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major_desync

[WIP] Gorgona (terrain)

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As a belated Christmas present, I thought I'd share a few sneaky pics showing the results of several months of wrestling with TerrainBuilder.

This is babby's first Arma terrain, so I opted for something small and manageable - the small Italian prison island of Gorgona (which coincidentally is just 35 km north of Capraia). The terrain is just over 4km x 4km in total (16 sq km). Of that the land area of the island is about 6.5 sq. km (this is larger than the real island). The island is hilly and heavily forested, and so is best-suited for small unit infantry and stealth special ops play. There is no airfield, but there is a helipad and port. Some obvious scenarios would be "Escape from..", prison breaks, or all out air-sea assaults.

Screenshots.

Features include a port village and a number of compounds scattered around the island, such as, a prison, farms, a military base, a radome compound, a research station, a small junkyard, a cemetery, and a small castle. All buildings and vegetation are from A3, so there should be no issues with AI x-ray vision (any more than usual).

Progress: The map is currently at what I'd consider alpha stage. I plan to do private alpha testing to look at FPS and gameplay, and if all goes well, release a public beta by the end of January.

One question to the forum: I haven't currently added a lot of incidental object clutter and detail (crates, pallets, wood piles, furniture, that kind of stuff) as a lot of that can now be added by Zeus. So the question is - do you expect to see incidental clutter and flavour in a terrain, or do you prefer to add these kind of things yourself via Zeus as the scenario demands?

Update: The island is actually bigger than I thought! :p I've updated this to the actual dimensions.

Edited by Major_Desync
Changes to the terrain dimensions

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I don't use Zues to add clutter - would take too long.

Don't go nuts, but I would suggest adding a little bit flavour with objects, just to make the map look believable.

Good luck :)

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Part of me likes the incidental clutter. It helps somewhat enforce immersion. However, it can sometimes be extraordinarily annoying as a mission maker to try and work around it. I'm for it, but try to keep mission making in mind.

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Progress report: I've been refining the Gorgona alpha over the last few weeks. Playtests on a dedicated server have gone well so far, delivering solid FPS and gameplay.

(Arma3 Tools update not withstanding) I should be able to release a public beta next week.

In the mean time - a couple of screen shots:

A day at the beach in Gorgona.

Miller's Crossing ;)

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i like your style. you managed to create some interesting looks just by how you place and combine objects. even with all these vanilal objects it has its very own character already. keep it up!

only thing i seee that could use some work is the sat map colours. just needs some slight tone corrections in my humble opinion. that's totally subjective though.

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I have downloaded and tested it. It's pretty nice, espacially how you use vanilla-objects to create something looking completly different.

But there are still some places to fill with objects, but i think this is just an wip, right?

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Very nice of all I've seen. Room for improvement by adding clutter, yes, but defenitely playable. Really like the compound buildings, especially the maze that is the old villa south of the village.

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Thank you all for you kind comments! We should probably move this discussion over to the completed mods forum, but first a few replies:

Object clutter - It is still a WIP, but I was not planning on too much more in the way of additions, unless there is a great demand for it (but I'm here to listen!).

I'm in two minds about object clutter. You need it certainly, and it makes an amazing difference. But there might also be a point where there's too much object clutter, so that it gets in the way of mission makers. This is especially true when objects can be added in Zeus and/or MCC (and more so if BIS develop that 3D editor they're talking about). Now - I might still be in the "not enough clutter" box, but I wonder if it's better to have too little than too much. That said, I don't know the answer. :)

Vanilla objects - this was one of the challenges I set myself: what interesting things can I do with just the A3 buildings? The villa maze was one of these - I hope it'll be a cool place for a bit of close-quarters battling.

(BTW - BIS have done a really nice job using and combining vanilla buildings, if you take a close look at any of the towns in Altis and Stratis. There aren't that many different vanilla buildings but all the combinations that they manage to get out of them is pretty impressive.)

Edited by Major_Desync

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Nice Island Major. Really appreciated it. Unluckly the only bug is the invisible buildings in map. Hope that will be fixed soon. I plan many and many invasion from LHD/Nimitz :cool:

Bravo!

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