Allie Terrain Tutorial Part 6

Some images are missing from this tutorial.

Part5 rvmat conversion and road placing Visitor RC3

Inside the layers dir in the data dir of our project you see a lot of PNG’s, PAA’s and rvmat files. The PNG files were converted by Visitor into PAA files, but visitor did NOT change the names inside the rvmat files, so we have to change them ourselfs.

This time we only have to change PNG to PAA in all rvmat files.

I’m using a NON free piece of software for that, its called ultraedit, it’s a professional text editor tool.

This program allows me to open up about 999 rvmat files at once.

I have no idea if there is a free text editor who can do this.

If there is somebody who knows how to change a shitload of files at once, please give us the magic answer.

http://www.idmcomp.com/index.html

As soon as I have an alternate way of doing this I will explain in an update to this manual.

Now lets go on with the rvmat files.

So they all look like this and they should look like …

This.

So you only change PNG to PAA, twice in one file !

I’ll explain the ultraedit way for now.

Go to your layers dir and select all rvmat files (715 for me) RightClick them and open them all with UltraEdit.

looks about like this.

Now in the left upper corner click search → replace

Fill out the popup like I did

Click replace all

This should change all png to paa in all files opened with UltraEdit

Now you can click each window to close and save, but this means you have to do that a lot of times, this is taking to much time so we going to use the macro function from UltraEdit to do it just one time .check this out.

Go macro → quick record

After clicking quick record close an rvmat file by clicking its little cross thingy in right upper corner of opened file

Click yes on next thingy

Go back to macro → stop quick recording

Now go macro → play any/multiple times….

Check play macro to end of file

Click OK,

This should save and close all files open in UltraEdit.

Maybe go into your layers dir and open one of the rvmat files and see if it did it ok.

Lets browse our dirs and remove all stuff we no longer need.

First while we are in the layers dir you can remove all .PNG’s (and if you have them .BAK files) from here.

Now back up one level in the directory and move to your data dir, same story here, you may remove all .PNG files

You may also remove the “ijl15.dll” and “Pal2PacE.exe” from here.

This about the time to start populate our island with some objects and stuff.

Lets start by creating some roads on our island.

Start Visitor and open up your island,

go tools → roads

Popup opens click add, now give your road a name

S

Straight parts look

….25.pd3
….10.p3d

Curved parts look like

….10 100.p3d
….10 75.p3d
….10 50.p3d

Terminators look like this:

Special parts are all o

A

c

M

Now on the rig

If you have your road selected there when you now Left Click on the map now, this popup should shows up.

Select straight part and click next.

Pick a length and click next

Change angle if you like and click next

And click finish.

Then you should see this.

Now dubbleclick the blue road part, popup should open, click modify dir a.

In the next popup window select a straight part and click apply, see the part appear next to your blue part.

This should be quite simple to understand, now try to make your road with all the parts you like, when you are at the end of your road you close the choose part popup and click the gen. terminator button to close the side of the road you just made.

When you think you are ready with that piece of road, you want to smooth the terrain out under that road, In the script output popup, browse to your arma directory and go to the script dir inside the visitor dir, find the smoothroads.vis script, select it and click the run button

Little popup shows for couple seconds ( or minutes if it’s a big road) after that it should look like this about. The smoothroads script just evenout the terrain under the road parts.

Its not easy but it is possible with bit patients to get the roads to nicely overlap the satellite pictures roads.

What road we are using, I have no idea, if you want to preview just start bulldozer.

I am not gone take pictures of all objects, plants and roads and such, you just have to figure that out yourself.

Visitor RC3v2 Roads

Lets start by creating some roads on our island.

Start Visitor and open up your island,

go tools → roads

Popup opens click add, now give your road a name

S

Straight parts look

….25.pd3
….10.p3d

Curved parts look like

….10 100.p3d
….10 75.p3d
….10 50.p3d

Terminators look like this:

Special parts are all o

Do this for the curved parts.

The special parts

And the terminators

And click OK.

Have this…

click OK.

Now on the right side of visitor there is the 3 popup windows, in one of them you can find roads