My first island - Pilis

Hi,

I 90% finished my first island, named after the hills around my place, Pilis. It is 25x25 km with a real elevation map. The main (sil) and secondary (asphalt) roads are real with ~25..100 m error.

Cities and villages are real too (et least their coordinates).

I used no addons, only resistance objects are in it.

You can download it from here.

Screenshots coming soon...

Please comment it.

BR,

Kubi

downloading now...  

EDIT: Well, the layout is very realistic (roads trough valleys, crosspoints and villages at logical places, realstic forest placement and nice rolling hills and mountains), but its way too emtpy. Its very hard to make a nice mission on this island because there is alot of empty space (No cover/concealment, except for 1 tree/bush every 50 meters).

If it was a 12.8×12.8 island (or even smaller) there would have been alot of less empty space, but right now the island is very suited for dogfights

Downloaded and looked fast at it. And saw a bug with a road HERE. I also saw some roads placed in a road.

Textures are all the same, maybe you can add different textures? Towns are looking good. Forest also. Maybe some more trees and bushes next to the roads?

It is a nice big map with potential when finished, It need some more polishing. Anyway good luck and keep up the good work  

OK, maybe it is not 90% ready, more in pre-alpha state

I'll double check the roads...

You are right about the distances between towns and the lack of vegetation. Maybe I'll split real cities to two or three parts ( as I did with Szentendre) to have more good places for missions.

Thank you for the advices.

BR,

Kubi

heya, looks gd so far, realistic terrain but objects bit plain, personally id make it a lil smaller, use the BIS spruce tree forest (Nogova ones) instead of old BIS standard trees (that look like theyve come out of a pop up book).

use some other textures, especially round the towns and villages, perhaps some walls round some of the farms (crop growing at the farms, fields etc), think how settlement usually look, the church is the centre of communities usually so put it where the public can get at it, in the middle of the settlement. add shops and some more factories, basically make the place look lived in.

add rocks at the top of mountains and at the bottom, but make them consistant with the textures ure using, so grey rocks for grey rock texture!

in some of the valleys u could have evidence of rivers, reeds and rushes, sounds, rounded rocks

Add some more archaeology, we all love to be indiana jones walking through ruins, one of the castles is triangular in shape, square is the norm plus it means u can have more towers etc.

like i said looks gd so far, but lil more work and itll be great

bootneckofficer

I've used Nogova forest and randomized direction and size (80..120%). And the center most of the woods are half-deleted to keep FPS. I was thinking about Nature Pack for the vegetation, but I kept standard one.

I'll add textures, but I still not familiar with that. I have to learn a bit.

The castle ruin at Visegrad is almost real, but still have to improove it. My friend made it using http://mars.elte.hu/varak , check http://mars.elte.hu/varak/visegrad/visegrad.htm (the page is mostly in hungarian, but clicking on the hungarian page's map, you will have a really good flash map)

Ty for the comments!

(Now off for a week)

For your first Island.....good job

Fix the errors with some Streets, then make some places, shops and more vegetations, so it would be a very nice Island.

I was so free and make some Screens from your Island and post it on our site Ofp.4players.de

Take a look.

Keep up the good work. Good Luck!

Imutep

as bootneckofficer said..

it´s nice... but a little booring..

would be much nicer if you made it smaller (maybe concentrate on a smaller area) and made it more detailed...

also using Nogova type forrests and objects ofcourse..

personally i think 25x25km islands are too big for OFP, if you make them as detailed as a normal 12.5x12.5km island they will still have more then 4 times as many objects, and that will cause lag...

so, making a more detailed 12.5x12.5km island is imho much better and much more useful.

remember, on a small island you can use the same amount of objects as on a big one without extra lag, and thus making it 4x as detailed

but it really is a very nice island for being the first

Quote[/b] ]personally i think 25x25km islands are too big for OFP, if you make them as detailed as a normal 12.5x12.5km island they will still have more then 4 times as many objects, and that will cause lag...

so, making a more detailed 12.5x12.5km island is imho much better and much more useful.

In your humble opinion you are wrong which is weird as this has been covered many times already... big islands dont cause any slowdowns. Yes of course they are loading more slowly as there are usually more objects than smaller islands, but they will not cause slowdowns. Slowdowns/stutter or "lag" as you call it, is caused by having lot of CPU heavy objects on the screen at one time.

Oh and you're wrong about the island sizes too... its 12.8km and not 12.5km. Not to pick on you or anything, but...

I private messaged kubi asking if he wants some tips to improve the island release. He told me to post in the topic so here we go.

First of kubi, you should have read the WrpTool's manual page 118 which is labeled "How to Release", it contains basic yet vital information for a good release. So read that first so you know what you should change on the update.

But just to recap whats to fix in Pilis, in few lines:

- Add island menu cutscene.

- Add readme to the packet.

- Use WinRAR with maximum compression for the packet.

Now the new information you cannot find from the WrpTool manual: Your zip file is 6.38mb in size, so if you pack the pilis.pbo without PBO compression (use tool like PboX to do it) the pbo itself is bigger and OFP loads as faster people claim, and finally when you pack the uncompressed PBO with latest WinRAR with maximum compression... the download size comes down to a total of 3.84mb, wow a nicely smaller dont you think.

Oh while you pack the pbo, remove the pilis.rrp file which is the WrpTool roads file, its 211kb in size and OFP will not use it so its just wasted space on the pbo.

Quote[/b] ]You are right about the distances between towns and the lack of vegetation. Maybe I'll split real cities to two or three parts ( as I did with Szentendre) to have more good places for missions.

Hey dont worry about the distances, they are great. Its a big island, its a big world out there so just keep the stuff as is now, distances between towns/cities are just OK.

Quote[/b] ]I've used Nogova forest and randomized direction and size (80..120%).

Ouch! Dont do that!

About the forest objects, you should delete all the existing forests and re-place them using the forest placing feature of WrpTool. Simple as that. Right now the forests look terrible from air and in mapview they have the edges all mixed up (random direction).

Quote[/b] ]And the center most of the woods are half-deleted to keep FPS.

I'm not so sure about this... I guess you could use just individual trees then, but I have no hard knowledge of forest objects causing frame rate drop. I'd say go with the traditional forest object placement.

Quote[/b] ]I'll add textures, but I still not familiar with that. I have to learn a bit.

You already have different textures under the forests, so I'm kind of assuming you did the initial forest placement indeed with the forest placer feature of Region Tool.

If you have any problems with texturing the island, just ask a specific question and I'll try to help. But basically its very easy:

- open the Texture Browser

- click on Add Textures button

- choose the b1, t1 etc textures from O\ directory (since you're using Resistance, right).

Then you are free to use the textures on terrain, just use Texture Mode button on the top of WrpTool, and Home key to "pick" texture from ground, then ALT+LMB to place texture, or you can use the powerful feature of Cell Selector to select cells like according to elevation and then use SHIFT+LMB to place textures on all of these cells. Its great feature to place more greener texture for lowlands and more dry or even rock texture to the high mountains.

You dont need to choose the transition textures with long filenames like b1s1s1b1.paa etc, just use the terrain type texture like b1.paa, pt.paa etc. Then you can use the Create Transitions feature of WrpTool to place the transition textures.

Pilis is a good island, I like it. I have pointed out few shortcomings here but it doesn't mean its a bad island or anything, I just want to help you to create better/best release for next update. Trust me on this, when you do the stuff I mentioned here, then it really rocks as you have the basics done correctly.

Feel free to ask any questions you have, I'm willing to help to the best of my ability. I like Pilis and your approach, good work so far.

Quote[/b] ]I've used Nogova forest and randomized direction and size (80..120%).

Ouch! Dont do that!

About the forest objects, you should delete all the existing forests and re-place them using the forest placing feature of WrpTool. Simple as that. Right now the forests look terrible from air and in mapview they have the edges all mixed up (random direction).

Actually, i liked what i saw...

EDIT: Well, the layout is very realistic (roads trough valleys, crosspoints and villages at logical places, realstic forest placement and nice rolling hills and mountains), but its way too emtpy. Its very hard to make a nice mission on this island because there is alot of empty space (No cover/concealment, except for 1 tree/bush every 50 meters).

If it was a 12.8×12.8 island (or even smaller) there would have been alot of less empty space, but right now the island is very suited for dogfights  

Of course it's realistic, because the terrain was made from a real satellite heightmap

There is much empty space on the island, because it's not ready yet, so just wait for the final version

An older screenshot screenshot from the island

Hi,

Butcher made some photos:

Visegrad

Visegrad

Hi,

The island is highly upgraded, so the time for release v1.0 has come.

You can find the island here

http://www.ofp.hu/~kubi/pilis/20060820_v1.0/dxdshot1154695052.jpg

http://www.ofp.hu/~kubi/pilis/20060820_v1.0/dxdshot1156029968.jpg

http://www.ofp.hu/~kubi/pilis/20060820_v1.0/dxdshot1156030175.jpg

http://www.ofp.hu/~kubi/pilis/20060820_v1.0/dxdshot1156030216.jpg

http://www.ofp.hu/~kubi/pilis/20060820_v1.0/dxdshot1156030282.jpg

Nice looking Island.

downloading now ;] I test it soon

great island. with some mapfact stuff, your island would be excellent.

more hills would be cool too.

And please make a readme, with version info. I DLed two versions, and I suppose the slightly bigger is the newer.

could anyone re-up this?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByTWuy3YMM4wbmhxdmozTm9IeDg/edit?usp=sharing