====== ArmA 2 Terrain Generic Tips ======

**ArmA 2 Terrain Generic Tips** for developing terrains, couldn't find any other page for this info, so here is our generic page.

Large terrains the cell size is performance (FPS) factor than satellite texture/mask resolution.

Satellite texture / mask values; 1 meter / 1 pixel generally gives optimum values.

Decent middle range MCO texture makes wonders for your terrain look.

You can grab little chunks of "seed" textures from google - typical 512 x 512's - tile them so they're seamless, then I overlay them on hand painted stuff - fade it right out with transparancy, or overlay using "soft light" or something in photoshop. Use them like MCO over the hand painted sat image - just to give a little more fine surface detail.


====== Terrain Close Texture Naming ======

When you name your terrain close textures, making different type names with underscore is bad idea, here is why.

VTE_Sand_co.tga\\
VTE_Sand_Dry_co.tga\\
VTE_Sand_Green_co.tga

Now when you sort those file names, sand is first, then comes sand_dry and then sand_green... however because we have the third _co and _nohq etc suffixes there, they get sorted ackwardly, like this:

VTE_Sand_co.tga\\
VTE_Sand_Dry_co.tga\\
VTE_Sand_Dry_nohq.tga\\
VTE_Sand_Green_co.tga\\
VTE_Sand_Green_nohq.tga\\
VTE_Sand_nohq.tga

See? That is kind of confusing as "sand" is split up around couple of other sand_<type> names. Solution for this is to remove the underscore from the type names like:

VTE_Sand_co.tga\\
VTE_SandDry_co.tga\\
VTE_SandGreen_co.tga

And its solved, now they all file-sort perfectly in ordered fashion :)


====== Clutter ======

It's generally a good idea to use a noDetailDistance value around the same or just a little higher than your "Base Texture Layer".

So your ground textures will fade out along with their "local ground level mco", just roughly at the same point as the satellite layer is taking over and themiddle_mco is kicking in.

And you can further disguise the transition point by having the clutter distance go out beyond that a fair bit say 100 > 125 meters is a decent visual compromise that isn't too FPS heavy.


====== Large Satellite Images ======

Miro said that: when I was working on Seattle map for TKOH 60x60km I had to split to 4x4 set(15360x15360 each)

I used Global Mapper back then, but I'm almost certain that GDAL utility called gdal_translate.exe can do it as well

http://www.gdal.org/gdal_translate.html

you need to use 
<code>
-srcwin xoff yoff xsize ysize 
-of format
-outsize xsize[%] ysize[%]
</code>