VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

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VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2016-12-23 11:23:43

Neverending development diary started it all in ArmA (armed assault), then came Never ending developer diary (ArmA 2) and today we started VTE Never ending developer diary for ArmA 3 :)

This is direct continuation for ArmA 3 VTE Porting Plan and History timeline wise heh. Now we just switch over to the more day to day routine editing mode, no more massive rush of porting arma2 models just so they work in-game without errors, glad that phase is over.

Did some good editing today, started to fix the vehicles so they would be somewhat usable.

Got aircrafts and helicopters working so that you can get in and fly them, many have working weapons.

Also got armored vehicles, cars and static weapons working the same way.

Its quite rough status now, still nowhere near that you could start to play missions but getting there slowly. In fact, the next big step is to put in some actual playable missions to PMC Gaming computer and start to play. But for that the vehicles still need some a lot of tweaking.
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Re: Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2016-12-29 14:45:38

Not for PMC Gaming with 4k yet, but on PMC DevSurf computer I dropped in the good old VTE Stresstest mission and it did ran pretty OK! :D

Then dropped SOG Retribution single player mission into the dir and tried it, it ran too. Wow nice.

Fixed couple of bugs, well mistakes really, on the initial port and now SOG Retribution runs without errors. Things are looking pretty nice, we get to actually play some missions soon.
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Re: Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2017-01-09 02:03:10

Some more editing and few days ago I played on PMC Gaming computer using zeus to setup some skirmishes. There are still issues with vehicles, but at least most of them work in limited capacity already.

It was quite fun to have some mission action outside of my PMC DevSurf computers detail settings of disabled/low :)
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2017-10-11 03:48:11

After spending all this time working on PMC Real World Data Terrain Project, today I returned to VTE editing :)

Initial version was made with addon breaker and then I believe latest binarization with pboproject. However now Mikero has hardened pboproject so much that VTE did not fully pack anymore, I had to edit it quite bit to get it working again.

However now full VTE has been binarized & packed with pboproject v2.24 :D
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2017-12-18 08:40:07

Almost year later than this porting project started I'm reporting that infantry is now without modern glasses or other such items and the faces are properly gooks as asian faces and rest normal arma3 western faces.

UH1 huey standard workhorse version is also working properly, got the rotor blur and gunner pose/animation proxys fixed so now we get to haul some infantry around the jungles.

Also started to port missions, only few are playable so far but the list is the full set from arma2 and hopefully those will be finished soon. We gotta have missions to play because addons alone are useless.

Things are looking good even though VTE porting is still badly in the beginning phases, so many vehicles etc are still not fully working.
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2017-12-31 15:06:33

Update time. I've been working on porting missions because we need something to play, also in past week I did some actual VTE porting, for example I fixed the 81mm mortar and split up character models into uniform, headgear and vest. Usually I play some missions and when come across some nasty issue I'll stop and go fix it, then return to play.

Splitting Up VTE

edit: this was already done now but as I wrote this text before doing it I just use that text.

My plan is to split up VTE into smaller chunks, mostly because terrain sizes and numbers. It would be three different entities; VTE Core, VTE Terrain Core and VTE Terrain Pack(s).

Basically core includes chracters, vehicles, weapons and the rest like ordnance, music etc. Terrain core includes terrain objects, ground detail textures (GDT) and clutter. Terrain packs would then hold the actual terrains which would be split up to pack1 OFP era, pack2 arma2 era and pack3 (and additional packs) for arma3 era.

Note: gigabytes are unpacked pbo's. When 7zip packed they become much smaller.

VTE_core == characters, vehicles, weapons and rest. pbo's 2.01gb
VTE_terrain_core == objects and ground textures. pbo's 1.06gb
VTE_terrain_pack1 == ofp era. 23 terrains. wrptool. pbo's 1.98gb
VTE_terrain_pack2 == arma2 era. 5 terrains. l3dt and visitor3. pbo's 1.85gb
VTE_terrain_pack3 == arma3 era. 6 terrains. terrain builder real world data fly boy projects. pbo's 22.9gb

7zip packed for download:
VTE_core 958mb
VTE_terrain_core 490mb
VTE_terrain_pack1 396mb
VTE_terrain_pack2 668mb
VTE_terrain_pack3 16.1gb

There is a huge difference between packs1-2 and pack3 because the arma3 era real world satellite texture / mask data takes insane amount of file space. One real world data terrain is larger than OFP terrains combined, its that crazy. Also note that pack3 is just a quick thought right now, its not decided that it will happen in that size, 16gb is heh totally crazy. We might have to split it up to like 2 terrains per pack or something, we'll see. If you have any ideas please feel free to share.

However file sizes are not the reason why I'm splitting VTE up, its the bigger picture where the benefits come. Updating is one, most of the time the updates come to the core and not terrains, so its easier to download quick snappy few hundred megabytes than two and a half gigabytes (not counting the new terrains).

I consider VTE to be a package deal, but if someone wants to only get the terrains or just use the objects for his terrain, he can now do it. Config required addons are none for the core and terrain_core, but the terrain packs obviously require terrain_core. However any mission packs I release the assumption is that user has every part of VTE.

Missions

Missions are huge part of VTE project, we are talking about hundreds of missions including single player, multi player and campaigns as well as some special showcase type cutscenes. There will be so much to play for everyone it will be exhausting to even scan the scenario, campaign and multiplayer mission lists. VTE will not be one of these useless addons / mods where user spends 5 minutes in editor and then forgets it, hahah noway dude, we got sum missions! :D

I have already done ground work to port all the OFP and ArmA(1) missions. Some of them will be tough to port as they include too much of OFP user interface rsc stuff which I'm not familiar with, or few missions are just such an SQS spaghetti that it is literally easier to create the mission from scratch than to try to port the actual existing files. However there is so much mission content that will be ported its amazing. Couple of these comes to mind are "Baqel's Tour of Duty" and "Unscripted War" missions.

Currently I have 3 campaigns, about 10 single player and 150 multi player missions ported. Even this number alone would be more than I've seen since OFP VTE release on any addons.

The Future

Currently there is still huge amount of work to be done to port, but work is underway to fix stuff. I'm also thinking about releasing the current "VTE Dev" under the radar without any bis forums news postings and such, like just putting a link into this topic. Not sure yet.

Year 2017 is nearing its end and I'm very excited about future of VTE, it going to be glorious to bring the best VTE to arma3 than we have ever seen. I remember back in late OFP era when VTE really bloomed when everything came together nicely, I will achieve the same feeling with arma3 in the future and then some!

Looking forward to 2018 and some excellent vietnam war gameplay with arma3 :cool:
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2018-02-27 00:47:37

Sorry for the total lack of dev diary updates, my bad :(

When I recount the development since that last update I would say the largest impact goes to the brand new real world data terrains, I do not even remember all their names (I think they were listed in the release changelog) but it was like two for vietnam (binh long 40km and huey city 20km) then several 40km ones for cambodia and laos. It is absolutely massive addition to VTE.

Before that I did a lot of work for the SOG Real War campaign which I played several days and had a tons of fun, its current version is only for ia drang valley terrain and already git committed it. Plan is to add rest of VTE terrains there (with perhaps some exceptions like the tiny ones).

Just basically few days ago I started to add aircraft physx to our planes, that appears to be quite bitch to figure out, but currently F4 phantom is already working as expected, A1 skyraider is mostly working but still wont fully stop when cutting the engine which obviously is a problem (same with A4 skyhawk).

I will try to keep these dev diary updates coming, just need to find a proper balance of enough updates but not too much.
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2018-03-12 13:52:00

Several aircrafts physx added, still failed to add to a1 skyradier, a4 skyhawk, birddog, ov1 and ov10 due them being the rear wheel steering aircrafts or that their gear has been modeled "up".

Attempted to import pew/wrp into terrain builder but special objects float. It took me a while to fight through this but finally managed to import all PEW into terrain builder and now all terrains except TET 68 are terrain builder native format.

Generated 16 million objects for laos terrain and a lot of objects to other cambodia/laos terrains. How did I get 16 million objects binarized? Well thats a long story ;)

I think two sets of VTE releases since the last dev diary update.

Overall a lot of work has been done and that 16 million object into jungle terrain is major breakthrough. Also I really like the terrain situation now as all the OFP/arma2 terrains are in terrain builder format, I can do edits to the at any time.
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2018-03-13 05:40:23

VTE Development, Laos Ban Pakha with 16,339,874 objects in-game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alf3Czs9m5U
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2018-07-19 18:58:24

Vietnam: The Experience cambodia terrain development 2018-07-19

Bar Kaev https://youtu.be/K8qL8557cZU
Krabei Chrum https://youtu.be/78wa_6WhSnc
Krong Svay Rieng https://youtu.be/JnH87uPt3qM
Pech Chreada https://youtu.be/Tk26MIvHCLU
Ponhea Kraek https://youtu.be/9-18Zo6PHdI
Siem Pang https://youtu.be/lnEG0BSYDq0
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2018-08-21 19:51:46

2018-08-15 I started to VTE edit again after a break, there is new pboProject out which once again required me to reconfigure few configs to be able to binarize everything, but now its done whole VTE binarizes with pboProject v2.41

Had to remove bad p3d model t_cocos_bend_f.p3d from terrain builder templatelibs and re-generated objects which took a lot of time, but now our WRPs are with clean bill of health, no more bad objects.

Added picturemap_ca images for all terrains, unified the "by:" names for all terrains and added mod.cpp for each VTE addon to improve the user initial surface impression when starting arma3 up with VTE. Its a small thing but makes a huge difference on first impression.

I finally converted the "PMC Vietnam" real world data terrains into "VTE Terrain Pack 3", this includes Vietnam Da Nang, Dong Hoi, Hanoi, Saigon, Pleiku and Vinh which all are 143km x 143km in terrain size. This whole project took me like 4-5 days to complete in 16hrs work days.

Terrain Nui Chet also got the old arma2 style road p3d pieces removed and brand new terrain builder shapefile polyline roads laid on top of them, also brand new roads were added to those populated places which previously had no road connections.

Today I binarized whole VTE, it took 12 hours, 25 minutes! :o

You could sum this up with "tons of terrain work!" :D
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2018-09-26 08:36:39

2018-09-25

Edited VTE SOG Real War 1 campaign and noticed that it uses so many outdated techniques or rather that I learned so much while editing PMC Powder Bat that this one looks way outdated. So I went and fixed few most obvious things that bothered me. Weather being the most obvious that shows up while you play.

In VTE itself fixed those ammo boxes being full, machine guns M60 and RPD firing sounds having bad echoes. Was quite interesting to install audacity audio editing tool, use Mikero tools DeWss to convert the wss to wav and then open it in audacity where I removed the extremely long echo.

Pretty much all infantry weapons magazine reload sounds were inaudible, so I brought those levels to normal.

Felt good to be back in VTE editing again :)
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2018-09-29 11:05:13

2018-09-28

VTE SOG Real War 1 campaign tweaking, tasks complete with friendly helo overflight so limited to land class, added player group savestatus/loadstatus, added player group units reinforcements system, plei me / fb falcon added american and south vietnam flag poles, plei me / fb falcon added medic tent, plei me / fb falcon added medic group on support waypoint.

Some nice little tweaks to make the campaign more enjoyable. Did some playtesting too.

Tried to fix the vehicle inside sound thing, insidesoundcoeff etc commands do not work anymore, didnt get the attenuationtype to work either, have to keep working on that.
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2019-08-24 22:16:20

2019-08-24

Installed new mikero tools which always causes issues, then started to binarize VTE. Had several texture errors no idea about them as they were making no sense, like texture format errors not like texture being missing or anything, fixed those by resaving the textures with texview2.

Continued to binarize and whole VTE has been now binarized without errors using the latest mikero tools.

Haven't done any actual editing but just wanted to run it through the latest tools for now.
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-12 00:01:05

2020-11-11

Some of the new VTE terrains had "vte_terrain_wrp_" file / addon naming style, not sure why I did it like this on initial creation but it did not match to the other terrains which had simply "vte_wrp_" style.

Today went through all those vte_terrain_wrp_ terrains and recreated them to vte_wrp_ addon dirs. This included recreating terrain builder projects and all addon directories, basically everything except the source files more or less.

I had to export satellite textures from global mapper into each of the terrains as the old work files had been deleted.

This task took me good part of the day, it was funny as it was end of the evening for me then and I went through my check/todo list basically in zombie mode heh, it was pure terrain editing craziness :)

At midnight was just binarizing the last few terrains, was really happy how this day (date) turned out. Even though this terrain editing change wont show much in-game except few satellite textures being better, it still was important thing to fix.
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-14 02:40:39

2020-11-12

Finished binarizing all the newly renamed terrain addons, now just need to do in-game testing that they work and look OK :)

Created VTE Terrain Pack 6, it now hosts the vietnam terrains from pack 4. Didn't like how large pack 4 got with both cambodia and vietnam terrains in it. Sure we have vietnam terrains in pack 3 but those are the big boy 143km monster sizes, pack 6 is now more compact 40km or even smaller.

Got excited about making new terrains, which is nothing new. I wanted to do OFP terrain remakes like a shau valley, khe sanh combat base etc locations with real world data and large size, to really bring in power of arma3 into them. So I started to make initial new terrains list heh ;)

Got started with few of the terrains, had to brush up on my tool pipeline skills as got a bit rusty after not doing any arma3 terrains for many months, actually come to think of it these are the first ones in 2020.

List for new terrains is pretty scary heh, got cool locations coming up that's for sure. Standard I'm going with is 40km x 40km size but couple of them are smaller compact, for example hamburger hill 937 terrain is only 10km x 10km which is laughable size... but it was special circumstances as a shau sf camp was just south east of it and "base area 611" north east of it. Now you might think well why not just make one bigger terrain, well at 40km it would be really tight and anything larger and we slowly start to get into the floating point precision issues not to mention jungle terrain object limits, 40km is good for 15-16 million objects but anything larger than that, you might have problems with object density.

Anyways, good terrain stuff coming up. VTE is getting better and better.
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-17 02:05:20

2020-11-14

Started to create new L3DT generated 40km and 61km fictional terrains ;)

2020-11-15

Got the heightmaps in-game but satellite texture/mask still will take some time while I tweak L3DT climate and generate images.

Also the new heightmaps were way too rough, elevations were way too high and that made ridiculous looking landscape where nobody would be interested of arma3 fighting. Need to tone down the values great deal for these heightmaps to be usable. Honestly it feels like easier to make good heightmaps for arma3 game-play in wilbur by hand painting...
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-21 02:45:20

2020-11-18

Re-generated heightmaps using L3DT for the new terrains, now elevations are much lower which produces much more playable terrain, haven't tested in-game yet.

Wanted to create couple of more L3DT fictional terrains, yes I am out of control crazy just no limits... hey, what else is new heh. Wanted to do very swamp / river infested wet lowlands type terrain for those river operations.

L3DT swamp river lowland thingy design 1. Few landlocked water areas, but slowly getting there. L3DT-Swamp-River-Lowland-Thingy-Design-01.jpg

2020-11-19

Fixed couple of SP mission scripting errors and then did latitude/longitude config for new terrains.
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Snake Man
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2020-11-29 06:40:31

2020-11-28

Yesterday I moved VTE project directories from Western Digital 4tb Blue 5400rpm hard disk to m.2 NVMe Corsair MP600 drive. Need to get some more performance out of the computer when editing these large files.

New day started by binarizing VTE. Was my first time trying several pboproject binarize dos cmd boxes as the same time. This was very easy with VTE because there are so many different addon packs like vte_core, vte_terrain_pack1 etc which are not conflicting with each other.

It was freaky to see three (3) pboproject binarization / packing processes run at the same time :)

Drew some vegetation shapes for one of the new vietnam terrains. This is always a lot of work if there are no OSM provided shape files available.

Global Mapper drawing vegetation shapes, vietnam jungles. Global-Mapper-Drawing-Vegetation-Shapes-2020-11-28T1048.png.

VTE Vietnam Than Loa 20km, 1.5 million trees. not THiCK enough. VTE-Vietnam-Than-Loa-20km-Vegetation-2020-11-28T1429.jpg.

Used terrain processor to generate just a bit over 2 million tanoa vegetation objects to this 20km terrain, jungle thickness was pretty nice but needs more undergrowth, and few rocks sprinkled around.

Started to look into Nui Chet terrain, that project of course was broken in terrain builder, so had to recreate it. It dates back to OFP era and really shows it, I remember making this terrain with WrpTool after first creating heightmap with Wilbur (saved as XYZ), heh good old times. But now this would need heightmap grid resolution increase and brand new satellite texture/mask, done in L3DT. But I'll just want to get it in-game and working through terrain builder first.
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"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

Snake Man
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Posts: 9338
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Re: VTE Never ending developer diary (ArmA 3)

Post by Snake Man » 2020-12-07 01:17:23

2020-12-02

Finished terra incognita re-downloads for vietnam, some were better... some pretty much the same what we had before.
PMC Tactical Forum New User Registration please read new info here.

PMC since 1984

Editing knowledge, visit PMC Editing Wiki
The leading, most detailed and comprehensive modification made for the Vietnam War - Vietnam: The Experience homepage
View our videos in PMC Youtube channel

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"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

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