Biro

Had a blast playing the beta demo this weekend! It's crazy how things have evolved since we started up with OGR back in the days, but I feel some of the gameplay core is still there today. Have to agree with the yellow sound marker. It should never have been there when you have so many other ways to localize the enemy. Playing mostly in a 4 man squad this weekend we didn't feel the drone was that much of an issue. I was mostly playing tank and could usually shoot down the drone in a couple of seconds and eventually using the divert tank skill afterwards. I also tried playing the scout a bit, but I felt I more or less had to use the drone as soon as it was off CD to spot enemies for my teammates and this destroyed some of the fun on that class for me. My biggest wishes further now is a proper gamemode with an objective and a ranking system for 4 player squads.

Congratz to all the participants, good job and well modded!

Gotta take one map at a time. It's alot of work getting one done, but I have nice amount of objects and plants which can be used on another one if I feel for it. I also look forward to Ground Branch, Takedown and Arma3 and it would be fun to do a mod for one of those aswell.

On the original farm map from old Ghost Recon, the mission is to save two pilots who has been shot down and taken prisoners. Their crashed F18 is located in an acre north of the farm, so I'm rebuilding this plane to get it like the original map.

Yes, hopefully someone can do a remake of the original mission aswell. That would be "epic"! Thanks Buehgler, nice to see some of you old Alpha Squad guys still hanging around? I saw the webpage was still up, are you guys still hanging together gaming? ---------------- Have started working on the F/A-18D Hornet. I belive this is the first plane I model in 3d max, so I have no idea what I end up with. Gonna handpaint the texture in mudbox and I have a slight feeling this will be interesting as I need to make it sort of destroyed aswell.

Small update for those who still follows these forums! Last months has been really busy at work for me, so I had to take a break from modding. My shoulder wasn't good for a while aswell and this killed the last of creativity I had. Good thing is I have more spare time now and the arm is good aswell. Have been working on the map for a couple of nights adding more details and vegetation. I wasn't too happy with the environment. It was too "green", reminded me more of Far Cry then Ghost Recon. Decided to go for something more along the lines of mission "Cold Walker" from GRFS. Trying to simulate an early morning in Chechenya or Georgia. More updates coming in the next weeks!

Nice work Zeko! Cool to see some of the old schools are still in the game and your doing way better progress then I'm nowadays due to work. Impressive that your making the textures aswell. If you haven't tested it yet, I can recommend mudbox for some texturing. Works great! When it comes to the environment, why don't you do something a bit unusual like an autumn setting with yellow/orange leafs on the trees or maybe a dense old forest? Just throwing out some ideas!

Hmm I have never heard about that Rocky. If so they should start firing on corners before you stick your head out and I don't think I have seen this. The reason they see through the bushes GRIN created is that's there's no collision what so ever on the leafs, but this is possible to add on new trees/bushes.

Pelt mapping is an option under the Unwrap UVW modifier, which can help you setup the UVs for more difficult shapes as stones, faces, characthers and so on. It's not used much on buildings as they tend to have more straigth corners. Vertex Painting is another modifier you can add and just paint what you want to blend with a black (0,0,0 (default)). If you look on the material file I posted above the texture called ""fd_blender_df" with the bumpmap texture "fd_blender_bm" will be shown where this black color is added. There's loads of tutorials on this modifiers if you stumble into problems. I kinda new there was something like conform aswell in max Zeko but I don't have knowledge of half of the stuff that's in there yet... This can maybe be easier to use, have to test a little to see how it works! My polycount for the main terrain is 44k quads. I'm pretty sure aswell that this could be lower but then again this will give more problems with vertex painting and texturing as I like to create small spots here and there with different textures. As you can see I also used Mudbox on the terrain and it's great if you go over the terrain with a stamp tool to create small variations in it, but then again you need some polys to play with. The backdrop was textured using the materials I used for the main landscape, but I didn't tile it that many times. In the model file I just set it up as "farm_day_05", so just consider it as the last part of the main landscape. It's offcourse possible to set it up as an own model aswell, but I didn't do that. It's interesting Rocky, didn't know about that one! After what I can see with a fast look this is more about mission scripting then mapping or am I wrong? I can't promise too many tutorials either as my time modding is limited nowadays. Maybe it's better if someone just copy tuts of interest into the wiki? Biro

Well this tutorial is based on that you have a little bit of knowledge in 3d max and with modding GRAW2. If you have, I think it will be "understandable". I can't go through all little details, it's gonna end up with a book if I do. But please ask questions and don't be afraid of trying. Start up with bringing one of the old terrains into max with 3d Ripper and we can take it from there. Biro

In this tutorial I will cover how a terrain from OGR can be ported into GRAW2. This is the method I used when recreating farm_day but it's for sure not the only way to do it. There's probably faster methods I'm not avare of as my knowledge in 3d max is limited. This is not some magic method to recreate all maps in an evening. This is hard work, but a terrain can be done on a couple of evenings! Programs used in this tutorial: Autodesk 3d Studio Max 8 (http://usa.autodesk.com/) Autodesk Mudbox (http://usa.autodesk.com/) Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com/) 3d RipperDX (http://www.deep-shad.../3DRipperDX.htm) Polyboost (http://www.polyboost.com/) World Machine 2 (http://www.world-machine.com/) XML Marker (http://xml-marker.en.softonic.com/) Backdrop The backdrop or the horizon is used to simulate a bigger world then what's the actual case. A program that's really good for creating such backdrops is WorldMachine 2. Dice @Battlefield 3 for example uses this for their terrain layout. (http://blogs.battlef...de-dice-alborz/) I'm not gonna go too deep into WM2, but my basic workflow was to sculpt up some very basic shapes in Mudbox where I wanted the mountains to be, then extract a displacement map. I then used this in WM2 and set up the different nodes and such to give me some better looking mountains with erosion effects. Check the screenshots below to see how I set it up and the result. It's possible to extract both a mesh and a displacement map from WM2 and it can be taken directly into 3d max from here or you can bring it into mudbox to give it further details. It's alot of possibilities here and it's just to start playing around with the different nodes and settings to see the results. Landscape To recreate the terrain of farm_day I used 3dRipperDX. This program lets you capture the visible geometry on the map and import it into 3dMax. One important thing here is that I used a fogless version of the farm to capture the whole map at once. It's a mod floating around here somewhere that atleast has the DS/IT maps made fogless and this is also possible to setup in IGOR. Now I have all the geometry from our OGR map in 3d Max and I delete all unnecessary objects so I'm only left with the terrain. It's ofc possible to just use this terrain in GRAW2, but it will lack details and vertex paiting will be hard aswell. Running a meshsmooth on it will give some weird results aswell so I figured it was better to recreate a new terrain over the old one. Now the trick is to have Polyboost installed. This is a small addon with some really great tools for max 8. (I think maybe some of the tools here have been included in newer versions of max, but as I only use max 8/9 I can't say for sure yet.) Polyboost lets you create a new mesh on another surface, check the screenshot below from 3d Max and you can see I have the terrain from OGR selected as a surface I'm drawing on. Try to use quads only when modelling shapes like this. Now it's just to lay out the basic shapes of the terrain. Use more quads where needed and take into consideration that you will apply atleast 1 meshsmooth modifier when it's all laid out. Next I did was to bring the terrain into mudbox and I started sculpting more details into it. Not gonna go too deep into how I did this, but looking at the screenshots I'm sure you will get the idea. More details is better, but think about the polycount! When I was satisfied with the terrain I brought it back into max for texturing and vertex painting. When working on steep mountains or curves it can be a good idea to use pelt mapping in 3dmax 8, but try to hide the seams as good as possible. Because I had a high polycount after I was done with the landscape I had to break it up into 4 parts as the GRAW2 engine only allows for 65k vertices if I'm not wrong. Importing into GRAW2 I think this is where people imagine GRAW2 is soooo difficult to mod for. It's not! There probably has been tutorials on this earlier, but I gonna repeat it for the sake of how easy it actually is. Use XML Marker 1.1 for the xml files. This will help you avoid the basic mistakes as forgetting an " for example. Then we need three XML files for the terrain. 1. Unit file 2. Model file 3. Material file In addition we need to to setup the textures in "tdb_texture_set" files. 1 for diffuse and 1 for bumpmaps. 1. Unit file The important thing here is where it's pointing to the model file. This need to be the correct path, if not the engine ain't going to find the model file. 2. Model file The important thing here is again where it points to the material and the diesel engine file we extract from 3d max. You can see I have split my terrain up in 4 and the backdrop is called farm_day_05. These names needs to be identical in the model file and in 3d max. 3. Material file I'm not gonna post my whole material file here, but only for 2 materials. The material name needs to be the same in 3d max as it's in the material file. The diffuse and the bump texture will be shown where I have vertex painted on the landscape. It can be a good idea to use the same texture as a blender in several materials as this will make them blend together nicely. In the example below I have an acre texture and a grass texture together with a texture I called fd_blender. The "tdb_texture_set" files is done for all textures in GRAW2 so I'm not gonna go into this one. Now it should only be left to scale the terrain up to the right size in 3d max. I use a command map from OGR for this as I know it's 400*400 meters and scale my terrain up to fit this one. Link the terrain to a helper called root_point, add alot of ambient points for correct lighting and it's all set. Don't hesitate on asking questions! Good luck! Biro

Tnx all, nice to see some old dogs still visiting these forums! It's still a long way to go on the map, but it's coming together nicely! I have to admit I have no idea how this is going to turn out in coop with such an open map, but it will be interesting to find out. More rocks and some logs will be added to provide more cover and I'm also aware of the "AI see through" for bushes so visibility blockers will be built in @ 3dmax. Currently working on the terrain tutorial, gonna put it up later tonight. Biro

Five years has passed since I did the remake of castle_day for GRAW2 and it's still not a decent small scale tactical shooter on the market that can replace the original Ghost Recon. GRAW2 was a descent attempt from GRIN, but they failed on some of the basic things that made Ghost Recon magic for many of us. GRAW2 is still a very good game to mod and it does surprise me how few really good quality maps, weapons and characthers that has been made for it. After the crap called GRFS hit the market for PC I really wanted to get back into the mod game and it had to be GRAW2. With this map I have some few goals I really want to achive to bring back the true OGR feeling: - Create an open map with long viewrange. - Create new and good looking vegetation. - Increase the draw distance on props, characthers and dynamic shadows. - Improve my knowledge in 3ds Max, Mudbox and Photoshop. - Bring the some inspiration back into GR modding to keep the community alive. - Continue to support and upgrade the mod with new content. I have no idea when this map will be done as I'm still learing new things as I go along, but I feel it's time to show off some teasers and create some inspiration here on the forum. All geometry except some few props from GRAW2 have been created from scratch in 3dmax, only using the geometry from the original GR as a template. I will write up a small and basic tutorial for how I have remade the terrain, so maybe we'll see another nice remake. Enjoy! Biro Open woodlands, just like OGR! Garage and Farmhouse - Still need some more details. The Barn - Sniper, second floor!

Remember the same trees are used multiple times. I plan to have around 10 different trees to create a nice diversion so it's not gonna be big size wise. The plan is to setup this map together with atleast 1-2 more as a mod and not as a map. The reason for that is primary rendering distance on dynamic shadows which I'm not gonna start trying to explain, the second is called AK47. Because of this it's possible to increase the draw distance on characthers.

I'll put together something when I start the official thread. The trees are between 10-25 meters tall and between 1-2 mb (megabyte I guess that's what you ment?) with all the files needed. The map is just as big as the original Farm_Day map if you have played that one. 400*400 meters. I also have a mountain backdrop/background so the view distance will be bigger then 400 meters. I don't really know what you mean with bad draw distance in GRAW2...I'm setting the draw distance to all object when I create them in the files. For example the smallest grass will be culled away on around 100 meters, but for example a tree will have an unlimited draw distance.