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Porting Seattle Map.. Progress & Issues

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Hello!

 

For the last little while I've been attempting to properly bring Take On Helicopter's Seattle map into Arma 3, with mixed results.

 

For one though, the terrain actually does load. Most buildings, water, roads etc. all work fine. The same low detail roads are present, but the actual textures look better up close which is nice. However, that's about where the issues start.

 

For anybody that's played TKOH (not very many of those) they will know that some buildings. skyscrapers in particular, have realtime reflections. These do not render in A3 at all. What's left are big blue blocks, and quite a few of them at that. As it existed pre-A3 I can't change the textures with script, I suppose I could forcefully remove them but it would remove a ton of buildings off the map. Been struggling with this as the central issue.

 

The other one is the ambient cars. Again for those that have played it, the Seattle map has automatically spawning cars that drive around all major roads. They don't have any collision, which is kinda lame but without them the massive terrain feels entirely empty.

 

Would be interested in what the community has to say about this, or perhaps even a possible solution I'm aware of concerning the lack of textures (I'm thinking it's maybe a shader issue?), and whether there's a community interest in getting this brought over as the CUP Team has stated they won't do it.

 

Thank you!

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As far as the ambient civilian cars, there's a couple scripts which add this, such as Engima's civilian traffic script or L_Axemann's "L_Civs" script.  There's also ambient traffic scripting commands in the game which I never actually checked out.

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I will second Engima's traffic script.  It's amazing and does the job you are talking about.  You may want to consider removing the wonky buildings and replacing them with CUP / vanilla A3 assets.  That would get you something functional without the battle of the imported buildings.  

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The problem is, neither CUP nor vanilla A3 have suitable buildings. Skyscrappers from TOH are quite unlike anything in ArmA. Not even Apex has anything like them, we're talking big, American-style skyscrappers here.

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9 hours ago, phronk said:

As far as the ambient civilian cars, there's a couple scripts which add this, such as Engima's civilian traffic script or L_Axemann's "L_Civs" script.  There's also ambient traffic scripting commands in the game which I never actually checked out.

 

6 hours ago, accuracythruvolume said:

I will second Engima's traffic script.  It's amazing and does the job you are talking about.  You may want to consider removing the wonky buildings and replacing them with CUP / vanilla A3 assets.  That would get you something functional without the battle of the imported buildings.  

Interesting, do these cars have collision hitboxes like regular vehicles? The reason why the TKOH ones didn't was because there were hundreds of them on the map at all times, and it was too much for the engine. 

 

4 hours ago, dragon01 said:

The problem is, neither CUP nor vanilla A3 have suitable buildings. Skyscrappers from TOH are quite unlike anything in ArmA. Not even Apex has anything like them, we're talking big, American-style skyscrappers here.

Very much this, they're extremely unique. Is it against the TOS to extract some of the regular buildings from the game and make them standalone objects that I could place down? They aren't anywhere near as impressive but it would do the trick.

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I'd rather see the TOH buildings ported. It might be a lot of work (could entail remaking the textures) and you may want to seek out an experienced modeler, but in the end, I believe it would be worth the trouble. Making the reflections work should be possible in A3 (I'm pretty sure Applegate terrain had buildings with something like this working at some point).

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20 minutes ago, dragon01 said:

I'd rather see the TOH buildings ported. It might be a lot of work (could entail remaking the textures) and you may want to seek out an experienced modeler, but in the end, I believe it would be worth the trouble. Making the reflections work should be possible in A3 (I'm pretty sure Applegate terrain had buildings with something like this working at some point).

I can guarantee you nobody is going to help me so relying on that wouldn't be worth much.

 

Here's another option, one that's more likely to work:

 

The textures that appear when you're further away from the buildings render perfectly fine. Obviously a little low detail but it works. Is anyone aware of how which texture I have to replace with what to make them both the same? That way the buildings would always load.

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I have almost no experience with TOH, but I think the reflections on the buildings might've been some kind of Picture-In-Picture technique they did in the game.  Since those kinds of reflections, as far as I know, don't exist on objects (except for maybe water reflections) I'd recommend replacing the texture with the fake reflection(s) in Arma 3.  The Apex "skyscrapers" use a fake reflection texture of a forest but it gets the point across.

 

The artifacting you're seeing from the TOH buildings might be the individual model/texture of each window which specifically utilized the reflection system in TOH and would probably have to be manually replaced.

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27 minutes ago, phronk said:

I have almost no experience with TOH, but I think the reflections on the buildings might've been some kind of Picture-In-Picture technique they did in the game.  Since those kinds of reflections, as far as I know, don't exist on objects (except for maybe water reflections) I'd recommend replacing the texture with the fake reflection(s) in Arma 3.  The Apex "skyscrapers" use a fake reflection texture of a forest but it gets the point across.

 

The artifacting you're seeing from the TOH buildings might be the individual model/texture of each window which specifically utilized the reflection system in TOH and would probably have to be manually replaced.

Right, makes sense. Texture work is not something I'm very familiar with though. Maybe you can help me. Looking at two different skycrapers in the PBO for the Seattle structures, I get this:

image.png

 

I'm assuming because there are no textures linked to the building because they're just reflections, they just don't have anything listed at all other than the roof, vent and door.. Not really sure what to do about this. As you can see right below it some of them don't have anything at all and are entirely reflections. It's not legal to de-binarize the p3d and stick a texture to it either.

 

However, as I said above there are long-distance textures that fade away when you get up closer. No idea where those are and whether I can keep them like that.

 

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9 hours ago, Ryejin said:

where can i DL the arma 2 map?

It was never an Arma2 map, Seattle was part of Take on Helicopters. 

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19 minutes ago, R0adki11 said:

It was never an Arma2 map, Seattle was part of Take on Helicopters. 

ohhhhh

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you would need to switch the shader of those skyscrapers to super shader to get at least a generic reflection of the envTexture.

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