PMC 51km Desert (working title: PMC Desert Hardcore)

This is 51km x 51km desert terrain for ArmA (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.

Its size is 51.2km x 51.2km which is 31.8 x 31.8 miles (or 1433 x 1433 yards). The whole landmass is 2621.44 square kilometers in size.

This terrain is absolutely huge. You can fit 16 (yes sixteen) Everon's or Nogova's in this landmass…

In the current build there is 278,120 objects (113,400 houses, 88,300 pieces of roads, 12,400 rocks, 19,300 bushes and 36,400 trees, etc). So clearly it is not an “empty desert map” at all.

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?

• Terrain shape.
• Roads.
• City locations.
• Harbor locations.
• Airbase locations.
• Oilfield locations.

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?

• city 24 M
• city 26
• city 34 M
• city 39 M
• Many other cities (fine tuning mostly)

Two big cities are 50% done meaning they are clearly and visually partial. These are “city 34 M” and “city 39 M”.

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 Build and AGS Port addons.

Just copy the addon pbo's into directory of your choice and use -mod parameter to launch ArmA. For more details read How to install ArmA Mod.

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 screenshots in PMC Tactical forum posts here.

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 ingame. 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.

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 forums 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 doing missions for this terrain, we are mission makers too and know how things work.

Download links from our forum topic here.