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daringd

A Noob's experience of creating a new terrain with a bit of advice

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So three months ago I was a complete noob to terrain making, sitting at the edge of the abyss, with an idea in my head and nothing more than a vague idea of how to accomplish it.

I trust a lot of you have been here or are there right now, so, at the suggestion of another user I thought I should write down some of my experiences and findings so all of the rest of you don’t feel so alone out there.

I’m not going to cover all the steps you need to take as a tutorial would, because there are some great tut’s out there, courtesy of Bushlurker and a few others, and I would start by saying, take their advice, to the letter because they know what they are talking about!

My findings so far…

At the start

Building a map is a huge undertaking. The phrase I would use to describe what you need is ‘mental toughness’. Don’t go into it unless you have a lot of patience and are prepared to constantly learn, compromise and stick with it. The programs you will use are buggy at times, other times you find it hard to believe that there is no simple way to do something, at first everything seems to fox you and have you posting on forums asking for advice. A lot of this is text book ‘learning by doing’

I would suggest that you read and try your hardest to understand the way V3 cuts up your terrain into cells, how that will affect your landscape in terms of what you can and can not do, how it will affect performance and how your terrain looks, it is probably the first big decision you will have to make, and probably one of the most important. Some of your limits are pre set, you can’t have running rivers, you can’t really have well rendered cliffs, you can’t have tunnels, railroads must be flat and at the same level all over your island unless you are willing to sit and model your own up and down sections, or figure out how to use the existing BIS up and down sections with each other. Compromise after compromise…

I drew my map on the back of an old phone bill first before I began making it, then I found different parts of the world I could use to make each part of the map, hit Google maps, and then stitched them together, to get a basic low-res idea of my map, and how it would work.

I thought about functionality, what does this island do? Would it survive in the real world, is it a collection of towns, if so, why? Is it a holiday resort? Industrial? where do the natives work? I found this was a really interesting part of the creation process and one that really gets you familiar with your island, you begin to create a back-story, if only in your head, that you can rely on to help you lay things out. My map is based on an export industry, so I need a couple of docks, cargo airports, a decent road and rail system, and then houses and towns would be close to the industry too. The secondary industry is tourism, so I have to craft a pretty old town, that looks like something you would want to visit, away from the ugly industry, and then some rolling hills, pretty countryside etc… I think once you understand your map in terms of history, it is hard to go wrong and easy to evolve it, maybe a nice urban development with old factories turned into apartments, this kind of stuff… you begin to get the idea. If your map was based on mining, you could have old quarries littering the landscape, old equipment and so on, the history of your map will give it character, it’s really worth spending some time developing your history.

Getting Started

Next come choices, like…

do I lay my road system before I begin my hi res sat map layer?

And then in turn you will realize how intertwined the sat map layer is with the ground definitions you want to use, it gets complicated sometimes. I opted to lay all of my roads first, and then export them from V3 and lay them over my sat map so I didn’t have to actually sit and paint them all in by hand, and I know that they will line up perfectly with the roads in game… but wait! Some of the roads are not as wide as the road sections that represent them in V3, so your as2 and as3 roads will appear wider than they really are now! So it turns out you have to go and thin them up a little… you are starting to see the real pain in the arse that this can become.

My next finding was that now I have put all of roads down, I want to flatten them out, make them all nice and smooth, so in game roads that are on the side of a hill are at an angle you could realistically drive on, and this is where I have really hit some problems.

Some of my roads are too long to be smoothed out with the scripts in V3 (and never rely on these scripts anyway, as you will find out, some of them simply do not do a great job), again, lots of posts about this to read through, there are techniques people use, there is road painter… so many ways to do this… but I have been using L3DT to sort of manually do it all with the tools provided there, though I would not suggest this, it is long winded and laborious, and will defiantly make you want to scream at times. I am still stuck at this point as I write this, trying to smooth everything out and have it look realistic… I have been smoothing roads now for nearly two weeks, if I had planned better I could have had this done by now, my mind keeps drifting to roadpainter…

Possible Problems

Another problem I have found now is: what are my limits? How many buildings can I have? Can I make my docks truly massive to reflect the scale of the industry? Can all of my buildings be enterable? Can I have huge sprawling cities? I don’t know the answers to these yet, but like anything I can only assume a balance must be struck between how your map looks and how it plays, less of everything means it will run faster, do you want to use it for online play? For instance, I want mine to be compatible with the day Z mod, which means up to 40 players, hundreds of zombies… I have decided to take a closer look at the Cheranus map and take all of my pointers from that. It runs fine in game, so I can assume that provided my map contains roughly a similar amount of objects, in similar group sizes, it should… SHOULD.. run about the same, and I can always begin to fine tune at a later date.

The last thing I would say is, I have found the community is a great help, lots of people willing to help you, lots of people wanting to help you. Also, try not to ‘announce’ too much, I’ve seen a lot of posts in forums like “I’m going to make an amazing terrain the size of Cuba, who wants to help†which I think puts a lot of people off right away, though, I think if you come to the forums with a terrain that is basically ready to have objects placed (sat map and layers complete, save for a revision after object placement) all of your ‘.cfg’ files complete, etc…. people can see you have done all of the real hard work and I would say, will be more open to helping out, no one wants to work on a map only for it to never see the light of day because the author has given up on it.

Lastly, everything I have written is my experience, and my outlooks so far, I am sure I may look back with fondness at the naivety of some of the things I have written here.

I some of you find this useful, even if it just gives you a sense that you are not the only one learning all of this stuff for the first time!

.DaringD.

PS : ZeroG posted this some time back, a good starting place for anyone wanting to do terrain…

Really take your time to look down through all of the links concerning anything you have a problem with because this has been my ‘goto’ post for all of my problems and I have found solutions there most of the time

ZeroG's post covering almost everything

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Update

So I have managed to solve my road smoothing problems with a few nights of sitting, patiently tweaking and playing with L3DT, though I am still convinced I could have done this whole road smoothing in an entirely much more simple way (plus there was a suggestion from Bushlurker about this program that seems it might be the solution!).

I was about to move on to my next stage of fully completing my sat map and layers, when it suddenly struck me that I should at least play some of the other user maps out there and take a look at what they have to offer, what new things they have implemented and so on. Things got interesting. Taviana: huge map, but with only a few cities. There has been some real time spent on it, but having talked to a few people I think it confirms my theory that large cities = slow performance. I also noticed the author had train tracks that were not running level but climbing up hills, in fact a complete section of corner tracks that were on a tilt, so I have to look into that. Lingor island was next, again, a great effort here, lots of cities to explore, lots to see, and it has been between this and Chernarus that I have compared my own road system that I can feel confident it is up to scratch in terms of quantity. So my next step is to really go over my island now, and just double check that everything is really what I think it should be, I think I may have over done it with a few too many towns, but that can be easily dealt with later.

Lastly in this post, I need to make a point and ask a question, sort of rhetorical really.

The point is that should you wish to find out about something an author has done in their island, you may wish to write to them and ask: Be thoughtful how you write, be mindful that they may get a lot of e mails such as yours, and that they really have no obligation to share information with you. I few points I may not have fully considered when writing to a few people to ask how they may have done certain things, which resulted in a day of mental soreness and something close to embarresment at the reply of one of these authors, so prepare yourself for not everybody being so open and forthcoming, but accept that that is their prerogative.

And the question… Is DayZ a sore point or dividing factor in the Arma2 community? It seems I usually do fine until I announce my map will be for use with DayZ or ask for help with how to prepare my map for use with the day Z mod, and suddenly people become very frosty. Is it that the community has suddenly become over run with DayZers dragged in by the sudden popularity of the mod? I’m not sure, but hopefully a lot of this will die out with time.

.DaringD.

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If your building a terrain for day z why not wait till it is released that way you get all the new building content for dayz and the new engine, as the buildings are being overhauled for better detail. That's what I would do as when you want to play on the new dayz when its released will your island work is the question as you will be using buildings from A2 and they may not be the same in dayz as in class names so might not work out how you think it will if this is just for arma2 dayz then forget what i said above but arma2 dayz will be left by many when the new shiny game is out.

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haven't added a single building yet for purely this reason, I'm not as stupid as I look! ;) Thought I would take the time to get my actual terrain looking and working well, plus I need to build a few unique buildings too, so i can also take the time to learn O2 as well!

D

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Update

...And the question… Is DayZ a sore point or dividing factor in the Arma2 community? It seems I usually do fine until I announce my map will be for use with DayZ or ask for help with how to prepare my map for use with the day Z mod, and suddenly people become very frosty. Is it that the community has suddenly become over run with DayZers dragged in by the sudden popularity of the mod? I’m not sure, but hopefully a lot of this will die out with time.

Which is funny because the creator of dayz also help create arma 2. I anxiously awaited to purchase arma 2 the minute it was released back in 2008 I think and I like playing both dayz and regular arma2. Hopefully your right and it will calm down and you get answers to the questions you seek

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Don't get me wrong on this, I'm not saying people suddenly turn into a raging prickasaurus when I mention it, but I can just pick up on a sort of "oh you're one of them" vibe. Though, IF this is the case, which it may not be (I have been known to be paranoid now and then) I can sort of understand it, a relatively close community suddenly gets an influx of new folks because of a sudden boost in popularity and it may well cause this, I know I have been guilty of it in the past in different ways. Anyway, I didn't want it to become a massive thing, I sort of feel like I should have kept this to myself now. People will be people, and so far most everyone i have asked for advice has given it and gone the extra mile, so I certainly can't complain.

Daring

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Update

So the last few days I got fed up of flying around my terrain in L3DT to find and fine tune problems with the roads so I binarised everything and decided to do it by literally driving along all of my roads and circling problem areas on a printed out map, systematically crossing off travelled road. Now I don’t know if there is a way to measure your total road distance, but I would estimate at least a hundred Km’s of road are in need of this treatment. This s**t takes hours! There was a point where I started thinking “I didn’t sign up for this!†when in actual fact, that’s exactly what I did.

On the plus side there was a moment when I first opened up my terrain in the editor when I was so happy just to have a glimpse of my work ‘in game’ with clutter, beginning to look like something playable. Quite a proud moment, despite the fact it is still devoid of buildings or trees, I realized just how much work has gone into this so far. Another unexpected bonus of doing things this way is being at ground level gives you a players eye view of the world, and I noticed quite a lot of other things, fields on hillsides that simply would not be on such a steep hill, crazy steep inclines that seem somehow just too unrealistic, things I don’t notice from above in L3DT, and also some happy accidents too, there is an effect on some of my roads that cause them to gently undulate, up and down, avoiding that unrealistic completely flat road, adding some very nice imperfection and age, I’m looking into trying to emulate this effect over a few other roads too.

Next stage is to go in and fix all of these problems, clean up my coast lines and then I will have a brand new, virgin island, ready for object placement, so I am quite excited at this point, and hopefully I can make a private release for anyone interested at that point in seeing the map, it will be the first time I can get any worthwhile feedback too.

Daring

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So, where am I?

Well, it’s been a while since my last update here and I’ve been a busy little bunny, putting in the hours. Now let me just explain, I’ve been working on this now since October, ambitious, my map is large, and every day I work on it, I curse myself for not wanting to start out small.

Now I’m roughly:

90% of road placement

100% rail placement

Both of my ports are in and set up (including cranes and rails, plus piers and so forth, but nothing else)

90% of my terrain I am happy with and is now good to go.

70% done on my Sat_lco(if I didn’t mention before is 10240x10240 1px= 1.5m giving my map a whopping 15.36km length and breadth).

10% mask_lco (has taken a back seat recently, since I prefer to work in blocks, processing all of one type of work at once, though I have a cunning plan…).

Looking back, and forward, I see that almost 3 months of work have gone into this so far, and I would say it will take a few weeks longer to have completed the sat & mask, and then I would hazard a guess I am probably only about 30-40% of the way through the actual creation process alone, the time scale on placing objects has become clear to me now I have toyed with setting up a few small areas to try and come to terms with the way things work. And then there is the task of actually setting up the files and getting this to work inside of DayZ mod and StandAlone(waiting to see what is happening with this and also waiting for some kind of precedent to be set for getting new maps in game on this)

All in all I’m enjoying this whole experience so far, I’m constantly learning, as previously stated, I have still to create a few unique models for the map, but I think this will be one of the last things I do.

It’s getting close to the point where I may need help, but we will see!

Here is a current export of the map for your perusal:

https://aag5bg.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pkdKG-KSVq9mLqIy6BfO7b2AxvYtQ8IfhO4wg6cq0FU0K-cyAjthvwO34hyflEyxXw4VEXOTCt1WNJBh40aGBYtbPwN0rfcsO/BG_plan_view.jpg?psid=1 (558 kB)

and a snap shot of part of the island from Visitor (hence no clutter, just basics…):

https://aag5bg.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pk7NKqMQLUB99sX5Le6s0-W9kGP3rIvLd6AI9SxkY-5K8pOncp2rFBR3PAYAVakRgMtuVCScFpsN_GAoBGtXqt4HkWiCmzpLn/BG_early_shot_1.jpg?psid=1 (291 kB)

Daring

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Here's a question for you:

I am the co-founder with a friend for a RP mission. We want a unique mission on a unique map. We are currently looking for a map maker to help make us the perfect map for our mission to make ours truly stand out from the rest. There is much much more to be said but I do not want to flood your post with our background. If possible, please join our Teamspeak so I can give you more details if you'd be interested in helping us out. I really encourage it so that we can get to talk and have a real conversation about the possibilities.

Sincerely,

Marine

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So, I've been away a little while, but since I got back I spent some time finishing off my satmap and doing an initial tree test (I'm quite pleased with the results!

I've popped a few more pictures up of the progress now, I feel like all the time I put into getting things right is all starting to pay off now, and with a few exceptions I think it's turning into a stunning landscape.

daringunnamedWIP1_zpsc9deca67.jpg

daringunnamedWIP2_zpse4fd2f8b.jpg

daringunnamedWIP3_zps6a078112.jpg

daringunnamedWIP4_zpsc4b0faa4.jpg

I hope that I'm slowly getting up to the required standard!

Daring

Edited by daringd
links were not working....

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looking great so far, keep it up :)

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This looks awesome, keep up the good work! I'm looking forward to this map's release :)

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just a couple more screen shots of a couple of towns I've been working on the last few days.

now back to solving my stupid RVMAT/WRP problem I'm having ( link )

daringunnamedWIP7_zps56417f8b.jpg

daringunnamedWIP5_zpsf1542854.jpg

Edited by daringd

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I figure that this llittle journal is outgrowing this forum, since I'm now entering the wicked and somewhat unrelenting realms of Oxygen2 and the evils of creating new model content for ARMA2, so I think to keep this thread completely organic, it should evolve with my little journey, so to anyone who does sort of follow this thread (you MUST be bored) then it kind of graduates to here. and I'll most likely interlink other connected threads that too.

D

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Thanks Stang,

Right now I'm having a little break from this for a couple weeks to re-charge, after doing nothing but this island for the last few months I've forgotten what my friends look like! I'll be back on it super soon though, taking time away has given me a new angle on some aspects of the island and also made me re think some of the ideas and areas I want to create, though I might have a little play tonight with one of the ideas I have... though now I think all the updates will go on over at the New mods discussion!

D

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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.

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Hey Proctoron,

Sorry I have not replied to your post, I wasn't being ignorant, I have just had a shed load of stuff to do to for work, life and various other things...

I'm super glad to hear that this post some how helped, I'm sad that I have taken so long to reply though! I'd love to see how far you have come in the last few months though, I'll be back in a few weeks to continue wrestling with my terrain, I was a bit bummed when Arma3 came out because it really knocked my motivation, but I soon realised it would not be too hard to port most of the hard work across, AND this terrain I'm working on is mostly for the DayZ SA, and that still seems a while off, so I'm happy to procrastinate for a bit longer... looking forward to hitting the boards more and more over the next few months!

D

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Hi daringd,

Just to let you know your thread is inspiring others too and is great for ongoing ref. Please keep it coming mate..!

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I enjoyed reading this thread, and i'm hoping to see your island someday.

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I've put a decent few hours in the last few days just working on a new area, I hope to get the sat map and layers for the area fixed up and optimized over the next couple days, then I can do a few in game shots of it to get some suggestions. One thing I will say at this point is, it is worth spending some time importing the ruined versions of the buildings into visitor, especially if you want to create some nice broken down areas or are trying to give an area a "being demolished" feel. Also I found that I've spent a lot of time being frustrated by my forgetfulness, having spent time away, I've forgotten some of the most basic things and had to re read my own threads and notes on almost everything.

D

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