====== ArmA 2 Allie Terrain Tutorial Part 2 ======

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//Some images are missing from this tutorial.//

Part2 directory structure/textures location Visitor RC3

Next part, the choosing of location.

This is hard, there is a lot of different ways of doing this, but I’ll stick to google earth as the source of all.

Pretty nice size for arma, 9 by 5 Kilometers, terrain in the Aegean Sea, Greece.

Shit loads of terrains to find there in nice sizes.

But again guys, its al personal taste, you can pick your own location.

Before we can even start making something we need to set some stuff up first.

Go to your P: drive (I always work on my P: drive, maybe you prefer to work in the armawork folder in you’re my documents folder), again I prefer the P: drive itself. **PMC Tactical note, do NOT use default windows dirs**

So in the CA folder you create your terrain folder, to keep it simple . I called mine like the terrain is really called: antikythira

Inside this folder create the following folders: data, music, objects and source

Inside the source folder you have to create a terrain folder;

Ok then that’s the directory structure setup done.

One more thing we need to do before we can really start making an terrain.

Download the BIS Sample map from here :

ftp://downloads.bistudio.com/Tools/BISampleMap.zip

Save to nice location and extract, I again store it in my arma tools folder .

Now go into the folder and find the textures, Close look on next picture

Now I’m gone copy all the .PNG and all the .rvmat files, and Paste them into the data folder In our newly created terrain folder.

To overcome problems later we are going to rename all the files.

I’m doing this because in a later stadium we want to define our own settings on what sounds we hear or how much dust is created when we move over these textures.

Because these textures are default for the game we need to rename them so we don't run into conflicts.

So we rename all files in our data folder (our data folder I mean the data folder inside the new terrain folder called antikythira in my case)

I just put 2 x’s infront of them to keep it simple, at least the game engine wont recognize them any more, so we are free to do with them what we like, and don’t worry we are still not done here.

There’s a bit of a weird thing going on with these PNG files, have a real close look at them, some of them are 512x512 pixels and some of them are 256x256 pixels ????

Save it.

Next is the Paths inside the RVMAT files, we have to change them in all 4 RVMAT files.

Have a close view of this picture, I have manually changed the paths I changed “samplemap” for “antikythira” and I have placed XX before “mesto2_detail_nohq.png”, we also need to change .png to .paa, so “xxmesto2_detail_nohq.paa

You should do this for all 4 RVMAT files

You can just open them up with proper text editor.

Now we have to change the texture files to PAA format, here comes the bit trickier part.

I created a batch file called png2paa with the following inside:

START Pal2Pace %1

I then added it to the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer : Tools/Folder Options/File Types Select PNG and click the Advanced button, create a new action and give it a name (I called mine png2paa) then point it towards the batch file (I saved my batch file in the Windows folder). Then copy Pal2PacE.exe and ijl15.dll into your Layers folder from the TexView2 folder. Now when you select one/some or all the PNG files and right-click on them you should see png2paa in the menu, click it and all the files should convert.

So we have to create a batch file?? What the fc.. is that you maybe thinking, well lets show you, its actually just a text file that ends with .bat, so Surpher created a notepad file and called it : png2paa.bat

you might run into this then

after you clicked yes, you should have this

If not you have to set an option in folder options. tools -> folder options

on the VIEW tab, find “hide extensions for known file types” and uncheck that.

Try again, that should do the trick

Now EDIT the png2paa.bat file, Put this line inside “START Pal2Pace %1”.

Close and save the file.

Now put this file into your windows folder

again go to folder options

This time go to the file tab and look for the line Highlighted here.(.PNG Portable Network Graphics Image)

Click the advance button click new, give it a name(png2paa), browse to the windows folder and pick the png2paa.bat file, Open, Ok, Ok, and … Ok

Now copy and paste Pal2PacE.exe and ijl15.dll into your data folder from the TexView2 folder,

And paste

Very nice, now we can convert all png files in our data folder to paa format the easy way.

Select all PNG files and right click them, choose png2paa

and then it should look like this in your data folder.