properly. Oh and those bloody train tracks, i think for now, much of them will be "blown to pieces" lol. We decided to go for a look of a terrain beaten by the war, since there is no way i can photocopy the exact buildings in this town, we dicided to have several of them bombed to the ground instead. :-P And my goal is first and foremost to make it "playable", the finesse and details will have to come later, at some stage i certainly have to learn oxygen 2 and modelling properly, maybe starting to make road signs at first is a way to go i think. Anyway, here is a little video i made, it is by no way up to the standards by some of the amazing terrain makers in here, but for me it is certainly an achievent getting this far, and maybe it will bring hope to other terrain makers or anyone who want to givve it a go out there. As for when this project is finished?, there is no way telling, i am working on it when i have fun doing it, it goes in cycles, i get and amazing drive and do lots of stuff, then i hit a wall, and i leave it for some time until new ideas and a new drive hits me. I am hoping for something that is "playable" can be released around summer togheter with the server and the mission and a site to get the files, my friends mission is coming along great and soon it is time to have some more playtesters than my son and daughter :-) Best Regards Knut Erik Holte.

Hi. I am definatly no expert, but is your "terrain grid size" in your visitor3 project set to 512 pherhaps? and not 1024?

A few tips here and thanks for that folks. Checked the *.rvmat and that is all good, and yes i am using mbg buildings and i have placed on one spot of the map all the buildings placed togheter for reference when i am placing objects to find the most suited quickly. But there must have been something else going on in the background on my computer at home when i tested, because when i tested now on my laptop i had framerates ranging from 35-50, (except when flying over my reference buildings i was down to 20) That made me pretty happy i can tell you, i can now continue on my work without worrying that something is horribly wrong this early in the project. Now i just have to start to figure out how to increase my ground textures from 4 to 6, but after two days of browsing forums and feeling a bit stupid for not understanding, i decided to just do 4 for now, and get back to that later at some point, hehe Thanks guys!

Allright, well, my satmap is 10240 as well, so should be allright i guess, and so far i dont have huge forests or dense cities, got around 38k of objects so far on the map and i believe that is not a lot at all. There is a few things i am suppicious at, like i have a lot of streetlights atm as i have been using them for road referencebefore i had a better satmap, and were wondering if too many colours on my satmap had something to do with it as well, so trying to make it more uniform. Will continue to improve the sat map, and remove the streetlights, maybe not make the forests as dense as i have them now, and my mask is just a copy of the satmap atm and is working on that as well as i am placing more objects around the map (can the mask cause something?) Thank M1lm8n for the reply.

Hi folks. So i have a 10240 by 10240 island based on an area on Earth, and 10m cells, and i have been working on the satmap latley, at the moment mostly just copying real life maptextures on it, and started finetuning it on a few areas on the map and it all looks quite ok to me. (for 5 months now i have just had a plain greenish satmap) However, when fiering up the game, i get a framerate of around 12-15, while on the cherno map, i have around 30. What influences the framerates on maps? by using 10m cells, i was hoping to get a better framerate than this, as i read that lower cells size lowers the framerate you can achieve. Searching on the forums, comes up with a lot of hits from guys who are playing the game, but not making a map for the game. My suspicion is that the issue is with the satmap, but i am not sure, when i boot up takistan i get like 40-50 (cant remember atm) So far i have only one clutter as well (for the grassy areas) And, will the framerates when testing in the editor mirror the framerates you get in game?

Nice work so far Daringd. Right now for myself, i still have to update the sat and mask layer, as i am still placing objects on the map, i figured i'd wait until i got most of the stuff placed out. The problem i have now is that there is a distinguished railway crossing my terrain, and well, i can not figure out how i can manage to place a railway in a slope correctly, read somehwere it is impossible, but still trying stuff out. Another problem i have that got me into Visitor, is that i have a road and a railway that passes under the airfield, so figured i had to make bridge where i could pass a road underneath and the runway on top, so i did visitor tutorials, and one day it just clicked and i went a bit wild and did a few models and started on a terminal building, and yeah, so i got distracted for weeks doing that (still to learn how to do the textures and coding to get them ingame though), but decided to say goodbye to visitor for now and continue on the map. I'd say i am maybe a year or more away from showing something decent :-D

There is a sticky thread in this sub-forum that gets you started. http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Mondkalb%27s_Addon_Tutorial

I am pretty new here and just recently from Mid January this year i started my first map project, and i almost gave up several times because i thought there is no chance that i could learn the tools, but i am a persistent bugger, and spent days upon days browsing these forums and going through tutorials, and eventually one day i managed to stand on my own terrain (or landing on the moon as i called it as it had no textures :-P) Why i wanted to make a map was a long time dream, of playing on a map from my home town, i understand that i probably wont manage to make an outstanding or beautifull map like many of the guys here, but at least, i hope, i can make a map, that me and my friends and hopefully some of the guys that has been stationed in the millitary at this place, might enjoy to play on once in a while. And if i like, i have a lifetime on me to improve it as my skills increases. With more user friendly tools, maybe more people, would be able to make a map of their favourite place in the world for him/her and his/her friends to play on, or a map out of an idea in their head, or one that suits a certain mission or whatever. So imho getting more user friendly tools would be a win win situation for both the players/communtiy and for BI.

Hi Daringd. I am about where you were when you started this post, and the funny thing is, learning all these new things and overcoming hurdles is what keeps me going on, i think it took me a month before i even was able to stand on my own land, and i almost gave up before that, now i got trees and houses and i am nowhere close to finishing anything, but it kind of makes me happy that at least i have come this far. I am also starting to look into oxygen with the BIS released models, first is was because i need signs that fits my country, and now because i need a flat surfaced bridge, and now my little brain is cooking again. :-) Anyway, great post, i have read it several times, and it is comforting to know, that other people are struggling like i do, it keeps me going on and keep trying.