PMC 51km Desert v0.3 (working title: PMC Desert Hardcore)
This is 51km x 51km desert terrain for ArmA 1 (no, doesn't work with ArmA 2), includes three airbases, 46 cities with mostly war torn ruined buildings, 53 villages, 3 airbases, dirt road network, two lane highway, 5 harbors and 6 oilfields.
Screenshots: image 1, image 2, image 3, image 4, image 5 and image 6.
Its size is 51.2km x 51.2km. This terrain is absolutely huge. This is four times larger than Everon or Nogova size...
In the current build there is 289,121 objects (125,400 houses, 88,300 pieces of roads, 16,400 rocks, 19,000 bushes and 36,200 trees, etc). So clearly it is not an "empty desert map" at all.
--- bugs - house on a road (unknown city). - bush/tree on a road (unknown city). - city 19, bush on the road. --- fixes v0.3 - save game bug fixed. --- fixes v0.2 - finished building placement for city 39m (decor still missing). - tweaked new ground clutter config. - created better satellite texture / mask. - palm trees in the mountain rocks, fixed. - added smaller rocks to mountain areas along side with the big boulders. --- v0.1 - initial release. August 11th, 2009.
Please note that this terrain is work in progress. Many of the cities are uncompleted and still with random object placement (looks bad), harbors and airbases aren't tweaked.
What is complete?
What this means is for example city locations on the terrain are set, we do NOT delete/move cities therefore if you make missions with the current release, next release has the same cities there without fear of them being moved/deleted. Individual building placement might change, but for example roads inside cities will not change.
What is NOT complete?
Two big cities are 50% done meaning they are clearly and visually partial. These are "city 34 M" and "city 39 M". However city 39m is now populated with buildings, decoration is still missing. Its completely usable for missions now.
The capitol city of the terrain is completely undone at the moment. It consists of two cities in fact, "city 26" and "city 24 M" which are planned to be merged and most likely the whole area you see now used by them, will be the outline of the capitol city. Yes its going to be mind bogglingly large.
Planned?
We are planning that perhaps couple of more harbors would suit the terrain fine as there is so much of that coast line unused now.
Fourth airbase... not sure, dunno if there is really need for one, perhaps a airstrip for small planes. Any suggestions would be welcome, please post them to our forums.
AGS Industrial Pack and AGS Port / Harbor Pack addons.
Just copy the addon pbo's into directory of your choice and use -mod parameter to launch ArmA. For more details read HOWTO Install ArmA 1 Addons.
This terrain is work in progress (WIP), we have been working on this since OFP times back in year 2003 when we first experimented with 51km terrain (results were really stutter and long loading times). It has been under development in a project name called PMC Desert Hardcore and has been seen on few screen shots in PMC Tactical Forum posts.
It was not earlier than 2006 when this terrain started to shape up and we first time believed that this might actually start to become something playable in game. In 2007 we had real first playable missions with this on ArmA and ever since we had strong believe that this terrain will change the course how missions are fought in ArmA. No more those 1km sandbox children games... this is the big time here.
Unfortunately ArmA 2 sneaked upon us before we get around to the first release of this terrain for ArmA. We could have jumped right into ArmA 2 but decided we need to do things with the original plan and that calls for ArmA release.
Is this PMC WRP Demo?
No, it is not.
There are two releases from PMC which might be bit confusing, they are ArmA 1 PMC WRP Demo and PMC ArmA 2 WRP Demo terrains. These include "PMC Desert 51km" terrain, which is not, I repeat NOT the same as the terrain of which manual you are now reading. Yes the //terrain// is pretty much the same, except some harbor and airbase parts. They do use the same design doc and backbone, but PMC 51km Desert is now the real "finished" terrain with months and months (if not years) of work put into it while the PMC WRP Demo's are just ugly skeletons thrown together with our fabulous tools.
We apologize about the similar nature of these three (rather two actually) releases, however we tried to come up with catchy and suitable name for this real "PMC 51km Desert" terrain but could not find one. Sorry but we just have to focus a bit when designating which terrain are we referring to now :)
Please send bug reports or other feedback so I can try to improve this port. To make sure feedback reaches me, register to PMC Tactical Forum and post there.
Notes to mission makers. We are well aware that working on missions for a addon/terrain that is WIP is quite scary, as the next version might completely ruin your cool mission. Well unlike in the OFP history we will not simply delete whole cities or do drastic changes that might completely make your missions unusable.
However it might be good to keep note that all object ID's will definitely change on the next version. Building placement will change on those unfinished cities. More fences and decorations will appear on the unfinished cities.
Only place we can see direct frustrations would be a finely tuned cutscene inside a city streets, there in the next version there might be a fence, plants, rubbish container or similar object to block the camera view. So we urge a caution when doing editing as the example here in the unfinished cities.
If you just place markers and triggers on city centers and place troops, those should cause no problems on the next version, even if some troops are inside a moved/newly placed house, its very easy to move them slightly in mission editor when tweaking the mission.
In a nutshell; don't be scared of creating missions for this terrain, we are mission makers too and know how things work.
Download links from our forum topic PMC Tactical Forum topic.
Back to ArmA 1 Manual Home page.