janus0104

Not gonna happen in the forseeable future, at least under the DayZ name.

If a mod tells us he'll pin it we'll gladly make a thread that links to this one, the model conversion guide, and similar topics. But making a link collection thread that ends up in graveyard is a waste of time, so I'd like some feedback from forum staff first :D Like a "If you build it, they will pin". Also, I looked into streaming stuff. If there's an interest in it, I'll stream making an asset from start until it is in the game via twitch.

We have an idea about adding some medical-stuff to the game, when that gets done and green-lit, coffee and alcohol might get added as weaker versions of them ;)

I'm afraid you really should come into IRC chat... The kind of back and forth this requires to figure out what's wrong would take days.

They sure are :( 1.) you need some kind of server to test on, since there's no dayz singleplayer. I think joe went around this initially by just using the ingame editor, but preferably you'd want to test it "in the real world". If you don't have a rented server or such to test your stuff on (and close the server while testing, screwing all other players) you just run it from your own machine. This means running the arma2oa server exe, but to get it to actually do dayz you need to have a bunch of extra parameters etc etc, server suites like reality help you with that so you dont have to figure it all out yourself. Download it from the location i linked in the main post, and follow the instructions carefully. This may take a while, I think it even took me an hour or so to get done, so... just try around, following it's instructions, until you manage to connect to your server. 2.) Start menu > Run... > cmd > navigate to the location of the bat > run it from there, then the window doesnt close when it's done and you see what it said/did. Then check what may be wrong (or isnt wrong). But it should take a little longer than a second :P 3.) Source doesnt have a PBO, the source is the contents of the pbo. In case this isnt clear, PBO is just an archive format like zip with some special stuff, so to get a PBO you pack the source into pbos and replace your client and server's pbos by the results you get from this operation. All the batch script does is automate the whole process for you, it takes the source folders, makes a PBO, and replaces the client and server pbos for ya. And yes, that messes with your mod, hence either keep backups or redownload when you're done testing. Or, you know... have dayz(incl. arma2/arma2oa) twice on your hard drive, one vanilla and one for testing. One of these days I might actually try and find out what tool everyone uses to record sessions on their pc and upload them on youtube, and just do the whole mysql/perl/reality server/source download/make a model/whatnot thing in a video people can follow. If there is interest in it. And I overcome my laziness.

Cool, thanks :D Hmm, I've never actually checked out tech dept. @Joe_Mcentire: I guess I could, but i might hold that off until it's finalized, i'm sure more questions will come in :D Now if only someone with animation experience with arma/oxygen2 could add something that I don't know yet, that'd be sweet ;)

Aww, did you have to? Now noone's gonna find it :(

I'm glad you asked. I'll update the main post.

Now that the drama has subsided a little, next update: Raw mutton. I also split mutton and goat, I really don't think goats are sheep. Grilled mutton next.

Yeah, when you don't have to figure shit out yourself :P And when you already have a working local test server.

Not sure which forum to put this into, so Mods please move into correct location if you disagree with my arbitrary choice here :D You need: - Some sort of modelling suite obviously... - BI Tools - P Drive set up - Those other tools (unrap, cpbo) - A color texture - An rvmat file - A render or something of your object so you have an image for the inventory - DayZ source - A p3d model - Optionally a local test server so you can see what your items look like ingame and tweak them. How to get these: - Modelling suite: Almost anything goes, as long as it can sanely export to the (widely accepted as the default cross-software format) .obj format. 3DS Max and Blender have the advantage of having dedicated export scripts. You can use sculpting tools like ZBrush or MudBox, but if your skills are at that level already, you don't need my help in telling you what modelling suites I like :P Anyways, I suggest you try looking into one of the big three in my book, Blender (free! that's a bonus), Autodesk 3DS Max or Autodesk Maya. There are other, I hear good stuff about Cinema4D, but I just don't have experience with everything, so... Those three I can tell you will work with what we're trying to do here (in the case of Maya, you need either at least a trial of 3DS Max or Blender, so you can export to .p3d). You can find the Blender .p3d tool here and the 3DS Max Plugin here. If you're just starting out with modelling, I suggest you look at the modelling studio of your choice's tutorials/documentation, and random modelling tutorials like this one. Join some online communities like GameArtisans and compare your work to, and get feedback from, others interested in 3D art. There's also many many art challenges you can join to try and improve your skills along the way. I think the big ones (Dominance War / Comicon Challenge) are kinda on a hiatus or s.th., haven't followed that for a year or so, but when one of these big challenges are happening, there's always spectacular work to get inspired by, while seeing the progress in their WIP threads shows you neat little tricks here and there. Hone your traditional art skills, how do you expect to make a good model if you can't even draw a somewhat recognizable soda can on a sheet of paper? There's great books about learning that, from human and animal anatomy to more... let's say 'interesting' approaches like this one. - BI Tools: Download - P Drive: part of the setup of BI Tools I believe, but also described plentifully in the internet - UnRap/CPbo...: Download - A color texture: Make in photoshop or similar, square with 2^n width (512x512 etc). Save as tga and convert to .paa with TexView - An rvmat: just grab one of the dayz_communityassets' ones, rename and edit it either in notepad or with the rv material editor. Most of them point to a normal map and a specular map inside the rvmat file, those are generated: - Normal map: Install the NVIDIA filter plugin for photoshop (copy of it available for gimp aswell), open your color texture, flatten all to 1 layer, Filter > NVIDIA > NormalMapwhateverthenameofthebuttonis, my settings for it (use the Scale value to set the 'depth' of the normal map, e.g. 5 makes smoother details than 15): - Specular map: Open your color map with TexView (one of the bi tools), go to Edit > Filters, click Load, browse to your texview folder, subfolder filters, load the specularMapFinish filter and run it. There is a more in-depth way that even uses material templates if you want more control over what's happening. Example for a rvmat: ambient[] = {1, 1, 1, 1}; diffuse[] = {1, 1, 1, 1}; forcedDiffuse[] = {0, 0, 0, 0}; emmisive[] = {0, 0, 0, 1}; specular[] = {1, 1, 1, 1}; specularPower = 200; PixelShaderID = "NormalMapSpecularMap"; VertexShaderID = "NormalMap"; class Stage1 { texture = "z\addons\dayz_communityassets\textures\2shells_slugshot_nohq.paa"; uvSource = "tex"; class uvTransform { aside[] = {1, 0, 0}; up[] = {0, 1, 0}; dir[] = {0, 0, 0}; pos[] = {0, 0, 0}; }; }; class Stage2 { texture = "z\addons\dayz_communityassets\textures\2shells_slugshot_smdi.paa"; uvSource = "tex"; class uvTransform { aside[] = {1, 0, 0}; up[] = {0, 1, 0}; dir[] = {0, 0, 0}; pos[] = {0, 0, 0}; }; }; Of course there are more advanced ways of making and tweaking materials and textures, but that's outside the scope of this guide. For all I care, you can bake a normal map from ZBrush, as long as it works... By the way, adding the normal map to your model in your modelling suite (remember to adjust Alpha Gain to your needs!) may improve the way it looks in the render :D - Render: with any old 3d studio, render with no background layer or anything, save as png with transparent background, open in photoshop or similar, copy the actual object over to a 256x256 document, rescale it to fit into the 256x256 size, make color/brightness/whatever corrections you deem fit, save as png with transparent background, convert to .paa with TexView. Compare the look of it in TexView to how other equip_... paas look so they all have the same kind of.... brightness and saturation range. We don't want one item to look almost greyscale and the other looking like a Jackson Pollock. - DayZ source: From github. Copy the dayz_communityassets folder to your p-drive so you get P:\z\addons\dayz_communityassets\models etc... - p3d model: Export from Blender or 3DS Max, both have plugins for it online. I prefer the 3DS Max plugin b/c 3ds max works nicely with autodesk maya, which i use to actually model stuff. - Test server: I think there are multiple options available, I use Reality because I find it easy to use. There's quite a lot you have to do to set it up, but it's all explained on that link when you scroll further down. Click on the "Zip" button at the top of the page, then follow the page's instructions to the iotta. You'll have to install MySQL (remember to also install the MySQL Workbench, which has the administrator and query browser tools) and Perl along the way, you'll have to copy over the arma 2, operation arrowhead and dayz files into one consolidated location, let it all set up and whatnot. If you're having trouble with this, please seek help with the reality guys, it's a little out of scope for this tutorial to go into detail on how to get a server running locally :D One thing to note however, in your server folder's arma\dayz_1.chernarus\config_whatever.cfg, set a password so only you can connect, at the Joining Rules set verifySignature to 0, at the ingame settings set BattlEye to 0 and down at the signature verification settings sett all reactions to = ""; you dont want to ban yourself just because your item isn't known to already released dayz versions or get kicked for running unsigned dayz pbos. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!!!! Remember, if you're done testing and want to play DayZ normally online agian, you have to put back the original dayz files (best to just rename them so you dont have to re-download all the time), or else BattlEye might treat you like a hacker... Other than that, the local server runs like any other, connect to it via 127.0.0.1 (otherwise known as localhost). Admittedly, you'll need a little extra knowledge to get all of this set up, but if you're adamant about it I'm sure you can do it. If you're failing hard, come into irc, ask for help and tell the people you're asking for help that you're trying to make and test models as community contributions so they know it's worth their time! When you have all that, put the p3d in the models folder, the color/normal/specular textures into the textures folder and the equip image into the pictures folder of the dayz_communityassets folder that you conveniently place on your p drive as p:\z\addons\dayz_communityassets Open the p3d with oxygen2, make a selection around your entire object, rescale it a little bit because it's usually much too big, move it to center after scaling - and in my case, I always also had to rotate x-wise 90°. Move, scale, rotate is all done with Points > Transform 3D > the transformation you want. You can also click Show Local Axis there to see which way the object will face ingame, blue arrow is up, you want it to be on the "up" side of the center axis, as center as possible for the other two axises. With all points still selected, click E, the Face Properties window appears. Assign the texture and rvmat in the bottom right of that window, pointing to z\addons\dayz_comm.... this is important, if you point to like c:\texture.paa it will search in c:\ ingame, which won't work. That's what the P drive is for, among other things, so it knows to make paths relative. With texture and material selected, click Apply, then Ok: Now bulldozer should already be showing you something properly textured etc aslong as you exported a proper model with uvmapping and whatnot. Note that the color texture is set in the Face Properties window, whereas the normal and specular map are set as seperate stages in the rvmat file. Next step, on the right of Oxygen2 you see a few boxes, one has something like "0.000", that's your LOD, or Level of Detail, list. Right click the 0.000, click duplicate, a 1.000 or s.th. like that will be added. Right click the new thing > Properties > ShadowVolume and okay. It will say ShadowVolume 1.000 now. Doubleclick it to make it the active LOD in the editor, select all vertices, hit E again to bring up face properties, make the texture and rvmat fields empty and click apply. Shadow points cant have materials. Click Structure > Topology > Find Non-Closed. If any points are selected (red) after this, you have to fix them or it won't work. Select all points of your shadow volume again > Structure > Triangulate. Now hit the key U to make sharp edges. Rightclick into the LOD box again (but not on one of the two LODs you have now), click create and set the Property to be "Geometry". Make sure it's selected by double-clicking it, your model will be shown as yellow now. Create > Box > Okay to make a simple box. Move and scale so it creates a bounding box tightly around your model. Rightclick into the LOD box again (but not on one of the tree LODs you have now), click create and set the Property to be "LandContact". Make sure it's selected by double-clicking it, your model will be shown as yellow. If you are in 4-view mode, which I suggest you use (File > Options > Start in four views > On), leftclick on a view that easily shows you where top and bottom is on your model. Point to a little bit "below" your model (in respect to local axis, not visually below) and hit the Insert key to place a vertex there. With the other views make sure it's centered somewhat under your object, this will (to some extent) be used by the game so the object doesn't spawn in the ground. Note that you can export (and actually SHOULD export, for high poly models) multiple versions of a model as different LODs, so that from a certain distance the game doesnt try and render such a "complex" object. I won't go into this in more detail here, though. It's fairly easy once you have gotten used to all these steps here. Your screen may look something like this now: Save your .p3d, pick some item in the dayz_code/CfgMagazines.hpp you want to replace for testing purposes - preferably one that already uses dayz_communityassets so you only have to change the last part of the path -, change the model and picture (the latter being the inventory icon) to yours, save. Use cpbo to package all your pbos again, you can sign them too and stuff but for internal testing, I just skip all that nonsense and run the local test server with signature check and battleeye disabled. The link points to a batch script, just save the contents to a .bat file and put it somewhere, e.g. as P:\dayz_communityassets.bat, and change the path variables to reflect your local installation. The server/serverpbo stuff is for my local Reality server, with server being the normal pbos, and serverpbo being the location of the dayz_server.pbo If this is all different from what you have locally, just change it using this as an example. God I wish this forum software allowed spoiler thingies. Since this was asked, I'll explain shortly what the paths are: set tools="D:\dayz\cpbo" <-- This is the location of the cpbo executable. If you installed it to be c:\cpbo\cpbo.exe then this one would be set tools="C:\cpbo" set target="D:\steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead\@DayZ\Addons" <-- This is the location of the pbo files for your DayZ CLIENT (i.e., the actual game you play with) set server="D:\dayz\local\DayZ-Private-master-1.7.5\arma\@DayZ\Addons" <-- This is the location those same pbo files are for your local test server (the server pbos and client pbos need to match *exception being that you can change textures and models in the client without updating the server, since the server doesnt really care what an object looks like*) set serverpbo="D:\dayz\local\DayZ-Private-master-1.7.5\arma\@reality_1.chernarus\addons" <- There is one special file, the dayz_server.pbo that runs stuff the client doesn't. It has it's own location (at least for reality) so it needs it's own path variable. set source="D:\dayz\source\SQF" <-- This is the location of your copy of the git repository that I told you about above for "getting the dayz source". the source has multiple folders each containing the contents for a different .pbo file. If you download the source to be at c:\dayz_source\ it should be set source="C:\dayz_source\SQF" set asset="P:\z\addons" <- this is the location of your dayz_communityassets folder. You have to copy that one folder from the dayz source folder to the p drive so you can properly work with them, and it should be at the P:\z\addons\ location If you're just starting out you can just aswell use BinPBO, which is shipped with the BIS Tools package. You tell it what folder to package (select p:\z\addons\dayz_communityassets) and where to put the result (select the dayz_communityassets.pbo in your arma2oa/@DayZ/Addons folder), make sure that Binarize is unchecked(!!!!!!!!!) and package. This is how I initially did it too, and only moved some changed cfgMagazines.cpps and stuff (so i actually get to see the items ingame) manually into the dayz_code.pbo with pbo manager (you cant package dayz_communityassets with pbo manager, i believe, because it binarizes your models, then arma cant load them?). The advantage of the batch script is that it updates all the pbos at once, not just dayz_communityassets, and you dont have to copy over the updated pbo from your client folder to your test server folder each time. So it may take some time to get it working right, but it will save you lots of time in the long run. Oh, just incase you are confused about the p drive's folders and whatnot, here's what it looks like for me (ignore extra folders other than \z\, those are just for temp stuff and backups and whatnot): I hope this short intersection has helped you get the packaging done. No go ingame and test :D If your model is too big, rescale the model - and remember to check if the geometry box is still around it properly. For shadow volume I find it easier to just delete the existing LOD and make a new one by duplicating the model rather than trying to move those exactly the same way as the model or s.th. tedious like that. It's only like 5 steps to make the shadow volume LOD unless you have non-closed meshs or stuff like that. If your model is somewhat in the ground, try moving the LandContact vertice further away from the model, if that doesn't help, move the model away from the ground :D For weapons: Get the object the size you want it to be ingame first, as a normal object. Then, add a Memory LOD in Oxygen 2. Using the insert key, add four vertices to the memory LOD (i think just the two for barrel are really required, but let's stick to the default, right?). One at the front of the weapon / inside the barrel, where the bullet comes out (for melee weapons, just get it to the very front of your weapon model). One at the other end of the weapon, but (this is important!!! otherwise your gun won't shoot straight, and for melee weapons those two target circles you may know from ingame will never synch up and your hitting will be at least slightly off) make both at the same height. Place 2 inside the model, for a gun this will be where the shell starts flying out (the 2nd one being used to tell the game which direction they fly. A single point has no direction vector :D). Now, select the one at the barrel/front, rightclick into the selection box on your right (not the LOD one, not the history one :P) and click New, name it "usti hlavne" without the quotation marks, czech for barrel or s.th. Select the one at the other end, make a new selection and name it "konec hlavne". Select the one where shells should start flying out, create a selection named "nabojnicestart", select the one where the shells fly to, make a selection named "nabojniceend". Select all four vertices and make a selection called "zbran", apparently 'weapon' in czech. Save this as a seperate .p3d from the weapon's "item". The item will be used to lay on the ground, the one with the memory LODs in the player's hands. Make sure the geometry box around the item is big enough or people will have a hard time picking it up from the ground. When ingame, you'll find that the weapon isn't properly in your hand AT ALL. Delete the shadow volume LOD for now and the geometry LOD, you can create those again (if you want) when the weapon is properly located). Move your object in the 0.000 LOD (and other mesh LODs if you have them) trial & error style until you get it looking right ingame (there must be a better way than trial & error, but I haven't found it yet). Make sure NOT TO MOVE THE MEMORY LODs!! This is important, or at least that's how it worked for the machete. If the LODs were to be placed in the final location/rotation of the weapon, the gun won't work. That's why we created those before moving the model into position. In the case of the machete, this makes for an interesting displacement: Animations: I have, honest to god, no idea how to make these properly with O2. If the guy who made the combatroll wants to pitch in, I'd be more than happy. Until then, I can't add any animations :( Nor do I know how to make new zeds or zed skins... So anyone with further info than me, feel free to pitch in. But PLEASE, don't just reply linking some arcane arma2 modding forum thread if you haven't reproduced it's steps and made sure it works. I can google myself, thank you very much. A great resource from which I learned weaponmaking is also found here. When you get something working ingame and you think it's ready to be considered for putting into the mod, approach the devs, easiest via irc (irc.thekreml.in:6667 #dayz) This information is provided as-is, I'm not going to babysit people through their first steps in a modelling suite or how to change a batch file to use the correct folders for their installation. Use your head, that's what it's for ;) If you have tried for 15 minutes, including google search, THEN you may ask in a reply and I'll try to update this guide to reflect any ambiguous steps. Good luck, and may the gods be with you.

Filter for custom stuff at the dropdown on the top, it shows the action key assignments.

You're tarnishing our reputation as the evil henchmen of a power-hungry devtator :(

It's not fixed, and it's 30m. Be on foot >30m from a building and loot will spawn.

There is a legitimate desire for this: - Trying out the game, getting the hang of controls and whatnot for people who play it for the very VERY first time. - When your internet is down. - LAN parties. - Modding. - Testing what you think is a bug in SA but could just aswell be from lag.