Around 14 hours of work - Tikhaya City

[Martin]

Very nice work!

[Poncho]

Thanks again for all the praise guys, might not have anything new out for a while. Work has been pretty constant and the internat on ship is pretty poor. Still glad to hear you are all enjoying it. I had some great pvp experiences in there before I left. I'd love to hear about some of yours!

 

Best would have to be when I was soloing a loot run in there when I came across a large hostile squad, I announced friendly but they started shooting and soon it became a man hunt. They may have had more men but I had an advantage, I built this place, this was my world, my maze, and they were rats trapped in it. I know every nook and cranny, every back path and vantage point. I didn't get them all but I left with the stuff I had looted and a few extra goodies from their bodies ;)

[boxman80]

Hey just a heads up to the Poncho, you may get some guy representing his "group" getting in touch with you to complain about the quality of the map update.

 

Basically I had one of my moderators get onto me to give me athe heads up that a guy joined our server yesterday for a minute or two and then went ona  rant about the city near Kamenka and how it looked "messy" then left slating the quality of our server. Today Ive checked our server promotion thread at day z mod and he's made his basic critique there (link: http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/149552-dayzcraft-epoch-1025-indestructable-bases-ai-missions-extra-weapons-balanced-map-updates-more/page-3).

 

It's the only negative feedback we've had so far and personally I've been more than satisfied with the quality of the update, but I've had to refer the guy to you as the designer of the update. 

 

 

Personally, I think it's just a case of the guy and his pals being a bit daft and a couple of minutes hardly seems like enough time to make a decent decision. Just to confirm that we have no other map updates or modifications running on that part of the map and everything appears to have loaded in fine (no other complaints but i guess it's possibility that the server didnt load the buildings right between restarts as sometimes happens with map updates).

 

Keep up the good work though!

[Rawr]

Wow this is awesome! You must be very patient putting so many hours into this.

[Poncho]

Thanks boxman80, I have to say apart from some issues with lag in the area, which are stated and not really a problems with the update but with people's hardware I have not seen or heard of any problems, especially regarding the quality which has always been highly praised, and I have don't know how you could call it messy :S I put a lot of time in to ensure that this was a city and not just a collection of buildings.

 

As you say it may have been a problem with them not loading between restarts, or maybe it could have been a problem with his client files? Either way thanks for the feedback and the heads up :)

 

 

Also thanks Rawr, always nice to hear kind words for my efforts :D

[Hero2None]

Hey all. Firstly, I wanted to say nice work on the city Poncho! I have also been investing several hours in the same idea.. Great minds think alike! That area of the map is entirely too perfect elevation wise.. and with the Bay there it was a... "why does this not exist?" moment. I love the fine details you took the time to place. Very cool.

 

I DO have a question though. One that can be answered by yourself, and anyone who has uploaded this city into their server. Do your roads work properly? I have tried to incorporate new roads into the map, but when extracted and sent to my admin.. he does not see the roads I took the time to place. Is this just a glitch? (if he uploads the file into the server, will the roads show?)

[Poncho]

I DO have a question though. One that can be answered by yourself, and anyone who has uploaded this city into their server. Do your roads work properly? I have tried to incorporate new roads into the map, but when extracted and sent to my admin.. he does not see the roads I took the time to place. Is this just a glitch? (if he uploads the file into the server, will the roads show?)

 

 

As long as your code is okay then you should have no problem once it is in the server. I have experienced this myself checking over content sent to me by an editor for my server, it can happen for a number of reasons, conflict in versions e.t.c for example he might not be launching the editor the same way you do so does not get the right one initializing. Either way if you can see it all and it is all aligned then you good to go :)

 

If he is worried about putting it in the server before he knows it is working tell him to sling it into his test server or you do it, either way you should be okay.

 

Once again thanks for the praise, it's always welcome ;)

[ZS.Raven]

Thank you Poncho, for this brilliant city.

 

It would be great, if you optimized the .sqf by defining the buildings as objects and not vehicles.

It would give players more fps, server will load faster, buildings would never move and there would be no problem with maximum vehicles limit.

 

I spend several hours trying manually, but it is a bit of a pain. There are 1400+ definitions in this .sqf....

 

Example:

 

_bldObj = objNull;
if (true) then
{
  _bldObj = createVehicle ["MAP_asf2_0_2000", [1139.8907, 2393.6802, 9.5367432e-007], [], 0, "CAN_COLLIDE"];
  _bldObj setDir -26.330427;
  _bldObj setPos [1139.8907, 2393.6802, 9.5367432e-007];
};

[oxygen220]

How did you add in roads and trees?

[Poncho]

I must admit I did not know this ZS.Raven, Learning something new :D This will really help for any future releases. I'm adding this helpful tip to my Tutorial and support Thread, thanks for the feedback and the kind words :)

[Poncho]

How did you add in roads and trees?

 

Just join any dayz Epoch server (preferably yours) and then back out to the main menu, open up the editor and you should have them. It's all in the _EU map editor update which you should have if your game versions are up to date. 

[oxygen220]

awesome!! previously iv been using it just on arma2, where will these files save?

 

and when i add in some paths or roads how do i move them around?

[Poncho]

It will save in 'My Documents' > 'ArmA2' > 'Missions' > 'YourFileName' Or similar to that structure anyway. 

 

To move roads around jut spawn in a campfire or something else small and select both your road and campfire in a drag box, one they have been selected use move your campfire around, you should find the road follows the same movement so you can use the campfire as a sort of controller to accurately position your road. 

 

P.s it helps if you read the tutorial & help thread for this stuff -->  http://dayzepoch.com/forum/index.php?/topic/2328-how-to-make-custom-map-content-tutorial-ongoing-support/  ;) All those questions are answered in there somewhere. Happy Editing Buddy!

[oxygen220]

awesome thanks :D 

 

(you da baws)

[Poncho]

Just trying to do for others what I would have like to be done for me way back when I was in their shoes.

 

I hope one day you will do the same :)

[Wesley]

It will save in 'My Documents' > 'ArmA2' > 'Missions' > 'YourFileName' Or similar to that structure anyway. 

 

To move roads around jut spawn in a campfire or something else small and select both your road and campfire in a drag box, one they have been selected use move your campfire around, you should find the road follows the same movement so you can use the campfire as a sort of controller to accurately position your road. 

 

P.s it helps if you read the tutorial & help thread for this stuff -->  http://dayzepoch.com/forum/index.php?/topic/2328-how-to-make-custom-map-content-tutorial-ongoing-support/  ;) All those questions are answered in there somewhere. Happy Editing Buddy!

And save often, your roads like to shift around at least once!

[Poncho]

Usually I just spam all the roads in a rough pattern of where I want them and hit save (this corrects the error in positioning between the 3D and 2D editors), then shift them over to the exact position before saving again.

 

9/10 times they will stick, and you save yourself the hassle of fine tuning them twice. There is however those moments when they reeeeally don't wanna play nice  :rolleyes:

[oxygen220]

hmm whilst making a runway i found copy and pasting the runway with a bush after lining it up made them stay put :D

[Poncho]

Yeah, I usually use a campfire, but I was mainly talking about the shift after saving. It can be very temperamental so I just to iron out the creases before I start fine tuning. Learnt that the hard way  ^_^

 

Once upon a time a young Poncho finishes a large edit...

 

"Ahh all done time to save this masterpiece!" .....saving map..... "Whaaa  :( what happened" said I as I looked down on the mangled mess of buildings and bodies on my screen, followed by the following few hours putting it all back haha. 

[williamjbrown]

Thank you Poncho, for this brilliant city.

 

It would be great, if you optimized the .sqf by defining the buildings as objects and not vehicles.

It would give players more fps, server will load faster, buildings would never move and there would be no problem with maximum vehicles limit.

 

I spend several hours trying manually, but it is a bit of a pain. There are 1400+ definitions in this .sqf....

 

Example:

 

_bldObj = objNull;

if (true) then

{

  _bldObj = createVehicle ["MAP_asf2_0_2000", [1139.8907, 2393.6802, 9.5367432e-007], [], 0, "CAN_COLLIDE"];

  _bldObj setDir -26.330427;

  _bldObj setPos [1139.8907, 2393.6802, 9.5367432e-007];

};

 

Just curious what kind of frame rate increases you are receiving from doing this? Do the buildings literally add in as vehicles doing it the older way? 

 

We have a lot of added building I would love to see if this would help FPS and it makes sense just never heard of this method before. 

[rotorface]

thank you very much for your hard work, using it on my server !

[Aristoi]

A very nice map, well done!

 

I have often wondered why so many seemed to think that changing the variable name would make it a building, not a vehicle, but have seen nothing definitive.  I did consider that the reusing of the variable name (_bldObj) versus possibly hundreds of seperate ones in the "_vehicle_x" format might help perfomance a little bit.

 

On the above, which of those keeps the shifting from happening?  I've used setVectorUp to level objects, but they can still drift.

[Aristoi]

That's correct that setVectorUp is just to break the normal terrain level matching to make buildings totally straight.  I've also used setPos and have still seen some minor drift, especially with a lot of other objects nearby (presumably the collision detection is bumping them around a bit).  I'll try setPosASL and see how that does.

[Poncho]

After the 'Changing the local variable names from "_vehicle_x" to "_bldObj"' was suggested on this thread I had few friends test it out on small - moderate sized map additions (Including a lot of trees and small objects). To which they had replied they believed it to cause a slight boost in FPS (around 2-4 fps). 

 

Believing it only made sense for this to have a knock-on effect for larger edits such as this I also added it to my support thread for map additions. For now I will remove it from there until I can undergo some further testing. Perhaps even on this edit, which may take some time haha... *gulp*. 

 

Anyway as always thanks for the feedback :)

[Novuhz]

One of the best custom cities I've ever added to my server :) Thanks!