[Map] Porto de Cabinda (4km) [WIP]

[LITOralis.nMd]

Hello,

Name: Porto de Cabinda (Temporary)
Location: Cabinda, Angola, and a little inspiration from nearby Soyo, Angola
Size: 4km
Factions : (ARF, AU, PLA, Norway, France, British, Germans) Too early yet to decide, atm the preference is for AU/ARF or PLA/AU .
Game Play Type : Jungle and semi-urban light mech vehicles and light air support.

After some time to research, I've started to build a map based on the Cabinda region of Angola.

However to keep it simple I'm building the map on a 4 to 1 scale, the city has almost a million inhabitants, so I'm not going to model the downtown and instead work on the suburbs and plantations, farms and fishing ports, and the proposed/under construction oil facilities and port.


Just to put it out there, I had picked three coastal cities in Africa:
Soyo, Angola: largest offshore LNG and Oil facility in Africa, the future crown jewel of subsaharan Africa. Luxury villas for petro industry workers are within 0.5km of a fishermen's shanty town.
Cabinda, Angola: just north of Soyo and war ravaged, has the unique title as the province with highest number of refugees per capita in Africa, after West Darfur, interesting as it has cattle ranches within a km of the capital downtown. Even so, it was a Portuguese colony and the place is so beautiful I want to holiday there.

Norwegian, French, British, German and Chinese companies all have interests in Soyo region. France has colonialist tendencies in Liberia, Soyo and Kabinda border Zaire and the bloody civil war there, Cabinda was part of that civil war and an alternative site for offshore oil/LNG processing facility.



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cabinda, Angola - Google Maps


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SHould look a little something like this (NOte, I have to add the port and offshore pipeline to the bay still):



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I have alot of questions.

I have so far modeled a gas station, junk yard, roadside stall market, 3 subsistence farming plots, the main roads, and part of a cattle station.

Without adding much at all I'm up to 150 objects already. WHen people talk of the game loading all the objects when loading the map, we are talking about a situation where repetitive use of a limited selection of the same objects will lower the total RAM usage?

My questions:

1. Can we use the new jungle trees?

2. Can we use the new fences?

3. Are there any African crops vegetation objects in the works?

4. I want to build a Mangrove swamp area using the new jungle trees, are there any problems with vegetation planted in shallow water?

5. When building an urban environment, is it really necessary to smooth out the terrain to make placing objects easier? Can I rotate each and every object to build a city on sloped hills?

6. Are there any guides to optimization for a noob, ...so I can read it first, before I get much further, so I can absorb that info and build the map with optimization in mind from the start?

7. I'm working on a third world shanty town map, there are no city planners, no preplanned streets etc in the hills. Why are almost all PR maps built with objects orientated at 15 degree intervals?

8. Noob question about water plane objects... I'll ask more when I get closer to having to find a solution for that part of the map.

9. More I haven't remembered.

10. Why does the BF2Editor suck so badly?!!

11. CAn anyone explain BUndling objects together?

12. Why The Heck are the anchor points for objects placed willy nilly between centered on XYZ, and then others in the same group centered only on XY,? ... this makes some walls impossible to rotate! /rant off

13. 255 ladders,

14. Minimum enterable buildings.

15. I need a tutorial on vegetation LOD and collision meshes, and how to place vegetation correctly. Anyone have a good link?



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[Amok@ndy]

hi first of all it would have been good if you had read this: https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f354-c ... w-map.html

i renamed the thread to match our standarts

1. you may want to show us some progress and then we will think about granting you access to them
2. same as 1.
3. no
4. no
5. i dont understand how you want to rotate the object to match a slope without making it look ****
sth like that:

doesnt look really realistic does it ?
6. dont use too many enterables in one place, UG distance not higher than 75, there are a lot of other ways to optimize your map for more info its the best to browse through other map threads and find hints of other Devs
7. thats a pretty simple answer because its easier and faster
11. ObjectBundles are bugged cant recomend those
15. thats why we have this one https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f189-m ... rs-up.html

maybe you should also flip the heightmap atm South is North and vice versa

[Arc_Shielder]

Personally, go for it. Being portuguese I know very well about the beauty of Cabinda and it will surely give me a hell of motivation to play there.

[Zeno]

Hello,

Factions : ARF, AU, PLA, Norway, France, British, Germans)

lol wut?

[Shovel]

lol wut?

7 team war. Haven't you heard of it?

Anyway, the map looks pretty good. I would expect that we get access to the new fences when 0.96 gets released.

[Zeno]

7 team war. Haven't you heard of it?

.

that would just be stupid...

and not possible

[Shovel]

that would just be stupid...

and not possible

I know, I wasn't serious.

[LITOralis.nMd]

AmokAndy I wish you hadn't removed my reserved posts, it was meant for links to my image updates.

Flipping the map makes it the only map where the ocean is on the left and the carrier is in the bottom left corner... design decision.

Factions : ( ARF, AU, PLA, Norway, France, British, Germans) All of these countries are either indigenous or have very large colonial banking or oil/gas interests in the area.

Regarding the slopes, ... for non-enterable buildings, as long as the front door is visible at ground level, it shouldn't matter if the rear of the building is built into the slope? Why is PR so anti-basements?

I really need to know the status on the new Jungle Trees, I played on the beta test of Forest Fire which uses these trees, the density was not very high,
Can I grab the trees out of the Forest Fire map and use them? Are those the final trees?

Also, if we plan to do Africa proper outside of the urban settings, we really need some cattle grates, and some cattle fencing and corrals and gates. RUdd's new fences work for some areas, but not others in Africa. And Rudd's fencing needs a compatible cattle/truck gate.

I'm absolutely stumped because not a single wall type object in the collective library looks like a cattle fence.

Again, can someone please point me in the right direction regarding the Trees, the LoD, Collision mesh and the model itself, do I place all three on top of each other? Can I then bundle and copy paste them?

[Amok@ndy]

AmokAndy I wish you hadn't removed my reserved posts, it was meant for links to my image updates.

I really need to know the status on the new Jungle Trees, I played on the beta test of Forest Fire which uses these trees, the density was not very high,
Can I grab the trees out of the Forest Fire map and use them? Are those the final trees?

Again, can someone please point me in the right direction regarding the Trees, the LoD, Collision mesh and the model itself, do I place all three on top of each other? Can I then bundle and copy paste them?

1. you dont need double posts... you can update the OP if you want to update with images
2. you dont have the permission to use the jungle trees until a Dev grants you them, also the detensity for Forest Fire was pretty high and on a limit of performance
3. why dont you even care what i tell you ? i told you to read the tutorials there you get told anything you need to know about Overgrowth (trees) and Undergrowth for example

[Rudd]

1. Can we use the new jungle trees?
I'm sure you can, just I'm not sure on the protocol
2. Can we use the new fences?
same as the trees
4. I want to build a Mangrove swamp area using the new jungle trees, are there any problems with vegetation planted in shallow water?
There isn't a problem with that afaik as long as the plant type is appropriate to water placement
5. When building an urban environment, is it really necessary to smooth out the terrain to make placing objects easier? Can I rotate each and every object to build a city on sloped hills?
yes you can HOWEVER you need to test it, if the incline is too far it'll screw up standing on them, if there are ladders it might screw up completely and if there are stairs it'll most probably make them unusable, I'd recommend not inclining them, but using statics with deep bases, so that you can just bury it.
6. Are there any guides to optimization for a noob, ...so I can read it first, before I get much further, so I can absorb that info and build the map with optimization in mind from the start?
its more of a skill that has to be learned tbh, my advice is to load up an optimised PR map, e.g. Muttrah and learn it that way.
Basically it goes like this
Enterables - place them with significant distance between each enterable to minimise performance impact (e.g. muttrah tends to place them so that enterables have firefights with eachother)
Overgrowth - keep the numbers below 28000 I'd say, careful with some of the leafier trees and bushes. the overgrowth atlas should be efficient however there are some new tricks we have to decrease the size
Undergrowth - just don't use 3 types of OG when 1 will do, I wouldn't go beyond the UG density settings of Qinling.
Lightmaps (not a big concern this early) - keep the number of lightmap atlases (i.e. the overal size of lightmaps) below 30, smaller = less memory usage
8. Noob question about water plane objects... I'll ask more when I get closer to having to find a solution for that part of the map.
they need lightmaps and envmaps, envmap tutorial is in the list
10. Why does the BF2Editor suck so badly?!!
yeah I hear ya, but after a while you learn to live with it, I tend to work on one aspect of a map at a time, OG, UG, Statics and not load anything else to help prevent crashes
12. Why The Heck are the anchor points for objects placed willy nilly between centered on XYZ, and then others in the same group centered only on XY,? ... this makes some walls impossible to rotate! /rant off
you can move the anchor points
13. 255 ladders,
Very important to limit the number of ladders and destroyable objects otherwise it just crashes
14. Minimum enterable buildings.
enterables are fine as long as there aren't too many in the same VD area, Dragonfly for example did this very badly, muttrah does it pretty well. The new version of Burning Sands takes this to heart
15. I need a tutorial on vegetation LOD and collision meshes, and how to place vegetation correctly. Anyone have a good link?
you mean as objects or using the overgrowth tool?

Also, if we plan to do Africa proper outside of the urban settings, we really need some cattle grates, and some cattle fencing and corrals and gates. RUdd's new fences work for some areas, but not others in Africa. And Rudd's fencing needs a compatible cattle/truck gate.

They arent my fences mate, iirc Rhino is the sexy author of those.

[Zeno]

Factions : ( ARF, AU, PLA, Norway, France, British, Germans) All of these countries are either indigenous or have very large colonial banking or oil/gas interests in the area.

You cant have more than 2 factions...

[LITOralis.nMd]

[QUOTE=15. I need a tutorial on vegetation LOD and collision meshes, and how to place vegetation correctly. Anyone have a good link?
you mean as objects or using the overgrowth tool?[/QUOTE]

I mean there are objects, such as the corn_grid, and palm tree clustes, that have three objects,

such as(without opening the editor, names might differ slightly):
crops->
corn->
corn_grid_50m
corn_grid_50m_Col
corn_grid_50m_LOD

I can't find a definitive answer as to the difference between these.... and what are the proper usage of these different objects.

FYI, I understand the basics on how to use the undergrowth and overgrowth tools and am learning the other subtle stuff...

[AFsoccer]

I mean there are objects, such as the corn_grid, and palm tree clustes, that have three objects,

such as(without opening the editor, names might differ slightly):
crops->
corn->
corn_grid_50m
corn_grid_50m_Col
corn_grid_50m_LOD

I can't find a definitive answer as to the difference between these.... and what are the proper usage of these different objects.

FYI, I understand the basics on how to use the undergrowth and overgrowth tools and am learning the other subtle stuff...

Although it was written about overgrowth, try this tutorial:https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f189-modding-tutorials/86683-static-object-tutorial-creating-simple-structure.html It explains how to create and set up LODs and COLs (though I don't think you need COLs for UG or "overgrowth fields", since they don't have collisions).

As for using the jungle trees, I'm afraid they are not ready for public use. There are still some issues that need to be sorted out.

The wooden fences will be released with the next version of PR, so you'll have those in plenty of time to use them.

As a general rule, the team doesn't distribute unpublished statics until they have been used in a map. This is because they need to be thoroughly tested. If we allow them to be used and then they have to be changed, it causes a lot of headaches for the mappers (and sometimes a lot of re-work). I would focus on reading through the tutorials (here's a good list: https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f189-modding-tutorials/20862-maps-tutorial-tool-list-pr-mapping-beginners-up.html) and not so much on individual statics or OG/UG.

Thanks

[Silly_Savage]

You cant have more than 2 factions...

I'm pretty sure he knows that...

I'm pretty sure he's listing possible candidates for which two factions face-off on the map...

So now that that's been cleared up...

...