cctoide

I'll concede the point that they took some liberties with the towns; one thing I noticed looking at Panoramio photos there is that there's a lot more multi-story apartment buildings in the region, while in Chernarus the only place these pop up is the large seaside towns, where they reused a few Sahrani apartment buildings. It's pretty fun looking at the Panoramio photos and seeing buildings, telephone poles, etc. they used as reference for game models. Apart from radically downsizing the towns along the river, and removing the ones at the edges of the map to make for a better transition into terrain synth land, though, it's remarkably accurate, down to individual hedgerows. I've never found a high res stitch of the ingame map like DrE made for Sahrani, but I'd like to redo that KMZ with a higher res image so you can see how much work BI put into matching the real area.

I'd been following the ARG, so I knew it was probably Lemnos. I brought the island up and started searching along the coast - I was looking for places with two tiny islets jutting out from a small peninsula. The first time I searched for a few minutes and didn't find anything, so I gave up thinking it must be some other island. The second time I was actually just looking around to see what the terrain and ground cover was like, and checking out photos on Panoramio, and at one point I suddenly realized I'd found it. Credit goes to Blu3sman too, he narrowed it down to Lemnos going off of nothing but "image no. 5" and a piece of info from earlier in the ARG.

Uh... I'm pretty sure Chernarus' terrain was 1:1. If you overlay a map of Chernarus over the actual region it's based on in České Středohoří (like so, open in Google Earth) it will be 15.36 km on a side, like Chernarus' landmass. Some of the towns even look close to 1:1 to their real counterparts. Lemnos might have been scaled both for gameplay and software reasons - both the tools we have, and the game to some extent, aren't fans of 4096 pixel heightmaps, and to recreate the island, which is roughly 30*40km, at 1:1 scale with a 7.5m grid would require one. Though I'd have hoped they'd fix at least that in A3 when VBS2 is getting support for gigantic maps... Based on the "2.4 times the size of Takistan" comment, I'm guessing we will get a 20*20km island (or slightly bigger) but with a 7.5 meter grid. They might be taking advantage of a feature mentioned in a recent VBS2 presentation, too, which would let them use heightmaps which aren't necessarily a power of two, meaning it doesn't have to be one of the sizes we're used to from ArmA 2. Just speculation though.

Choppers, the road (too clean and perfect, looks like a repeating texture, no shadows from the grass), the poles (jaggies on the cables, pole on left resembles Chernarus poles). Plus the road people assume this was taken from is unpaved and has no poles, unless it was upgraded after the latest satellite imagery. Also looks like the entire sky might have been swapped out, as the lighting in the grass seems too even and devoid of shadows for what looks like a mostly clear sky. Looks like it might have been taken on a much cloudier day.

Nice find. It hit me that if two screenshots happened to be across the island from eachother, it might mean we'd indeed get the entire island to play on (either that or two maps of two different places on the island). Seems these two are both on the west side of the island though, only 7km apart.

No idea if I was beaten to the punch, but I believe I've found the location of the first screenshot: (edit: 39° 53'57.80"N, 25° 4'16.28"E in case it's unreadable)

Hope there's clarification on some of the bullet points listed above soon. Though I'm guessing it'll be some time before the next round of official info is released...

I suppose the next question once the initial excitement has died down is whether that image of the coastline can be matched to a point on Lemnos.

Nice. With screenshots, to boot. :) edit: Well, before the site died, anyway.

Preparing for an explosion of rage in the thread when it fails to materialize at 15:30 sharp. :p

You can also get a valid Czech phone number (515417711) by concatenating the numbers in the answers to the last question. Would be in the South Moravian Region according to Wikipedia. I really doubt this is relevant though. :p

I think the thing that looks "off" in that image after a closer look is the almost complete lack of shadows, apart from the ones cast by the two poles. Even the cable crossing the road has no shadow to be seen. It might just be a side effect of all the mangling the image has suffered, though. The cable's shadow might have gone the same way of the cable going out from the lamppost to the left, which is still barely perceptible when you zoom in. Could also be that they simply rendered the asphalt road and poles and worked them into the original photo, as the place where the image was apparently taken lacks both a paved road and the poles. The latest imagery of that area on Google Earth is from 2005, though... and I'm not sure what the point of altering the road would be, anyway.

Sorry, my numbers were off. 235 sq. km is the total map area for Chernarus (15.36*15.36 km), 180 sq. km is the land area. That makes Lemnos around 2.6 times larger than Chernarus. But I agree with Jakerod, it's just speculation at this point. It's probably just meant to give us a hint as to what the story involves. I'd love a huge island and a ton of new assets for map creation, either way.

I have my doubts that they'd recreate Lemnos in its entirety. Sahrani's land area was just over 100 sq. km, Chernarus is 180 sq. km. Lemnos is 477 sq. km. Unless they've been working on it for over a year or reinforced the terrain team, it seems unlikely. Or they could be replicating it at half-scale, I suppose. edit: my numbers were off

The traffic sign in that photo looks like it has a yellow background... might just be the lighting, though. Could be useful for narrowing down where it was taken, if it is.