Can the Arma 2 engine support large metropolitan areas?

[miscology (DayZ) 18]

I was looking around my home town of Edinburgh thinking how perfect it would be for a DayZ setting. It's got a large central city, with a sprawling superb, plus a castle, and seven large hills surrounding the city. Every hill can be seen from 6 other hills, so sniper hills have an extra challenge.

It's often cold, windy and rainy, fitting my favourite weather in DayZ. Lots of hills and interesting areas for DayZ players. There's a great coastline, a large river, huge old bridges, mysterious islands and lots of interesting mountains in the distance. There's an airport and old WW2 airbase that used to keep squadrons of hurricanes.

The towns in DayZ are unrealistically small, making me wonder if the DayZ engine can support them. However, if DayZ is going to venture into other world's I personally would prefer something that really feels ancient, decayed and apocalyptic.

What do you think? Is this the direction DayZ maps should go, or are you a fan of the Lingor Island setting?

Google Image Gallery for more pics.

[Mayuyu 411]

Really pretty city! I'd love to see a big city in DayZ.

The problem with massive cities is the risk factor drops by a lot. Servers would need to hold a lot more players! The ARMA game is hard to run, and that would be a nightmare... Cherno, Berezino and Elektro are too small, but it makes confrontations a lot more exciting.

[PC. (DayZ) 16]

To. Much. Houses.

[serioussam909 15]

If there were cities that big, then vehicles should be a lot more common than they are now.

[auridas330@yahoo.com 3]

I believe that Arma II/virtuality engine 3 can support large areas but the zombies would kill almost any cpu :/

[DayZPvP.com 143]

ArmA 2 has a very hard time with the current urban areas (anyone else lag in the factories/office buildings?).

I have more hope for ArmA 3.

[#momo# 5]

There are already custom islands with big cities avaible for Arma2. However, you have to make some compromises if you dont want a dia show with 7 fps, like smaller overall map, fps-easy builidings, etc. Only high end pcs will run a big town whith a high amount of enterable buildings on a 20*20km map.

Right now DayZ will not change the map anyway IIRC.

Some rather big towns for arma2:

http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=15482

http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=12315

There are more...

[OrLoK 16185]

Hello there

There are larger maps like falluja for arma2 but they tend to use low poly non enterable buildings to keep framerates up.

The Engine is capable of having large complex areas, but many machines just cannot handle what RV spits out.

In IFL (a standalone RV engine game game) There are large towns with fully enterable buildings, but the poly count is quite low and still many folks get large fps drop whilst in them.

Compromise is key.

I lived in Edinburgh for many years and to model a city that size in it's entirety would be a nigh impossible task (its a big place!).

To model the town centre would be doable, but dont expect to be running around castle corridoors!

Rgds

LoK

Edited August 11, 2012 by orlok

[Hell-In-A-Handbasket 8]

decent sized cities would be awesome. just the cities, could have roaming bands going street by street and even take control of whole sections of the city.