Falkland Islands Map - Ideas, Discussion & Demo Terrains

Since we seemed to be developing an ongoing discussion about a possible Falkland Islands terrain project over in "Addons Requests", I've opened this thread instead, where the discussion can proceed without being interspersed with... well... Addon Requests... ;)

I've grabbed most of the larger and most relevant posts as quotes so I'll paste those below (apologies if I missed any)... - which will bring newcomers up to speed on the discussion so far with a single post, then we can take it from there...

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RE the Falklands scenario in the recently closed thread:

A full-sized Falkland Islands mod would be a pretty good addon to have, no vegetation (other than clutter) and a sparse populated area would make the island really lean as far as resource-hogging goes. Also, the Islands are (very roughly) in 2 roughly equal parts.

I just had a quick look at the Falklands islands on Google Earth. with a view to making terrain. They're much bigger than I thought! And the sat imagery is pretty patchwork and low res. So, sat maps would have to be made the BIS way I think (which is OK, look at podagorsk, etc, quite nice!), and I think the islands would have to be either scaled down, or split into chunks. My suggestion would be to go for a couple of 40x40km islands on a rough 3:1 ratio

IMO one of the things ArmA2 maps lack is real-life scale, most maps are, by necessity, compressed somewhat. This sometimes leads to artificially compressed missions, where it's particularly difficult to ingress to anywhere without always being spotted.

Plus, with a full-scale map, AT LAST there's real reasons for the ACE2 rucksack feature.

Im glad my thread started a discussion on this! (my apologies for posting in the wrong place to start with) I was reading about the latest Argentinian sabre rattling in the news today & the idea came to me that a modern version of the '82 conflict (fictional of course, I dont want to trigger any angry debates about overblown media reporting etc) using Arma 2 would be pretty cool, ive no mission making skills myself but if somebody else made it I reckon it would be an enjoyable campaign, and would let us play with some British gear as well as Argentinian if you were able to play it from both sides :) I know a version of the Falklands was made for the original flashpoint so im guessing someone in the community maybe has the maps already?

The maps won't port that easily afaik, it was a whole different method of working in OFP. It is possible, but i'd say the best solution is going to be to start from scratch. If you can find appopriate satmaps and DEMs then you're off to a start! (finding appropriate satmaps and DEMs however....is the difficult part)

Full scale maps would be great, but also impractical to make/play with, IMO.

Hmm Chris, you're right, just looked at the Islands myself and there are alot bigger than I imagined... I think the Falklands would make quite a nice addition to Arma2.

I remember the OFP Falklands map as being too compressed. The main thing about the Falklands, which I guess most people don't appreciate, is the scale. And, thanks to it's relative sparse object density, it really could be done in real scale, or at least near to real scale. I can't really imagine a better map more suited for real life scale given it's low object density, I think it would be a good opportunity to make at least one large scale map.

The FLK Mod islands weren't much bigger than 10km x 10km though were they? Can't recall exactly. Chernarus is about 10x10 isn't it? I think a 40x40km map per "half", even with the features compressed, would be just fine. Not meaning to insult your intelligence either but you also have to remember a 40x40 map isn't just 4 times bigger than 10x10, - you could fit 16 10x10 maps into a 40x40km map! Thats alot of landmass, a helluva lot of landmass.

Definately agreed. I'd be willing to do alot of the legwork on the basic terrain if I could get DEMs or something similar for it. However, Global Mapper has failed me. What we need is a Geography Student at a university; they're probably not aware of it, but they can get "free" access to alot of these paid websites through the institution!

Satmaps don't matter for the falklands really... L3DT would do an adequate job of assessing the terrain and assigning reasonably convincing attributes to it (see Duala), but DEM's are a different matter... technically if you can get even a contour map you can make one...

I do quite a bit of GIS stuff... the institution association thing is patchy - it CAN get you better UK ordnance survey maps - of the UK, but not better DEM's, for example...

ASTER data was institution-only (it's often more a case of departmental or project based subscriptions) for a while (30m DEM's), but, as ZeroG reported over on the islands section - it seems to be available again.... coverage is Global - but available data is NOT... just checked the Falklands... obviously that stuff hasn't been processed as yet... So unless you can find a Geog student with appropriate data access (if there is better data to access), that takes you back to SRTM... a bit scary at 1:1 level... specially around coastlines... it can be "tidied" though... might take a while on a 40x40km map tho...

Performance-wise it should be good... the west coast half of my current scotland WIP is a falklands-like wasteland of rough moor and the occasional rock - performance is impressive, even on my rig, so that would be a major plus...

I was under the impression that Cherno was 20x20??? Sahrani is...I made a starter 40x40km basic SE England terrain for the Few mod and it really was enormous!... 4 x Chernarus in a square... 16 x Isla Dualas... I think that would be big enough???

It's an interesting idea for an island, and would keep all the Brits happy for a while

PS... you realise of course that if someone decides to make this terrain happen we're gonna need Ambient Penguins...

OK...

Another P.S....

I've been thinking a little more about scales and islands and I was trying to think of a 40x40km island that most people have actually tried, and I couldn't think of one offhand... like Pathy said - it's probably much bigger than most people realise...

So since I had the evening off... I pulled the SRTM data and cropped the Falklands out at 4096x4096...

It's bigger than you think.....

Purely a Scale Test... NOT meant for actual play... there's grass/rock/sand textures & clutter, but nothing else...

DEM - 4096x4096 - 10m cell size

Satellite - 4096x4096 - 40m segments - 1px/10m

Map - 40km x 40km

I didn't actually take careful note of how much compression there was to reduce to 40km, but it was roughly 40 miles = 10km, so say around 1:4 - heights slightly less...

Falklands Islands Scale Test 40x40km

(with the cheesy 4096 satellite layer it's only a 23mb download)

I really don't think splitting the islands into 2 x maps, or trying to go any larger than 40x40 is practical... not if we actually want to see the map actually happen this year...

It may all just be clutter and rocks... but you can fake a lot of believability with trees and fences and houses and all those goodies - when it's just grass and rocks they have to be GOOD grass and rocks... the landscape has to carry it on its own...

Even at 40x40 theres problems in Visitor, plus, to go higher you have to start using bigger cell sizes - terrain detail will go down as size increases and, on a map like this - terrain detail is all you have to work with...

Anyway... Hopefully someone will pick up on this idea... I've never really looked at the Falklands before - it's a fairly impressive landscape!

B

And the beauty of it would be that if someone created the Falklands maps, we could have both the modern day setting that I mentioned, as well as the 1982 conflict if the community put some '82 units together, im sure the SLR would go down well!

Very, very nice. The only trouble is the proportion of land taken up by sea - several chernarus' worth, and the landmass ends up being similar to Ch. My idea was to cut out each island in turn and rotate them so that they best fit into the available space. However, you could probably get away with this with both islands together perhaps. Am going to try it out right now!

I was just talking to CBFASI about this... you never know there might be something forth coming. :eek:

40km x 40km East Falkland Island.

www.volcbat.com/flk.rar

It's got a really quick satmap on, so it's not exactly pretty...I've also rotated the island slightly to make best use of the available space. All in all, it's pretty mahoosive, and fufills the aim (to show the idea of 2 40x40km islands representing the Falkland islands is possible)

Well done Pathy!... just d/l'ing for a look now...

By the way - did you see Planck's post back in the Islands section.... he ordered up the Falklands on ASTER... it's processed now (they used to take a month or more.... they must be Fully Funded or something!) - so thanks to good 'ol NASA there's 30m DEMs available now...

I gotta just say though I'm a bit worried about the rotation thing - particularly with "historical", or even just RealWorld terrain... changing which way North is seems like an awful fundamental change to make...

B

Yeah, although it's not a massive change, and I figure with the alteration of Magnetic North over the years it's probably not of huge importance anyway. I'm personally of a "it's worth it" mentality, but I can understand the objection.

The 30m DEMs, how do they compare to the SRTMs?

OK.... guess that looks OK - short of scrolling it vertically upwards & into the distance that's The Story So Far.....

B

Yeah it was taking up a fair bit of that thread, hopefully the mods wont close it now work seems to have started & plenty seem interested in this mod! As stated before I have no programming skills whatsoever but plenty of ideas & will be sure to put input in to this thread if things take off! :cool:

Certainly i'm not keen on starting a full on mod myself. I am happy to contribute stuff though to anyone who is. I'm more interested in making an Island though, and as we've already got alot of modern Brit Kit or stuff that can stand in, I think if the terrain is made, a modern day scenario is easily within reach.

Wait guys... what about Nicholas Bell's WIP project? catito14, can you cooperate with this project?

Certainly i'm not keen on starting a full on mod myself.

Me neither... I have a MAJOR sized island Project plus I've been chatting with Beton.... we might collaborate loosely on a series of WWII Pacific Theater islands - Iwo Jima, Wake, Saipan, Guam, etc... sometime... once there's suitable plants... oh... and Japanese Soldiers... (end hint mode).

However - this is the Ideas & Discussion section, so I don't see any reason why we can't toss around ideas here... there's two basic "starter kit" terrains... Well, here's all the relevant source files for mine.....

Falkland Islands 40km Scale Test Source Files

Just the essential files so probably "not suitable for beginners" ;) and, if anyone fools around with it, could you please repath everything out of my namespace?...

I said my island project was MAJOR sized... believe me, at 20x20 it really is! Every time I open visitor I think "you've got to be joking!" :D

Ridiculously huge for a one man project... thats one of the reasons I said I thought going beyond 40x40km wasn't a good idea... It's certainly feasable I guess, but I for one would be more than delighted with a reasonable approximation of the Falklands at a scale of, say - North and South Sahrani... 20x20km was VAST to us not that long ago and, given the fact that it IS largely an empty rocks 'n clutter-only wasteland, scaling to that kind of size might make it a much more attractive and achievable prospect for someone...

I'd happily rescale my demo version to 20x20km if anyone wants that... I'm sure Pathy will do the same if asked... they're basic working terrains with clutter but nothing more... A Project On A Plate... :)

B

I said my island project was MAJOR sized... believe me, at 20x20 it really is! Every time I open visitor I think "you've got to be joking!"

Ridiculously huge for a one man project... thats one of the reasons I said I thought going beyond 40x40km wasn't a good idea... It's certainly feasable I guess, but I for one would be more than delighted with a reasonable approximation of the Falklands at a scale of, say - North and South Sahrani... 20x20km was VAST to us not that long ago and, given the fact that it IS largely an empty rocks 'n clutter-only wasteland, scaling to that kind of size might make it a much more attractive and achievable prospect for someone...

Too right mate! Especially for one man or a small group, stuff like that can take ages! I generally focus on infantry but when I had a go at making an island it made me appreciate Sahrani far more than I had! Gonna take a look at the source files you uploaded, if I make any interesting changes I'll post 'em up!

This may be of use... http://artist-3d.com/free_3d_models/dnm/model_disp.php?uid=615&ad=02anatomy_design.php&count=count

This may be of use... http://artist-3d.com/free_3d_models/...hp&count=count

Yes..... Ambient Pengins, pleaase! :D

B

Yes..... Ambient Pengins, pleaase! :D

B

Lol if there is ever a falklands island release WITHOUT ambient penguins then its not a finished addon!

Well, i'm updating the previous link with a populated version. It should finish upload in about an 20 mins from now. When I say populated, I mean bushes and rocks. Lots of bushes and lots of rocks.

What I wanted to do in this stage was, having "proved" the possibility of a 40km^2 island, prove that such an island could be populated with objects and still be viable. So, this is what you have here.

It runs pretty smooth, except if you're trying to barrel through the mountains at 800kph in a Harrier, whereupon it gets choppy. Heli's seem to be just fine though, and probably if I were patient enough to slow the Harrier down, it'd be OK at slower speeds. The satmap is as ugly as before, but i've fixed some clutter issues, and obviously added....lots of bushes....lots of rocks. I've been generally having fun with the terrain so i'm pretty happy with what i've got so far. I guess the best way of approaching this would be to treat everything so far as general clutter, then focus on specific points of interest (roads, airstrips, towns, battlesites). It should be OK performance wise anyhow. Just to demo, the following video is at 10k VD (vid settings shown at start). Theres a little lag in places but I can't run anywhere near this high Vid settings on Chernarus, so that i'm even running 10k VD and having a smooth game is quite something!

<object width="525" height="444"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzpai_mgbFU&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzpai_mgbFU&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

The .rar is still in the process of uploading but this will be valid from roughly 02:00AM GMT onwards (time of posting 01:39AM):

www.volcbat.com/flk.rar

Nice work Pathy! Hows Goose green looking on there? :) I wonder if anyone has ever made a Westland Wessex for Arma or Arma 2? Got to have one of those for an '82 mission, although Im still very much liking the idea of a modern campaign featuring these islands!

Goose Green looks about as godforsaken as it should! :)

Nah, it needs a little work. The entire 'project' is very messy, but its better than naught, eh? I'm working at Bodge Speed Ahead, so it's not exactly the highest quality stuff i've ever made. Then again, it ain't the lowest *snicker*.

Edit: 2 minutes till upload completion :D

Edit Edit: Done.

Very little in the way of trees to slow peoples systems down either, I guess port stanley would be the only part that would cause any real problems! Ive got visions of the last mission of a campaign showing the white flag flying over stanley after you take tumbledown :)

Nice one Pathy, looking good for such a recent project start :)

Initial impressions (of the last-but-one release only, not got the new one yet):

Still seems a little small ;) but I agree the scale needs careful thought.

Seems to me to be rather more hilly & mountainous than I remember, that might be a function of reducing the lateral scale though, or an effect of having too large a view distance when factoring the scaling-down.

So the scale has been, according to my poor math estimations, to be about 1/4 real life? I guess that could be livable :)

Good job on the speedy implementation BTW :)

Coastline would need a little work with the SRTM DEM... that's the only real terrain editing job... nobody's too familiar with the Falklands anyway - or looking too closely though... a general beachey smoothing where it's low - left cliffy where it's steep would do...

Like Trickster says - there's only very few "focus areas" where we'd need to hit the web for photos and try to get some kind of beleviability... the rest of the island is a generalised moorland and that's fine - we don't need every bush in the right place really... at 40x40 the scale is gonna help a lot with the believability factor...

As for the DEM... I mentioned on the island editing thread that I'd checked for the Falklands, and Planck replied - saying he'd ordered them specially so they were available now... I wonder what he wanted them for? maybe he's working on something.... (speculation mode off)

Meantime I've just grabbed the 30m DEMs myself... I'll take a look and see if they're a better alternative...

B

I'd assumed somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 in scaling down X and Y, but I only halved the elevation. The trouble is, the south of the island would end up completely flatchested if I scaled down the Z axis more. So yeah, it's proportionally a little higher than it should be. Well spotted ;) Easily tweakable should popular opinion deem the elevation proportionally a little high.

@B.L, awesome. Looking forward to seeing how the DEMs work out. The coastline on this is a little bit rough in places but not as bad as I actually expected. And yup - it's actually the same trick with stuff like vehicle textures, you can make the general hull low res, but make the entire thing look high res just by focusing on the key things such as lights, periscopes, etc. In this case we're talking about making most of the terrain "low detail" and picking out key areas of interest to bring the ground to life. Best way of doing this, especially considering however we do this, if we want to represent those key areas we're talking about a big scale.

Oh BTW Pathy, if you're looking for RL texture info, you can use the Google-Earth time-slider feature to dial the displayed region's texture back to several years ago. You'll still get low-res crap, but at least it'll be less patchy low res crap :)

Personally, I think it'd be better to use a 3rd party app to texture a terrain model using slope, altitude and perhaps orientation info. Like Vue for example, if you have that. I had some amount of success using Vue to texture a smaller map, setting the camera to a VERY high altitude, losing all fog & atmospheric effects, and rendering at as high a resolution as I could reasonably wait for.

Image link.

If not Vue, then Lightwave or something similar, anything that you can get the terrain info into.

OK - had a look at the ASTER 30m DEM's, as did Pathy... don't think they're worth the work they'd need to get the extra detail they offer...

briefly... SRTM DEM's are basically radar photographs... clouds don't matter, which is great, but - specially at lower resolutions, they don't handle coastlines well - you tend to get quite abrupt drop-off... it's a wavelength thing...

ASTER is a multispectral sensor array star trek thingy - it measures reflectivity at different frequencies basically... clouds can matter... the DEM is "derived" from two seperate "photos"... unless conditions are perfect, you get unwanted stuff...

...conditions are rarely perfect...

Pathys current SRTM is the best bet in my opinion....

B

look forward to this very very much keep up the good work

this is looking mega , cant wait to see how this will turn out . keep it up!

I also eagerly await this :)

Obviously if some modern missions in the Falklands are going to be happening we're gonna need this bad boy porting

The Argentine version of the Hummer that they seem quite fond of at the moment!

Is Like the Hammer.

I going to love this mod!!! I can`t whait, you can make this mod and make a cooperation whit the other mod about the Falklands for arma 2.

... This is only really an ideas discussion guys - mainly about if the island itself could be done in a worthwhile way... It looks feasable, and I suspect Pathy is tempted to make it, but there's nobody actively making anything else as far as I'm aware...

Though that could change if the island looks like it's definately going to happen...

You'd be better off suggesting specific addons you'd like to see made in the "Addons Requests" thread... there's a lot of keen modellers lurking there who may just take up on the suggestion... or they may not...

Something that hasn't been made yet plus a few attractive pics is a good way to request tho ;)

Also, the more addons there are that suit the island - the more tempting it becomes to make the island... :D

It IS a MASSIVE project though - made feasable only by the large areas of featureless wasteland...

B

Well Bushlurker if Pathy (and you and anybody else) end up going further with this I'll try to find any models you need.