Terrain Development

ArmA 3 editing; configs, modeling, missions, textures, terrain etc.

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Snake Man
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Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-03-15 03:33:01

ArmA 3 PMC Terrain Development

I thought it might be nice to have topic where various terrain development discoveries etc are posted.

To recap whats been happening to my personal arma3 terrain projects; I wrote the PMC Ultimate Terrain Tutorial which has been very successful with newbie terrain makers, then just recently mere weeks ago (well OK might be bit longer time) we at the discord arma #terrain_makers finally figured out after painstakingly testing all sorts of stuff, of how to create real world data terrains.

Here is some PMC Terrain Development footage of heavily work in progress terrains (as you'll see).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyHEyGeEtbE

I'll try to post anything interesting or major that happens in terrain editing.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-03-18 01:19:06

Currently I'm running about three (3) different tasks at the same time on the most busiest times, it depends bit how the projects process etc.

- Terra incognita is downloading satellite texture
- pboProject is binarizing terrain
- Global mapper is exporting another set of source files
- Convert layers png fast is processing PNG to PAA

... ooh my! ;)

Yeah its not for the weak minded that's for sure hehe. It starts to put some strain on me as I don't want to miss even a minute of valuable editing time in a day, so I constantly have to watch and keep those processes running.

The problem is my quad core 16gb ram computer which runs out of cores and ram very quickly, I have to slow down in this editing pace as the computer can't handle all that I would throw at it hehe :)

I'm seriously planning on purchasing some multi core like 8+ core and 32gb ram bare minimum system as soon as I get some money. This is crazy stuff man, just crazy ...
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-03-20 16:00:24

Learned valuable lesson when working on the PMC Real World Data Terrain MEGA Project as I chose few terrain locations which ended up overlapping each other. Overlapping is stupid, I mean why do the work twice.

Had to actually re-design locations and even terrain sizes for few of those.

Was interesting to see that I was too enthusiastic when I did the design phase and didn't even notice those overlapping areas.

Obviously this is so called first world problem, I mean normal arma3 terrain developer has nothing like this to worry about as he is working on one single terrain.

Also today I finally completed terra incognita satellite texture downloads for libya, yeah! :)

Now that download finished terra incognita cache dir is 39.8gb with 3.9 million files heh.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-04-01 18:32:41

Finished all afghanistan terrains, the few syrian terrains and even vietnam terrains are almost complete (just one terrain giving me binarize freeze for unknown reason).

On 03-24-17 PMC after careful consideration and few suggestions I decided to create bis forum topic for PMC Real World Data Terrains, torrent downloads started and was seeding max speed for over 10hrs (utorrent history time limit). Since then Dscha and TeTeT have joined to help me seed these torrents and obviously everyone how downloads and seeds, thanks guys!

I was really surprised how warm welcome these terrains got. I was expecting silence or grunts about object-less / too large terrains, but seems like people are really happy to have large aircraft terrains.

Attempted to create 143,360 resolution satellite texture because Libya Benghazi terra incognita download was made as 1 meter / pixel resolution but the terrain design was set to 143km so... ugh heh. Attempted? Yes because I ran out of hard drive space :(

Hard drive free space is a big problem for me, I've battled against that for what feels like weeks now. I free some space, do couple of terrains and we are back in square one. Extremely frustrating. However there is light at the end of the tunnel as monday (first work day of april) I'm going to order Western Digital 4 terabyte Blue hard drive. It should arrive by the end of the week if I'm lucky. After that the last push of the PMC Real World Data Terrain mega project begins.

Since 03-31-17 its been holding pattern on these terrains because above. I'm trying to do some other smal stuff which doesn't require so much hard disk space but yeah its been pretty relaxed today. Actually this is quite nice breather for the insane terrain developing rythym I've kept on for weeks (if not months).
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-04-08 21:06:20

On friday 04-07-17 the new western digital 4tb blue hard disk arrived, set it up and now I'm back in making terrains and full speed :D

Already got couple of new PMC real world data terrains in-game and lot of source data created with global mapper and terrain builder related tools. Things picking up nicely.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-04-11 02:59:19

I did it, I broke my own high score! :)

I now have working in-game terrain with 143,360 x 143,360 resolution satellite texture/mask.

First when I tried huge satellite resolutions I thought 71,680 was simply crazy, then I was pushing more boundaries with even number 81,920 and then I thought magical 100k number of 102,400 was demented act of a lunatic... and now I have 143,360 in-game. I'm starting to lose all sense of reality and think there is like no limit what arma3.exe can consume... :o
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-04-18 04:51:33

Yesterday binarized last PMC real world data terrains for its phase 1!

Now I'm going to relax at least for a day, or maybe half a day, or maybe few hours at least.. heh who am I kidding, I'll be editing stuff for phase 2 right away! :D

It has been extremely exhausting doing all those terrains for all this time. Unfortunately I didn't write down the day I decided to start this project, but it was march 13th 2017 when the forum topic was created and it was at least week or two before that when this project started. Actually this project started the day when I begin learning real world data tools in the first place heh.

Feels so satisfying to complete phase 1 and providing arma3 players so many terrains from real world locations.

Cannot wait to start further tweak these terrains but still I want to remind that these terrains will never be "normally populated" with objects by me alone, but I can add forest vegetation and place objects for important areas like military bases, airfields etc.

Exciting times for terrain development! :)
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-05-07 12:23:13

Now I have a tool pipeline to place vegetation and even buildings (only as placeholders) randomly using openstreetmap shapefiles! :D

This is at least for me major breakthrough, it is so easy now to create more complete real world data terrains as so much of the info comes directly from online and automation goes so far. Only thing left now is the individual object placement like houses and other populated places.

After I refine my tool pipeline and workflow I'll update our wiki with the tutorial parts how to do this.

This is awesome! :)
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-08-17 17:21:50

Good news for terrain downloads! Today I got my internet connection upgraded to gigabit 1000/100 and can now seed the terrain torrents with about 8mb/s speed! That along with Dscha server seeding, there should be no problems for fast downloads.

I will definitely keep torrent's as PMC main distribution method for arma3 addons. It is so much easier for me to handle and everyone has torrent client these days (if they don't they should).
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2017-09-11 14:17:43

The new western digital 4tb blue hard disk drive that I bought in april... started to break down, heh. So I had to get another new WD 4tb blue. It has now been installed and files migrated there.

It only took three days to copy all those arma3 terrain editing p:\ contents with the millions (yes literally) files including useless PNG/PAA in layers dirs etc.

Now lets hope this another-new hdd wont break right away heh.
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Colince411
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Colince411 » 2017-09-13 16:29:34

Hello everybody!

After seeing the success with the large scale Jets terrains, I thought I'd have a crack at it. I not new to map making and prior to my current project, I was working on a 82km map located in northern Nevada. I got as far as v0.01; importing all of the data into Arma 3. My satellite data was 10m/px, which at the time was super cool and very beautiful looking in-game....at high altitudes. Unfortunately though, I'm one of those guys who tries to please everybody. I figured that if I was going to put a large amount of time and effort into a project, I would not like it to be for select player types.

Skip about 10 months forward and you get to about 3 weeks ago. I finally got a little break from the army life(currently stationed in South Korea) and decided now was a good time to start gathering data for my new project. Being as picky and selective as I am, I new that wherever I was going to select had to be an island. That way the immersion of players wouldn't be broken when they approach the boundaries of the map. It had to be something with a large variety of terrains and environments; and also had to be similar in type to the maps Altis and Stratis(this would help me with my layers map by giving me a proven and completed point of reference). My final requirement was that the island, had to be large! Obviously under 143km, but big enough to where I could turn some heads and players could really feel surrounded by the game.

Now, thinking big-picture is one of my major flaws because it always keeps me held back with complex thinking, and never allows me to continue with an idea; luckily this was not one of those times. A map 143km x 143km has a total area of 20,449,000,000 meters. Knowing (thanks to PMC) that the max number of objects (with this size) was 6,246,282. Divide the numbers and you get 1 object for every 3.273 kilometers.....you cant really please every body with that population. Luckily my map is an island with the total area of 3,607,393 kilometers. This puts my island object count about 1.7 objects per kilometer....still sub-par. But after a very detailed review of my island, I've come to the conclusion that roughly 5/8 of my island is baron and can be very loosely populated; saving my object budget for the remaining 1,352,773 kilometers to be the main focus. Of which another 3/4 of that are fields and mountain sides that are not highly object taxing.

The current work I've been doing is of course Sat-image acquiring. So far I have all the sat data for my entire terrain from three different sources. This gives me three different images per tile, taken at three different times, allowing my to have three different options when stitching images together. All of my images were selected from a scale of 1m/px making my map Sat-image 1m/px. I've had a lot of issues with clouds and discoloration in each tile, but with the three different options of images and a LOT of Photoshop magic; I have almost completed my whole island. My goal was always to have a high quality and smooth Sat-image without that patchy appearance that some maps have with unprocessed images. It's completely understandable though, the amount of time and effort I've put into just this small portion of the project has been more than enough to make me continue and never think about looking back. lol

Anyways, I just wanted to pop in and introduce myself and let everyone in on my current terrain project. I am very open to criticism and ideas, to the point where I even welcome people to try to lower my confidence. It just ends up as fuel for my intention to succeed. :wink:

Thanks for adding me to the forums- Thanks for pioneering the way with large scale Arma maps- and of course Thanks for the incredible time saving reference data provided on your website!

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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2018-02-11 01:19:12

We have known for long time that binarize crashes when trying to binarize more than about 6.6 million objects, it always crashes on me when doing 6.7 or more objects.

Was thinking that because binarize is 32bit it might be the limiting factor, I remembered my arma1/arma2 terrain days when sometimes for some odd reason I loaded unbinarized WRPs into arma, so why not try the same here because arma3_x64.exe is 64bit, it should theoretically eat huge number of objects that we throw at it.

So I went and terrain processor generated 10 million objects, heh yes 10,046,778 objects to be precise. Imported these to terrain builder which took 59 minutes heh, then exported WRP.

Now I did not start to binarize with pboproject, but I used armake instead and the "pack as is" option, so the pbo will have unbinarized WRP.

Then went and loaded that terrain pbo into arma3, it loaded very slowly but steadily increasing the green progress bar at top of the screen, it reached all the way to the right but arma3 was still loading or doing something. Memory usage peaked 7.4gb ram which was quite crazy heh.

Finally got into eden editor, it works! :D

Did some testing but unfortunately there is some sort of problem with that many objects as they seem to be loading into one or just few terrain grid at the time, a bit difficult to explain. Also character and weapon LODs were not loading properly, there clearly was some memory usage issues with this insane number of objects UNBINARIZED in-game.

But I was very happy to see my theory come through, 64bit arma3 can load more than 6.6 million objects, its just the 32bit binarize that is our bottle neck now.

I'm hoping that we can contact bis devs and ask them to release 64bit binarize so we can pack more objects into our terrains.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2018-02-18 21:04:34

PMC Iran Jahrom 163km terrain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTsa10eJjAk

This is at today the largest ever terrain for arma3 as in complete package of heightmap + satellite texture / mask + objects (we all know you can and people have made 400+ km empty objectless terrains with basically no satellite texture). This terrain has 163,840 x 163,840 resolution satellite and 532,796 objects.

I wanted to add more objects (half a million is not enuff muhaha), but there are literally no forests so its all about buildings and small clusters of trees around them.

Anyways I'm really happy to get this terrain in-game and working, also updated https://pmc.editing.wiki/doku.php?id=ar ... ain-limits
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2018-03-13 05:42:15

Here is footage from terrain with massive 16,339,874 objects in-game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alf3Czs9m5U

We are living in exciting time at terrain development community :)
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2018-04-19 07:31:44

After some thought I made a decision; no more populated place shape file terrain processor random placement, I'll do populated places using compositions / prefabs in eden editor / map builder etc.

That doesn't mean that the populated places look great or even good, but at least they don't look as crap as the random method result you can see today from existing PMC real world data terrains.

It will be a lot of work to make the compositions / prefabs and stamp them down (and often rotate), but the way I see it every composition / prefab you create, you are making progress instead of hammering your head to a brick wall with shapes + random placement.

The more your composition library grows the better final product you can achieve. Also I plan on adding my eden compositions and map builder presets into github for everyone to download, sharing all the way.

We had fun with OSM shape files for populated places, but from now on its all manually placed prefabs.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2018-04-22 14:46:19

Here I'm using ObjectPlacementTBH tool by Adanteh to stamp in some compositions and making one brand new one.

Iraq Al Qaim Placing Objects https://youtu.be/G56VfyCEVjc
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2018-09-24 07:15:26

Yesterday started to test with terrain builder how many objects I can binarize to in-game use, the goal was to test in-game object count... however it failed miserably. As a background info PMC Balkans Kosovo terrain had 20.7 million objects in it already so I was trying to top that, well when I imported objects to terrain builder it failed already in the 10 million mark, HALF of what I've already done, I'm confused :?

I wrote a new object generator tool, quick and dirty, but it will now generate random a3\ object trees for me with a push of a button. First I tried WRP City Creator but its arma2 tech so didnt work with arma3 formats and specifications.

Will be interesting to figure out why terrain builder fails on 10 million objects using the normal export format, with the terrain processor LBT format and higher amount of objects per LBT it seems to take about 15-16 million objects before failing.

By failing I mean it will not properly save the objects layer files, they end up 0 byte file size or very small anyways (one time I saw them as 3.01kb).
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2019-12-21 22:11:11

2019-12-21

Dating back to probably arma3 early days 2014 maybe 2015 I created PMC Powder Bat campaign for stratis and later it expanded on altis, long story short today it is largest campaign I've made for arma3 with 221 mission dirs.

I have put just incredible amount of work and effort into this campaign, especially in 2018. its the most advanced campaign tech (because new arma3 features, doh) I've written as of today, really happy how it turned out and excited of all the "campaign hub" goodies etc.

Months ago already I learned that altis is downscaled miniature terrain from the real world data (we talked about it in PMC discord, screenshot of real thing in global mapper). The real Lemnos can be just barely fit to 36.8km terrain size but altis is 30.7km terrain. I always knew that stratis is real world data terrain and 8.1km in size, I had no reason to believe stratis is downscaled version, until couple of days ago. I was shocked to see stratis being 8.1km but google maps clearly shows the real life place is more like 12km. I felt like I have been betrayed by bis the worst kind of way.

Altis is 30.7km terrain (30,720 meters x 30,720 meters) while the real world data lemnos is more like 36km. If you place 15360 x 15360 square trigger in the coords of 15360,15360 it will perfectly cover altis terrain area.

Real world Lemnos

Stratis is 8.1km terrain while the real world data "Agios Efstratios" is more like 12km. If you place 4096 x 4096 square trigger in the coords 4096,4096 it will perfectly cover stratis terrain area.

Real world Agios Efstratios

Both altis (from lemnos) and stratis (from agios efstratios) have been downscaled, not sure how much but enough to make them fake.

Tanoa is heavily based in fiji but it is FICTIONAL by design, it is not fiji. Tanoa is fully fictional.

Because PMC Powder Bat already had 221 mission dirs (cutscenes included) I just could not give up on that campaign. I cannot accept the fake downscaled make belief terrains... so I decided that I'm going to create real world data lemnos 36km and agios efstratios 12.2km :)

Yes I know, that is crazy, its some sort of obsession and inability to let go of old things or things that are "fine" as is without you messing your life because of them. But its one of those things I cant get over, I have to fix it whatever the cost.

I didn't want to mention this previously because had not decided if its worth trying to do. for example it is not even my goal to replicate bis object placement quality on every inch of these terrains, I'm just happy if I can play PMC Powder Bat campaign and have "some buildings" at the objectives. full object placement for lemnos is insane amount of work. all I need is to have it "acceptable" level for myself.

So day before yesterday started to create the global mapper projects, yesterday had both of them in-game.

Greece Agios Efstratios: 12.2km, UTM 35N.
Terrain size: 12.288 kilometers x 12.288 kilometers
Heightmap grid size 4096
Cell size 3 meters
Satellite resolution 12288 pixels

Greece Lemnos: 36.8km, UTM 35N.
Terrain size: 36.864 kilometers x 36.864 kilometers
Heightmap grid size 4096
Cell size 9 meters
Satellite resolution 36864 pixels

Then started to create forest (tree/bush/rock) terrain processor template for agios efstratios and got 116k vegetation objects in-game, tweaked some satellite darkening values (still too bright). Also got ObjectPlacementTBH updated and copied camp maxwell objects into a composition.

By the time of writing this I already have camp maxwell, air station mike-26 and two other PMC Powder Bat campaign objective locations placed into the WRP. I'll start testing the ported campaign missions to get a feel how the new terrain works.

Some screenshots:
THE-REAL-Altis-Muhahaha.png
THE-REAL-Stratis-Muhahaha.png
ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.You.Stole.Camp.Maxwell.jpg
ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.Forest.Shapes.About.Done.png
ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.Forest-01.png
ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.Forest-02.jpg
ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.Forest-03.jpg
ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.Forest-04.jpg
ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.Where.Are.You.bis.WHERE.png
ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.Camp.Maxwell.AirStation.Mike-26.jpg
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2019-12-25 13:28:31

2019-12-24

Finally got binarize crashing stopped (for now, hah) in PMC Agios Efstratios terrain. Got LZ Connor, Camp Maxwell and Air Station Mike-26 all in-game.

ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.LZ.Connor.Camp.Maxwell.AirStation.Mike-26.jpg

ArmA3.Agios.Efstratios.Satellite.2019-12-24.jpg
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2019-12-26 15:33:45

2019-12-25

Work on PMC Agios Efstratios continues. Opteryx did a great satellite texture ocean background. I went and fixed ocean bottom depth to much deeper which looks better as water color but also "feels like" real ocean/water heh.

2019-12-26

Binarize is (still) crashing a lot when adding objects and even without objects when doing heightmap editing. I don't recall ever having this much problems with binarize crashing before besides the obvious known issues (this is not known issue).

Been starting terrain builder and arma3 so many times I actually have pinned the icons to taskbar, yes its that sad. Luckily with agios efstratios because its small girly men terrain it doesn't take more than couple of minutes binarizing until the crash occurs. I have been starting this process so many times I cant even count, it really starts to wear on me.

For the long term future this worries me a bit, binarize crashing issue is something new on the arma3 tools, I never had such issues before, what if my other terrains like PMC 51km Desert, Rugen or the 100+ real world data terrains start to get crashes... that would be really bad.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2019-12-29 18:44:37

2019-12-27

Solved the binarize crashing issue by changing surface tile and texture layer size, now its been without any crashes over 10+ binarizations.

Huge load of work to start two arma3's (yes, two), one has altis open in mission editor, another one PMC Greece Lemnos, I'll look altis locations then "add comment" to PMC Greece Lemnos mission for each and every class names{} location. That took a while.

Then it was time to copy altis class names{} into editpadpro and open PMC Greece Lemnos mission.sqm in another tab, then start to go through comment by comment and match the new coordinates into brand new class names{} ... uuh that was so painful for my pinky finger to press CTRL all the time to cut/copy/paste ;)

But after hours of painful tedious repetitive work, it is done, aayeah.

For the future such class name creations (or just new locations) I need to write a C++ tool to read the mission.sqm and output class names{} config out of it, kind of like osm places csv to cpp tool is now.

PMC.Greece.Lemnos.Class.Names.Done.2019-12-27.png
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2019-12-30 16:38:33

2019-12-29

Started to paint satellite mask go PMC Agios Efstratios. Because openstreetmap did not provide any usable landuse and natural shapes I drew the forest shapes in terrain builder, now I used those to export shapes as imagery to create roads and forest mask parts. Ocean and deepocean (is there a difference?) I painted free hand in gimp, also added generic desert area color as well.

Got the initial satellite mask in-game and it works, doesn't look very pretty though as the desert part came out all too sahara flowing sand looking, need to replace that with something else like maybe regular dirt.

As weird as it sounds terrain looked better "without" mask at all when it just took the first bis terrain GDT + clutter it could find and stamped that down to everywhere heh. Oh well this was the first try, hey at least it works and now can start to tweak it like the mentioned desert type change.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-04-27 05:08:30

2019-12-31

PMC Greece Agios Efstratios more objects added, some of the locations are still missing.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-09-04 11:55:46

2020-05-11

PMC 51km Desert went through all the road polylines and deleted any objects that were on or too close to the road. This included rocks, bushes and trees, also in few cities actual buildings.

2020-05-14

PMC Rattler and PMC Rugen terrain builder projects re-created due known bug in terrain builder which most of the time breaks project files when switching from one partition/path to another.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-10-26 02:34:36

2020-10-23

Finished downloading terra incognita balkans belgrade 143km satellite texture.

2020-10-24

On windows 8.1 loaded balkans belgrade into terrain builder from E: hard disk partition, sure enough that terrain builder project was broken, so had to delete it.

Terra incognita was downloading balkans kosovo 143km satellite texture in four tiles.

Recreated the whole balkans belgrade 143km terrain builder project. Imported new arcgis 2 meter / pixel scale satellite texture which looks much better than the old 2017 era one.

2020-10-25

Finished downloading terra incognita balkans kosovo 143km satellite texture. Looks like this one is better than the 2017 downloaded one.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-10-29 08:09:07

2020-10-26

Terra incognita finished downloading balkans montenegro satellite texture, got global mapper exported preview image out of it. Cant really say if its better than 2017 download, but at least if both are combined it should be pretty ok result.

2020-10-27

Terra incognita started downloading balkans vojvodina satellite image. Also generated layers for belgrade as there was some mishap with convert layers png to paa bat previously.

2020-10-28

Balkans vojvodina terra incognita satellite download completed. This satellite texture is almost perfect, really nice.

Balkans vojvodina recreated terrain builder project because it broke when switching from hard disk O: to E: partition. Got the whole project binarized.

Cambodia krong svay rieng terra incognita satellite downloaded.

Cambodia ponhea kraek terra incognita satellite downloaded.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-02 01:12:44

2020-10-29

Cambodia siem pang terra incognita satellite downloaded.

Started Chechnya Grozny 143km terra incognita satellite download, this will be another 2 day task at minimum. Terra incognita is so slow to download.

Today terra incognita is clearly the weakest link in terrain development tool pipeline. Sure terrain builder is also single threaded software and generating layers is pretty slow, but you can at least speed it up with high clock speed CPU. Terra incognita is what it is, no amount of hardware you throw at it wont change how fast it downloads with the one connection code/config.

I did take a look at allmapsoft universal maps downloader but it simply is piece of crap heh, always was always will be seems like.

2020-10-30

Continuing to download chechnya grozny satellite, this slow speed of terra incognita really bothers me. It will take months to complete all the satellite re-downloads as its basically 2 days per 143km terrain. Obviously there are few smaller and bigger ones too.

I need to prioritize my stuff so that I won't be focusing on terra incognita like sitting by the computer watching it download that's just crazy, I need to do whatever else there is to do in the mean time.

Chechnya Grozny satellite texture download completed, it was great improvement for the previous 2017 version. Excellent.

2020-10-31

Started downloading large egypt suez 163km terrain satellite using terra incognita, its 82km section sizes. This will be longest download on re-download project so far.

2020-11-01

Egypt Suez terra incognita satellite downloading finished, satellite texture is looking good, will be improvement to the existing one for sure.

Downloaded Vietnam Binh Long (VTE) satellite, that was interesting as it had much more infrastructure now than in 2017 downloaded satellite (or 2018 cant remember). Its bad for 1965 era terrain heh, but oh well what can you do, there wasn't many public satellites taking photos in the sixties hehe.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-08 00:50:49

2020-11-02

Downloading Vietnam Da Nang satellite texture and it was better than the first download, it wasn't perfect but much better.

2020-11-04

Darkened PMC Ulah Yuruakh (whatever spelling heh) satellite texture as it looked so bright, also did some background L3DT work kind of got carried away.

2020-11-05

PMC 51km Desert AGS port / harbor objects were aligned a bit off, dunno how that happened but got it fixed just by binarizing the latest development version, go figure.

2020-11-07

Used L3DT to generate brand new satellite texture / mask for PMC Ulah Yuryakh. With my new editing computer hardware it was pretty smooth.

Started to prepare PMC Mongolia release :)

Tested 18.7 million object WRP version with 1077 road features, unfortunately those roads were too large, while arma3 did run with them... it started to flicker objects which is sign of memory issues. So had to revert back to the original low amount of road features roads.shp file.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-11 23:53:23

2020-11-09

PMC Mongolia 18.7 million object version is stuttering a lot, its just too much data (satellite + objects) combined for arma3 to handle. Had to revert back to the v0.0.2 which only has pitiful 19,354 objects. This is not really what I wanted, but terrain builder project is broken and it would take huge amount of work to recreate it.

2020-11-10

Terrain builder randomly breaks projects if you change the physical hard disk letter/path.

I tried to save one project by copying it to the original drive/path but no dice, still broken. Oh well, was worth to try. This is a huge problem as I have hundred+ projects which most are probably broken now after the last hard disk switch.

However now I won't "ever" change my arma3 editing hard disk letter / path anymore, so once I get through once more recreating these terrain builder projects... then I'm set for life heh.

2020-11-11

Created global mapper / terrain builder PMC Editing Wiki: BPW files (not that wiki page but actual files in my HDD).

Now I got setup for 40,960 x 40,960 resolution 1 meter / pixel scale satellite texture in 4 x 4 tiles. Also did one for 20,480 x 20,480 resolution as well.

This is excellent setup which automatically aligns terrain builder imported satellite texture/mask tiles in correct coordinates. You have no idea how much time I have wasted and fingers being sore for copy pasting coordinates from PMC Editing Wiki into terrain builder heh.

I'm still trying to find perfect tool pipeline workflow for the file names coming out of global mapper, being feed into graphicsmagick darkening bat and finally to terrain builder.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-15 22:33:16

2020-11-13

Libya Wazzin satellite texture is atrociously bad (according to PMC Tactical terrains web page), so decided to make 8 x 8 BPW world file setup for 81,920 x 81,920 resolution 1 meter / pixel scale satellite and global mapper exported new good arcgis 17 level satellite texture.

This new satellite was already downloaded in 2019 dunno maybe even 2018 cant remember, it has basically no clouds which is just awesome, also not much if any patches either. Its a great satellite texture.

Switched my graphicsmagick satellite darkening batch files from Dsat_ to Sat_Tex_ naming scheme. For masks I'm going to use Sat_Mask_ so they fit the naming nicely.

2020-11-14

Created L3DT climates for PMC 51km Desert, PMC Rattler and PMC Rugen terrain ground detail textures. Very crude stuff, but its a start.

Generated first set of satellite texture/mask out of those heightmaps using the new climates, imported them in as 1 meter / pixel scale, so rattler/rugen 25,600 x 25,600 and 51km desert 51,200 x 51,200 resolution.

This of course breaks all of my existing OFP tile texturing and my lame photoshop satellite work, but we must enhance these terrains to 1m/px scale, cant have low res poop hanging around :)
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-19 00:42:24

2020-11-17

Finished downloading satellite texture for Libya Sabha, usual arcgis 17 level download.

Started to put together libya benghazi terrain builder project while global mapper was exporting satellite texture as 8 x 8 tiles.

Created BPW files for 8x8 tiles at 143k 1m/px resolution. Now won't ever have to align satellite tiles in terrain builder again.

2020-11-18

Libya Benghazi got new satellite texture imported, it looks very good but unfortunately it has few of clouds just in the city area. Its always something heh.

Good news is that my 8x8 143k resolution BPW world files worked perfectly :)

L3DT design map parameters for arma3, rolling hills. Not sure if this is even remotely correct way, its just what I've been trying lately. L3DT-Design-Map-Parameters-2020-11-18T0317.png.

PMC Libya Benghazi 143km, new 2020 downloaded arcgis 17 level satellite texture. PMC-Libya-Benghazi-2020-11-18T0445.jpg.

L3DT heightmap river, first quick attempt, hehe L3DT-Heightmap-River-01.jpg.
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-22 02:04:39

2020-11-20

PMC Rugen L3DT satellite mask 2020-11-20T0204. blue is ocean bottom, orange is (beach) sand, green is grass, "faded green" is hillside grass-ish, bright green is "lush grass" and gray is rock. PMC-Rugen-L3DT-Mask-2020-11-20T0204.png.

Then did tons of work for designing new large european woodland terrain, mostly rivers heightmap part. Experimented with both L3DT and Wilbur. It was a lot of back and forth editing, learned bunch of new stuff too while at it.

2020-11-21

Woke up and realized I'm out of control jumping from one terrain project to another, I need some focus.

So I made a TODO list to get some terrains released. This means few touch ups like verifying satellite texture is good, removing man made objects (randomly placed buildings which looks bad) and then release.

Went through my changelog from october and november, the TODO list got quite long which was surprising, so many terrains edited and left into the directory when I continued to edit something else.

All I care about is editing hehe

Now let's get some terrain releases done, aayeah! :)
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-24 05:04:21

2020-11-22

PMC Rattler and PMC Rugen First L3DT Generated Satellite Test 2020-11-20 ArmA 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTlBNikBCzM

Did some work to create new pmc_terrain_data layers.cfg, satellite mask making. Slow progress, actually had to switch to PMC Pakistan Abbottabad 2km terrain so that processing it is faster than these usual large terrains.

2020-11-23

Finished going through all the pmc_terrain_data layers.cfg entries, now all are tested in-game and working. Now I can proceed with the 2019 started terra incognita satellite texture download project and actually use proper satellite mask for all terrains.

Used PMC Libya Ras Ajdir terrain as first real test for this new layers.cfg and Sat_Mask_??.bmp images in 4x4 tiles, worked out well no issues with simple two terrain type test :)

Today was a long editing day, spent a lot of time in gimp editing mask tiles. Had few things that went back and forth, for example libya benghazi I ran graphicsmagick converter sat png's to darkened bmp's too soon, had to delete them and do them all over again. Nothing too big but yeah it was a lot of work and every time you need to do same thing twice, it hurts heh.

Did a count of hard disk usage for arma3 editing files:

OpenStreetMap shapefiles 20.8gb
Terra Incognita downloads old dir 571gb
Terra Incognita downloads new dir 143gb
ArmA 3 addon/mod projects dir 2.06tb
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-27 06:49:01

2020-11-24

Woke up this morning and had libya benghazi pretty much ready for binarization, your morning cant get any better than that :)

When binarization was done, libya ras ajdir and sabha were both good to go for release, this is awesome early in the morning and already two terrains done :)

Georgia Sokhumi had a long coastline, did ocean mask colors for that, was pretty happy how accurate the coastline was when painted in GIMP using lasso selection tool.

2020-11-25

Started working on Mongolia release, had to re-create terrain builder project because it broke on the recent HDD partition change. BPW world files that I created had one coordinate wrong, so had to fix those.

Also had some strange problem with GIMP, it created and saved/exported 25,600 x 25,600 resolution BMP image, but could not open it.

Someone in PMC discord asked me about Kuwait terrain, well had no interest on such really but once started thinking about it... then came out with all kinds of crazy plans of creating several Operation Desert Storm suitable terrains hehe.

Below is some fantasizing and goofying around in PMC discord. Joking /ON:

This is not a terrain design, this is simply a Size Reference. Kuwait. Kuwait-Size-Reference-UTM-38N-2020-11-25T1200.png.

Kuwait Ali Al Salem airbase as 20km terrain (not a plan, just goofing around). Kuwait-Ali-Al-Salem-Airbase-2020-11-25T1214.png.

Kuwait blanketed with terrains to cover Operation Desert Storm all angles of attack muhahaha. uh? :o Kuwait-Operation-Desert-Storm-Crazy-2020-11-25T1331.png

Joking /OFF.

2020-11-26

Mongolia terrain builder finished generating layers :)

Then using convert layers png to paa fast bat wasn't that fast either with 204,800 x 204,800 resolution satellite texture/mask heh.

Made a mistake as I wanted to try moving bare essential addon project from WD 4tb blue (5400rpm) hard disk drive to m.2 NVMe drive, should have known that mongolia terrain builder project broke down. I moved it back to the original drive/path... but even only having loaded it on another drive/path the project still broke down, it didn't work when moved back to original location.

So lost about one day, probably more, of time spent compiling / generating this project. Oh well lets re-create this project once again.

Learned valuable lesson; terrain builder breaks project files without you even saving them.
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Snake Man
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-29 06:37:55

2020-11-27

Mongolia got binarized. Had to reduce vegetation object count from 1.3 million to mere 19,000 because arma3 was running out of memory. It was the usual symptom of objects flickering. Kind of shame, dunno if there is some middle ground between these object counts but its not worth investigating.

Went through my remaining list of terrains that which ones have good enough satellite texture, luckily found several that had good enough which did not require immediate re-download.

Wanted to migrate bare essential editing projects from hard disk to m.2 NVMe drive for that excellent speed. Bare essentials are "PMC OFP Terrains" and VTE.

Obviously all "PMC OFP Terrains" terrain builder projects broke with this move, heh figures. Oh well these are fairly small projects and get compiled pretty quickly on m.2 NVMe drive.

2020-11-28

Terra incognita finished downloading satellite texture for first iraqi terrain on the list, al busayyah. That satellite came out nearly perfect. Overall I'm very happy by the results of this "2019 re-download project".
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Snake Man
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2020-12-07 01:16:39

2020-12-02

Compiled and binarized new Yemen Al Hudaydah terrain, this has not been released yet but was created already early last year.

2020-12-03

GIMP edited Libya Msallata satellite texture, added ocean sand bottom part and clone brushed few clouds off. Msallata was one of these really bad satellite textures, now it got great improvement.

2020-12-04

PMC Mongolia release packet created while working on other stuff on the background.

2020-12-05

Had to do few more fixes for PMC Mongolia release after Opteryx's feedback, then it was release time :D

Mexico Carreras satellite texture clouds removal using gimp clone brush, man that was painful job.

2020-12-06

Mexico terrain development continues, brought carreras in-game and it was looking really nice, excellent heightmap.

PMC Mexico Carreras batch of screenshots:
PMC-Mexico-Carreras-2020-12-06T2051.jpg
PMC-Mexico-Carreras-2020-12-06T2053.jpg
PMC-Mexico-Carreras-2020-12-06T2054.jpg
PMC-Mexico-Carreras-2020-12-06T2055.jpg
PMC-Mexico-Carreras-2020-12-06T2056.jpg
PMC-Mexico-Carreras-2020-12-06T2059.jpg
PMC-Mexico-Carreras-2020-12-06T2101.jpg
PMC-Mexico-Carreras-2020-12-06T2103.jpg
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2022-03-21 23:23:49

PMC terrain dev diary content have now been moved to individual web pages.

Dev Diary PMC ukraine Mariupol

Dev Diary PMC Ukraine Donetsk

More dev diaries are coming along with addon releases :)
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"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

Snake Man
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2022-04-11 00:43:02

Killin' it! new PMC Editing Wiki pages added :)

PMC Editing Wiki: Tools main namespace for 3rd party tools like GIMP etc.
PMC Editing Wiki: Tools, GIMP
PMC Editing Wiki: Tools, GraphicsMagick
PMC Editing Wiki: Data Sources main namespace for 3rd party data downloading websites.
PMC Editing Wiki: ArmA 3 Tools, PMC Heightmap Clipper
PMC Editing Wiki: ArmA 3 Tools, PMC OSM Places CSV 2 HPP Converter
PMC Editing Wiki: Data Sources, Geofabrik OpenStreetMap Extract Data.
PMC Editing Wiki: Data Sources, ArcGIS webviewer for satellite imagery used in PMC ArmA 3 Terrains.
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"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

Snake Man
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2022-04-11 20:04:37

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PMC since 1984

Editing knowledge, visit PMC Editing Wiki
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"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

Snake Man
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Re: Terrain Development

Post by Snake Man » 2022-04-13 04:03:27

Another release, another dev diary to read; PMC Taiwan Taichung Dev Diary.
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