Things you'd like to see in maps?

[cring0]

I've begun my adventure into map making for Arma 3. I still have a lot of things to learn, especially since my experience with modeling and scripting is very minimal, but geography and cartography has always been a passion of mine. This, coupled with the desire to create a map that I could appreciate myself (and better designed to compliment certain mods) I think will help me to stay motivated.

I know what I'd like to see in a map. However, gathering ideas from other players and modders would be beneficial.

What is it about your favorite maps that you enjoy or find appropriate? What are some things you don't like about the maps you've played on. Pros and cons and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

What are some things you'd like to see more in maps, things that you find lacking?

[Richie]

A cross between Taviana and Chernarus would be awesome :D

Large and small towns and cities, a well designed road system, 2 or 3 islands linked for a choke point, then the lush green countryside inbetween.

[BFranek]

Arma3 Lingor all arma3 buildings and textures.

[Brez]

The shorline cities of Chernaurus with the Islands of Taviana and the rolling hills of Napf to me would be ideal.

[raymix]

Word of advice, make a very small deathmatch map while learning, something like 1x1 or 2x2 km... it is fast to load and render as well as it's gonna be a perfectly established base for your larger project with fully working configs. Learning curve is steep, tools suck ass and will break often, on top of that documentation is almost non-existent. I'd assume this is due to large amount of stuff that is required for simple things that scares people off from creating tutorials.

You shouldn't worry about what you don't know - scripting and modeling is not required and will slow you down even further as both has their own quite steep learning curves. Focus on what you already know and are comfy with and before creating your own models, learn to port and modify existing ones from A2 first, this will allow you to understand how o2, object properties, configs and rvmats works.

Again, start small... to give you an idea - a 10km world made in World Machine would render full night just to disappoint you in the morning... 30km renders roughly 3-5 days. Ofcourse I am talking quality stuff that of Altis or Stratis, not A2 peasantry. A3 is an amazing and powerful engine to work with when all the peaces falls in places.

Best of luck, bud.

[DayZ Vet]

A cross between Taviana and Chernarus would be awesome :D

Large and small towns and cities, a well designed road system, 2 or 3 islands linked for a choke point, then the lush green countryside inbetween.

+1    My two favorite DayZ maps :rolleyes:

[CrazyCorky]

I would love to see something like Celle if you ever had the chance to play on that map. However a bigger area of it. The forests were dense to where it felt like you were in a forest and unable to see too far in front of you. Possibly with a mountain and snow surrounding if that's possible!

[SkyDogs]

A river system.

[cring0]

A river system.

lol if only, I'm only looking into map making not reworking the engine for Bohemia =p Rivers were in fact a part of my plan, but they'll need to be sea level because.. arma. You know.. makes me wonder if there would be a way to code a system for making locks..

I'll edit my original post with my original ideas later. I had a rough sketch too.

I've been doing a lot of looking around for the past month or so. One thing that I always wanted was a map where you could actually utilize boats to the point where boats would even be appealing. I already have a smaller island drawn up similar to Venice.

Another thing is having a wide river, kind of like the Amazon, fed through a canyon with footpaths cut into the sides, etc. Don't have time to get into it all. I need to see if there are any serious modders out there working on something similar and/or if my visions would even be attainable with arma.

[SkyDogs]

Sea level waterways would be fine for a video game. I would imagine it would not only give your map a unique feature, but it would be relatively simple too.

[Richie]

A tunnel or underground base :o

[unerground2]

Never seen a USA Desert map yet ( what about Vegas ) ?

[cring0]

A tunnel or underground base :o

Well that's another thing that I'm pretty sure you can't do with Arma.  I was planning on trying to make caves and mines just by making trenches basically and laying rocks over them.  I haven't seen anyone else even do that though so I'm wondering if there would be an issue there.

 

I haven't really gotten too much into what kind of cities I'd like to try to take ideas from, but I would definitely like to make at least one large city.  In the past I thought it would be cool to have map where the whole island was one big city, but I found someone was modeling one after Manhattan, called Minihattan.  They modeled a bunch of their own skyscrapers which is cool, but they're still buggy and looks like they need a lot more texturing.

 

 

I would love to see something like Celle if you ever had the chance to play on that map. However a bigger area of it. The forests were dense to where it felt like you were in a forest and unable to see too far in front of you. Possibly with a mountain and snow surrounding if that's possible!

 

No, I haven't even seen that name, I'll have to check it out.  I looked at a lot of maps, but a lot of them are just ported over from Arma 2 and only have Arma 2 buildings.  I thought Everon was kinda nice, it's been around for some time I think.  I saw Wild Annie was testing out Napf, I'm sure that will start blowing up soon.

[Richie]

Well that's another thing that I'm pretty sure you can't do with Arma.  I was planning on trying to make caves and mines just by making trenches basically and laying rocks over them.  I haven't seen anyone else even do that though so I'm wondering if there would be an issue there.

 

You sort of can, your trench with rocks will work :)

 

Check out Namalsk, it has an underground base made up of a custom building sat inside a crater with some fake flooring to hide it.

Also check out the hidden underground bunker in Origins (Taviana 3.0), that one is done really well.

[Gen0cide]

I love nice elevation maps similar to Takistan where you have low and high elevation wrapping around each other.  Forested areas but not like Havana on BP.  More like a mix of Takistan and Cher for me.  

[dank]

Deer hunting, a fishing pole, roller coaster components to build my own roller coaster next to the Ferris wheel.

[Face]

Varied terrain heights helps make the map more authentic, like it was modeled after some place in the real world as opposed to something artificial. I'd look to Celle as to what not to do in terms of flat-land syndrome, other than that the map does a great job at making each location unique. Locations that have their own sense of identity and uniqueness are a bonus.

 

Also, spreading out the towns and key locations is a great way to make the entire map useful. A large terrain is great and all, but it's pointless if only 1/4 of the map has cities and towns worth traveling to. An example of big terrain - tiny world syndrome is Napf. Easily one of the most popular maps in A2 Epoch, but personally I found only the upper portion of the terrain useful. Everything else was just empty land and pointless to travel to unless you had a helicopter handy.

[SkyDogs]

Have you seen Bornholm, Face? Should be renamed Borehome. It's miles upon miles of rolling fields and meadows.

[DayZ Vet]

You sort of can, your trench with rocks will work :)

 

Check out Namalsk, it has an underground base made up of a custom building sat inside a crater with some fake flooring to hide it.

Also check out the hidden underground bunker in Origins (Taviana 3.0), that one is done really well.

yeah that underground base on tavi has made for some great gun battles in the past. hope it can be done with A3

[TheVampire]

I'd love for a map that is wooded like chernarus, the size of Bornholm or larger, but also mountainous. The Chernaus formula worked, but I wanted it to be larger with more hills. Small sporadic towns with a few large towns also is nice.

Underground places would also be awesome, but how they did it with the DayZ Origins map is kind of glitchy and may be the reason Sabina is so laggy. It's basically a square hole with a flat object that is textured the same as the grass. The underground portion was then basically made how you would expect but wasn't exactly underground.

Caves made with rocks are less glitchy and better looking.

[cring0]

Word of advice, make a very small deathmatch map while learning, something like 1x1 or 2x2 km... it is fast to load and render as well as it's gonna be a perfectly established base for your larger project with fully working configs. Learning curve is steep, tools suck ass and will break often, on top of that documentation is almost non-existent. I'd assume this is due to large amount of stuff that is required for simple things that scares people off from creating tutorials.

You shouldn't worry about what you don't know - scripting and modeling is not required and will slow you down even further as both has their own quite steep learning curves. Focus on what you already know and are comfy with and before creating your own models, learn to port and modify existing ones from A2 first, this will allow you to understand how o2, object properties, configs and rvmats works.

Again, start small... to give you an idea - a 10km world made in World Machine would render full night just to disappoint you in the morning... 30km renders roughly 3-5 days. Ofcourse I am talking quality stuff that of Altis or Stratis, not A2 peasantry. A3 is an amazing and powerful engine to work with when all the peaces falls in places.

Best of luck, bud.

Yeah, I'm doing a slightly smaller "practice" map. I was just going to grab an existing island but decided to get creative and make something that might actually be appealing. The image I'm working on is 1024x1024. Im not sure at this point what exactly dictates what size the finished map will be though. I'm using l4dt to work with the height map. According to it the map would be like 6x6km but I'm not sure if that's accurate.

I'd love for a map that is wooded like chernarus, the size of Bornholm or larger, but also mountainous. The Chernaus formula worked, but I wanted it to be larger with more hills. Small sporadic towns with a few large towns also is nice.

Underground places would also be awesome, but how they did it with the DayZ Origins map is kind of glitchy and may be the reason Sabina is so laggy. It's basically a square hole with a flat object that is textured the same as the grass. The underground portion was then basically made how you would expect but wasn't exactly underground.

Caves made with rocks are less glitchy and better looking.

I'm making caverns on my test map lol. Yeah the underground layer in Sabina was buggy as hell. If you went through the tunnels in origins the AI would light you up through the walls.

[raymix]

Yeah, I'm doing a slightly smaller "practice" map. I was just going to grab an existing island but decided to get creative and make something that might actually be appealing. The image I'm working on is 1024x1024. Im not sure at this point what exactly dictates what size the finished map will be though. I'm using l4dt to work with the height map. According to it the map would be like 6x6km but I'm not sure if that's accurate.

It's the cell size per pixel of your height map, it's a value you will enter later in TB.

For example 1024x1024px height + 10 cell size multiplies and will make 10.24km x 10.24km world. This means, one pixel will be taken from your height map to create 10 meters of grid. Back in L3DT you should simply work with 10.24km world to make things easier in this case.

 

Another example would be 5km world, as in 5000m. If you export it as 1024px height, to produce exact terrain your cell size should be 4.88 (5000/1024). However Arma does not like uneven values in cell data, this will result in broken satmaps upon creating 16px overlap. The only way to fix this is going up to even cell size - 5. So 5x1024px = 5102m (this value should be used in L3DT to avoid future problems). In your case with 6km that will be 5.85 cell size, again - uneven. Either make it 5.5 or 6 and multiply with 1024.

 

General rule is - the smaller value for cell data, the more polygons and better quality for smaller details, but at the cost of performance.

 

Point 5 decimals are fine, too.. so something like 1024px * 2.5 cell making 2560m world won't produce broken satmaps.

 

Finally, a 4096px satmap * 1 cell = 4096m world (1m per 1px), same as 1024px satmap * 4 cell = 4096m world (4m per 1px). Both same size, but first one will produce 4 times better quality at the cost of 4 times the performance of second one, because it will have 4 times more polygons covering the same area. So choose wisely on the type of terrain you build. If detail is not important (less mountains, more flat land), go with second one.

 

Then there's altitude, which is also important. In arma water level can not be adjusted, it's always 0. So if your application supports water, lets say 100m deep and your highest mountain is 400m, then you will need to "sink" your terrain in TB for it to work. That means terrain altitude will be min -100m and max +300m... 

 

Hope this helps anyone else reading this. I know you never asked for this, but you'll thank me later when Terrain builder just like any other Arma dev tool will start showing its true colors.

Edited February 4, 2015 by raymix

[TheVampire]

You should post some of your in-progress in the map discussion section.

 

I'd like to see more info on Kiory's snow map too.

[cring0]

Omg raymix, you're so much help, thank you. Can't wait to get home and figure this out lol.

About the altitude though, l4dt allows for negative values, so I'm guessing what you're saying is that, whatever my lowest alt is, arma will make that the water level? So like if the deepest part of the ocean in l4dt is -10m then that will become 0 essentially raising the sea floor out of the wa-- yeah I'm going to wait until I'm done working, I don't think my brain is working properly right now =p But the terrain size makes sense to me now thanks.

@vampire I'll definitely post progress if I make any lol. I thought what kiory was working was a weather "system" though, for his boreas project. Maybe I'm wrong.

[TheVampire]

I could be wrong. All I heard was "project" and seen video of a snow covered map :P