CUP Terrains for DayZ

[NonovUrbizniz (DayZ) 137]

Hi, I'm NonovUrbizniz/CiforDayZServer

This isn't official by any stretch yet, as there needs to be an adjustment to the APL and APL-SA for me to go ahead with the project, it will also require the official tools, and to ensure that all parties who've contributed over the years to CUP Terrains are ok with their work being ported to DayZ. There are quite a few people who have spent a lot of time bringing CUP Terrains up to a standard there is NO WAY I could have ever accomplished on my own. Lots of varied skills applied over dozens and dozens of hours improving things from configs, models, to textures... it's really a mountain of work. I am fairly confident that everyone who's contributed will be fine with the transition as I stressed the importance of CUP Terrains being something freely available to as many players and fans of Bohemia Interactive.

Having said that, M1lkm8n did the VAST majority of the opened buildings and I did the others, most of the vegetation will need to be gone through again anyway, so the work that has been done by others can be re-done for DayZ specifically if there are any permission concerns. Lots of the assets in CUP Terrains remain largely unchanged from their initial release from Bohemia.

It is an ENORMOUS project to port over, but I can get a working copy done fairly quickly... to go through everything and ensure it's optimized for DayZ is something that I don't see as an attainable goal by myself, however I hope that the project generates interest and people willing to contribute.

My real life commitments have taken up the majority of my time for the last few years so I have not contributed much work to CUP Terrains since it's initial release, but leading up to it I was hoping it would be a good opportunity to teach people the ins and outs of modding. 

To that end I created a series of Arma Modding tutorials (7 videos in total), which at this point are definitely outdated, but are broad enough in scope that they're still very applicable, and from what I can tell going through the DayZ files, it's all very relevant to DayZ.

In the coming months, I plan to get back into Arma modding and clean up CUP Terrains in an effort to prepare for the shift to DayZ. I will HOPEFULLY be documenting some things along the way and preparing some refreshed tutorials for Arma 3 and DayZ as info becomes available.

Anyone with experience in any aspect of model editing or terrain building is more than welcome to make contact if you want to contribute! Anyone who wants to learn, feel free to follow along, and hopefully at some point I will get a batch of tutorials out that introduce the basics of modelling and finishing models for use in game. There are  a lot of relevant links to same in the descriptions of my videos (which have written tutorials linked as well (links may be broken let me know I'll find/fix them).

 

*edit*
In case you are not familiar with CUP Terrains

CUP Terrains is a project for Arma 3 that "ported" all of the terrains from previous Arma games released in the Bohemia Public Data Releases. More Details about that project can be found here: https://forums.bohemia.net/forums/topic/186835-community-upgrade-project-cup-terrains/

The intent for DayZ is to will include:

Rahmadi
Sahrani
Southern Sahrani
United Sahrani
Porto
Utes
Chernarus
Chernarus Summer
Desert
Takistan
Zargabad
Shapur
Proving Grounds
Bukovina
Bystrica
Takistan Mountains

The OFP maps will NOT be included.

*/edit*

Edited August 29, 2018 by NonovUrbizniz (DayZ)

[Funkdoc 46]

i appreciate your upgrade project for dayz and i m kind of excited what this will bring to the game. i hope u will find a way and time to "compile" those maps for a useful manner as MP maps for dayz. do you plan to make new variants of A3 assets like buildings, thinking of furniture in enterable houses and expand unused building space for new rooms...?

Big Ups

[NonovUrbizniz (DayZ) 137]

Well, the entire project hinges on 2 things.

1. BI has to change the APL and APL-SA licenses to allow use of Arma models in DayZ SA. I'm not sure if this will or won't happen, I'm sure they want it to, but commercial products can be complicated.

2. In order to actually get the terrains to load in DayZ they will likely need to be "repacked" which will require rebuilding source files that BI did no make available. It is possible to create them, and the CUP Terrains team is currently working to that end in order to improve the maps for Arma 3.

IF 1 happens but 2 does not, then at the very least I can port in all the "natural and artificial objects" (buildings, plants, signs, and roads) so that anyone who DID create their terrain in Arma 2, or Arma 3 using ONLY CUP Core, or their own models.

Having thought about it, it's fairly unlikely (although not impossible) that Bohemia is going to release source for Arma 3, which would be needed in order for addon author's to use any of the assets they used from Arma 3 in their addon's for DayZ... so it MIGHT get fairly complicated for terrain makes to use their A3 map source to make DayZ maps.... OR BI might have seen all this on the horizon and has a plan... really could be either way.

There is also a distinct possibility that for DayZ (and eventually Arma 4) they're looking to make a break from legacy content... which is a valid position... the older content doesn't really standup against freshly created modder content, much less DayZ or Arma 3 quality models...

It can be improved, and re-worked but more often than not the majority of it remains as it was originally shared with minor tweaks.

As far as new buildings... there are already a fairly large amount of opened buildings in CUP, and other team members are currently working on making that more of a priority, so I believe some more buildings may be included eventually.

I am not sure I will start modelling buildings again, it was very time consuming and I wasn't particularly good at a lot of portions of it.

Here are some of the buildings that M1lkm8n and I did for SMD Sahrani (he did most of the work) almost all of these were closed buildings from Arma 1. 
 

They all got heavily reworked as well, all materials and pathways and geometries were gone through, they were given shattering glass before Arma 3 had it (arma 2 didn't have it at all)

Some even got animated destruction:
 

All this was done for our DayZ Derivative mod, where you spawned with limited storage capacity, had to find clothes, and backpacks to expand, had helmets and vests that gave increased damage protection, inventory crafting, object crafting based on books you had to find, Zombies that would attack anyone who shot at anyone, and spawned anywhere, not just in towns, and didn't get cleaned up so you couldn't tell if there was someone in a town or not. We spawned trash loot so you could tell that it was a loot spawn point but still had to search for good loot... only helicopter crashes spawned hi powered weapons, vehicles didn't spawn with ammo on ever restart, fully recolored UI and menu screens You could throw bricks for 1 shot kills to zombies... lots and lots and lots of tweaks to the original mod.
 

 

And TONS and TONS of custom zombie and player models as well as custom vehicles helis planes, cars, suvs mostly just retextures to match the factions... we made it so that ALL the characters showed backpacks when they were equipped, and so that women players could wear ghillie suits... we almost had equal armored vest/helmet models done for the females, and female zombies, but never finished those.
 

This thread has all the features and details: https://opendayz.net/threads/dayz-sahrani-mod-development-work-in-progress.7373/

[SoloFlow 0]

I am so happy to see good map developers from Arma 3 coming to DayZ SA like Mike, Ben, and you as well. Will really put some much needed life into the game. Godspeed. 

 

[DarthRogue 8]

Don't forget also that you would need to do the navmesh for all the maps.  Otherwise zombies will be walking through walls on every building on every map.  

[NonovUrbizniz (DayZ) 137]

35 minutes ago, DarthRogue said:

Don't forget also that you would need to do the navmesh for all the maps.  Otherwise zombies will be walking through walls on every building on every map.  

They've already said they're going to provide a tool to generate the navmesh.

The key there is that you need full source files which were not provided with the Arma Data Release. So, as stated above, those would need to be re-created in order to do terrain level edits, and likely in order to use the navmesh generator (however it's possible that the navmesh generator acts upon an already binarized terrain?).

Either way... pleased to report the magicians working on CUP Terrains have made huge headway, and they HAVE regenerated the source files... So, provided Bohemia allow use of Arma content in DayZ then this project should be a go.

I'm going to work this weekend on brushing up my A3 skills and get ready to help along with the A3 project as much as I can, and when/if BI change the license I can begin working on getting all the old Terrains in DayZ...

I've been hearing a fair amount of concerns about the quality of the terrains especially the older ones, however after having ran around in a few of the maps in A3 CUP Terrains in 4k... I'm not sure  what they're looking for? But I'm assuming it has more to do with the World Objects (buildings and misc objects) which are certainly not at the quality level of Arma 3 or DayZ, but they're not that far off either, and IMO... I personally just don't really like the post apocalyptic design of the houses... I know I'm in the minority on that one.

I'm mostly interested in getting the project out so I can focus on making buildings again. I just lost interest when I wasn't motivated to play what I made any more. I did enjoy it, it was just so pain staking and time consuming, and honestly... quite a bit out of my comfort zone... I've picked up some more skills in my time away from modding that should lend well to doing models, but I'm still not a modeller which is really what you need... although anyone who is a modeller would know how dumb of a task this is and would walk away... I have a feeling a great deal of improvement can be seen just by tuning and tweaking the existing textures and rvmats.

[1para{god-father} 2]

Quote from Dayz Dev   -  "At the moment, using Arma 2 or Arma 3 content in DayZ isn't allowed. On the topic of the Public Data packages, the licenses are Arma, Arma 2 or Take On only"

So cannot see CUP coming any time soon  :(

[Funkdoc 46]

i think that was not the last word. i can imagin that they will bring some unbinarized Dayz samples like they did for Arma. they also will make a new license for DZ share alike soon, i think.