Bushlurker (DayZ)

The biggest task with any major terrain is all the individual model assets required to make it look even halfway believable... Take a look around Cherno next time you play - a good look... Everything you see apart from the ground surface under your feet and the sky above your head is a model of one kind or another - there's a lot of different models required to make a "city"... that requires skilled modellers - and time, lots of time.. Now Cherno isn't really too heavily populated by "major cities", yet it's fairly well known that it took a whole team of pro-modellers a year or more to make.. how long would you guess New York would take?? I've made a terrain or two in my time, and a building or two, and they're not simple boxes, especially when people are keen on enterable buildings... a medium-sized enterable building, from initial design idea to finished, textured and working in-game could easily be a weeks work or more for a pro-modeller... Take a walk down the high street of any medium sized town - how many different buildings do you see? - how many would you need for a city? a couple of hundred? - that's a couple of hundred "man-weeks" work - 4 years for a single modeller - a year for a team of four, 6 months for a team of eight??? Then there's the traffic lights, traffic cones, postboxes, streetlamps, streetsigns, pavements, roads, walls, fences, bollards, phoneboxes, billboards... the zillion other things that you need to make any urban location look even halfway authentic... Then you'll need a terrain to put them all on, plus all the "natural" model assets that requires... And then you have to put the two together - assemble all the models into coherent locations.... A Big City - a proper "western" one, is a great ambition, and I've no doubt Rocket will make it happen in time, but it's not going to happen overnight... What's perhaps of more immediate interest is the possibility of porting some of the Arma2 Community terrains to the forthcoming new DayZ runtime when it appears... There's a wealth of beautiful terrains available from talented Arma 2 Community artists. Gaining permission to, or interesting the original authors in, porting some of these to the New DayZ would provide a tremendous variety of new Infestation Areas until the next proper, official terrain arrives... In fact, I know of at least one or two "nominally Arma2" terrains which are currently in-progress and which are intended for the new DayZ when it appears... No Major Cities though.... ;) B