Never ending developer diary (ArmA 2)

[banana]

Member Skelig has created a tank which will fill a much needed gap in the mod: The M41!

[banana]

This is the Remington 11-48 that was used in Vietnam by many people.

You can try it out in VTE as well, really good at clearing trenches!

[Snake Man]

Sorry for not posting here in, heh well, years

VTE editing continues

Just placed VTE files into armawork directory and started to binarize the whole set of addons (at time of writing this its been binarizing several hours and probably continue several more hehe).

It was back in June 2014 when last round of VTE editing was done, this was for the upcoming v1.6 release. Unfortunately development was cut short due my overwhelming burnout for editing and also Elite Dangerous was released which took most of my time.

The changelog for v1.6 is 140 lines long so lot of fixes and tweaks coming.

Also I ran into very odd bug, one of the terrains caused plain and simple CTD in certain coordinates, could not figure out what caused it after several tests. Such CTD bug of course is a showstopper for any release.

Today I'm looking forward to get back into VTE editing and release the long overdue v1.6 finally. I have no idea how long this will take, I'm quite out of touch with VTE as I haven't even played it since summer of 2015 (actively played back in 2014), got to get my bearings and get back to work. Right now I only moved the dev dir into armawork dir, checked rapify/binarize batch files and started to binarize.

Found some notes in dev dir, I'm quoting these as I honestly don't remember much of them so, heh:

VTE v1.6 Highlights
- Proper names for two terrains
- Terrains reworked, optimized, bugs fixed, lot of under the hood stuff improved.
- Terrains some satellite textures improved and couple of brand new ones added.
- Aircombat terrain added low / high canopy jungles, great improvement on the old empty terrain.
- PACV hovercraft get-in bug fixed.
- A7 Corsair get-in bug fixed.

Two new campaigns are also planned to be released at the same time, but we cannot promise if these will be ready in time.

My development and release plan is to make first development version available with torrent download, sort of like "nightly build" type of thing with regular updates but not every day of course, only when there are some good fixes/tweaks put in. Torrent download would be very easy for me because I don't need to upload anything, just create .torrent file and put that to VTE dev page, if people download it great and if not... no harm done to anyone. Frequent Delta Patching Upgrades is also in my mind but I don't think there are anyone to test actively so its just extra work for me for nothing, so torrent is the easiest and quickest release method.

Make no mistake the torrent dev version would mean large downloads every time there is an update, as it would be all the files included. But torrents are fast (if there are people to seed heh) and honestly I don't expect many if any(?) people to download it so heh.

My ArmA 2 development install is beta v1.62.103718 which is the "last good non steam" version. If you don't have or cannot install this version then too bad. You can read more details about this in PMC finishing ArmA 2 projects, read TODO here topic. However I don't see why VTE would not run in v1.63 too, but I just cannot guarantee it and wont support bug reports made with it. If the v1.63 situation improves I'll re-visit this decision.

Anyways so there you go, VTE is back in action since June 2014 and v1.6 release coming when its ready!

I will post updates into this topic so stay tuned.

[Snake Man]

Been very slowly editing VTE, fixed few bugs and also updated PMC Addons/Mods Manuals: ArmA 2 VTE class names where I found them to be old ones.

Done some mission editing, not really in traditional sense but more like logistics stuff how I compile mission type for several terrains. Still work in progress for VTE but I completed it for other PMC terrains so looking good. I did fix couple of odd bugs which baffles me how they were left there, its like mission worked fine few years ago and now... not so much

Also small tweaks for vtemod.com official web site. Damn I wish we had dedicated web developer, some real artistic guru who would make awesome web site, but its all up on my mad skillz heh.

So yeah it is going slowly but it is going.

[Snake Man]

Finally and painstakingly tracked down the Ashau Valley arma2 freeze bug. Actually this was also present in MDSZ and who knows maybe some other terrains I haven't used very much.

The cause was too many objects in close proximity (or in small area which way you want to put it).

When I checked MDSZ it had one small area with OFP era vte_igrassfield.p3d 50m forest block objects stacked quite heavily close together, so when I used PMC WRP Forest Replacer tool to split them up into 15 vte_grass04.p3d objects... it placed insane amount of objects into very small area, pretty much stacked on top of each other.

For MDSZ the fix is semi easy, I'll just use WrpTool to manually remove excessive vte_igrassfield.p3d objects from the small area in original OFP source WRP. For Ashau this gets serious, there are places where you have three (3) different canopy's stacked on top of each other and these areas are huge, it definitely looks cool in OFP but if that three stack setup is converted to 15 singleton objects per canopy in arma2, it means just too many objects in such close proximity.

Anyways the good news is I found the bug... to fix it is going to be totally different thing

[Snake Man]

Today I worked hard and fixed both MDSZ and Ashau freeze bugs!

MDSZ was easy pretty much how I described it in above post, but Ashau was totally different. I had to put all my experience into play when fixing that as it required so much fiddling and shuffling of the objects in various tools etc. It was interesting process to say the least, way too long story to write here.

I'm so happy now that both of those major issues are fixed.

Played quite some time in Ashau Valley when testing, flew F4 Phantom with 10km viewdistance around the terrain, I then watched PMC Realwar 4 cutscene combat for a long time too and no freezes.

This one the last major bug holding back VTE v1.6 release. I am not going to do the release now, not yet at least... I will put lets say v1.6 release candidate (RC) 1 out today using torrent and then continue to tweak few more things while you guys test it. The thing is that I know there is no "you guys" out there because everyone has moved to arma3 already and definitely no VTE players left, however I keep the tradition and post those release candidates (prolly just the one) before releasing the final official v1.6 which also will be my last arma2 release.

Anyways I am so happy that the freeze bug was fixed and that motivated me a lot to do few additional tweaks while the RC is out