Skira Island

[JRD]

As the release date still unknown, I thought I could bring something cool to discuss while we wait.

Codemasters say they didn't "create" the island of Skira, instead, they "imported" it from satellite data.

That's how it w@&k (as far as I know, at least):
NASA and NOAA installed a topographic radar on their space shuttles. Its called Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM).

Allow me a nerdy explanation...

A topographic radar emmits radar waves from a known orbit of the space shuttle (a known height above the Earth's surface). Radar waves has a known travel speed, therefore, you can measure how long it takes for a radar wave to travel from the shuttle to a particular target on the ground and back, resulting in a measurement of elevations over the surface of the earth.
SRTM data is available for download on the internet with 90 meters of  resolution (a 90m x 90m pixel representing a place on the Earth, which is pretty impressive indeed).

Back to the game  ;)

What devs on Codemasters did, I believe, was to choose a place on the globe that has all characteristics they want in a war sim and downloaded it.
The place chosen is the island of Kiska on the Aleutian Island Chain, in the Bering Sea, Alaska.
Here is an image of the place I got from Google earth:

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Well, since I know the place and how to obtain SRTM data for free, all I had to do is download it and start fooling around with digital elevation models (DEM), which I use a lot at w@&k.   ;)

This is a contour map of Kiska Island

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And a shaded relief model of the place

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The island is about 40 km (64 mi) on its northeast-southwest axis and about 15 km (25 mi) on its northwest-southeast axis. I read somewhere that it takes about 20 minutes to fly from one end to the other with the fastest helicopter available in game
The most proeminent feature is the Kiska Volcano on the far northeast side of the island. It reaches some 1,200 meters (3,600 ft) above sea level and the last eruption reported was in 1964.... its definetly not sleeping!!!!

I used an open source (free) software called SAGA to create countours and 3D models like this. The edges are quite square as it is the original data resolution.

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These are views from southeast and northeast with the volcano in first plan.
Another view from the west, with the volcano on the background

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And one view from the top of the volcano overlooking the whole island

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I know images looks very raw without any sky or sea along with them, but keep it in mind I'm just fooling around with free softwares and data to create a glance of the place OFP2 will take place.
Devs on codemastres had a tremendous effort to make it look like a real place, I'm sure.

All I did was to resample data to creata an island made by 10m x 10m pixels so I can imagine what Skira will look like

Apparently, you begin your mission over the western side of the island and the campign takes you towards east, fighting against the Chinese army. If it is correct, I assume the final battles will be fought around the volcano on the northeastern side.... which would be realy cool.....

How about that for an open world game?

[spaceboy]

That's really neat JRD.  I saw those in the gallery and was wondering what you were up to.  Thanks for the interesting info.

[PZ]

Wow, J... that's some talent - you're going to be the mapper for OFP2, I take it...

Spaceboy said that the Fuel map is drawn on the fly so we might have a problem generating maps. 

This open world way of gaming is simply fascinating - excellent job, my friend.

[JRD]

Thanks guys..... I am actually wondering how they are going to make the landscape in OFP2. I found out about the original island and couldn't help but checking it on Google Earth, the rest is a result of a calm afternoon at w@&k and my pre-vacations mood.... all I want is to give my head a rest.
Hopefully they'll make a high detailed map avaiable so I hope I can do as good a w@&k as D_B's....
I'm not sure about placemet of enemy troops though. I think you can deploy your men anywhere in the vicinities of the battle field, so maybe enemy units are not stationary either..... wait and see....
What I plan to do is create posts about how I won a particular battle, detailing units used and how to face the enemy, but I'm guessing there won't be much scriptted events so the same battle cannot be fought the same way twice!!

[Art Blade]

Impressive, JRD :-X Won't be long until Codemasters see this and try to shoot you for revealing too many detail previous to release date :)

[Dweller_Benthos]

Cool, real-world game modeling. Brings me back to the good ol' days of making maps for the original Unreal. I had the audacity to import a model of the grand canyon into an unreal map. Sorta worked, lots of bsp holes, but you could walk around in it if you were careful and didn't mind how slow it was, since the entire landscape was rendered in polygons like everything else in the unreal engine.

I was thinking of doing something of the same idea for Battlefield 1942, but never got around to it. It would've been pretty easy to convert real world DEM data to something that BF42 could use, ah, the lost opportunities......

[JRD]

Who knows D_B... Codemasters is implementing a full mission editor in OFP2, I don't know what "full" means, but maybe we get to create real world maps using DEM like that and use them in the missions editor in OFP2.
If its true, not only the Grand Canyon will be a stage for battles, but the whole world (evil laugh - huahuahuahuahuahuahahuauha)  ;D ;D ;D

[JRD]

From the official CM site
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Hi all,

Am glad to report that I've now received back answers from the recent "Creating Skira Island" Q&A session and you'll find the first batch below. The team couldn't answer every single question asked, but as you can see below the answers they did give were quite in depth and very informative.

I'll be releasing the answers in 3 batches, with the first batch posted below and the next 2 batches coming on Wednesday and Thursday:

1 - 343guiltysaprk - what kind of tools did the developers use to create the island

To create the huge environment that is "Skira Island", our art teams essentially used a combination of 3D Studio Max, Adobe Photoshop and multiple home-built custom tools. Once the assets themselves were created, proprietary conditioning pipelines prepared the data for the game engine to use and display on-screen.

2 - 1Mystic-G - Are there any other environment sounds you had to capture besides trees and water? If so what are they?

Our environment sounds are completely tailored to the Sakhalin setting; we used the expertise of recordist Chris Watson whose w@&k can be heard in many BBC TV and Radio programs as well as Major films. Chris has captured wildlife and ambience recordings from the actual island chain, as getting the ambience sounding as real as possible is hugely important for us. If you decide it's time for some recon we want you to have interesting things to listen to after all.

As for specifics we have wind through long grass, through gaps in rocks - our ambiences are also tailored for the day and night cycle so you have a different feel when it's dark. One of our favorite recordings is the arctic fox as it's a very haunting sound when heard at a distance!

One interesting thing we have been doing is letting the battle rage on in-game whilst we record only the distant battle sounds and from those recordings make "battle ambiences" that sit perfectly in the game world adding another layer of intensity.

The ambience like every other area of the sound design is focused on detail and realism and as much use of "the real thing" as possible.


3 - ZaRiF215So - How Many People Did you Send to Kiska To Look At The Geography of the island and The Like.
We sent a dedicated photography team to capture every aspect of environmental detail, capturing everything from pictures of dirt, the patterns of individual leafs of grass and trees, up to panoramas that capture the expanse of terrain and eco-types. It was important for us to mirror the different types of terrain that appear in different areas, and to match that terrain to the vegetation. We needed detailed documentation to answer every aspect of the environment; on what do the beaches look like, the forests, the mountain tops, etc.

4 - wassisname - The island is 220sqkm but how high is the ceiling What is the over all world size floor to ceiling wall to wall?

This one actually took some digging to find the answer to. At the moment, we found the highest point on our island which was the tip of our huge volcano, and then added more than a kilometre to it. This means that the literal "game space", extending to the limit of the oceans around the island itself and the sky measures to: 32km x 16km x 1.76km.

5 -Mr.X3CuTa! - Which part of creating the island did the team have most fun with? (in-depth details please)

Several team member's favourite area of the island is an old abandoned monastery that was shelled at the end of WWII. It's visually beautiful, strategically key to holding the island, and a total blast for multiplayer PvP missions!

6 - Jujuman - You've mentioned previously not using any random seeding for the environment (Trees and such), but how was this really possible with a 225km2 island? Did you actually have a team of 50 people placing trees for a year or what? What was your method?

We have a really strong art team working on the game based both out of the UK and in Malaysia. Within this group are several technical artists that have helped to create proprietary tools that we can use to quickly create areas of content, and then zoom in to a very fine level of control (down to individual trees and bushes).

Rather than a random seed approach, it's much more controlled. We can rapidly place an entire forest, tweaking the overall feel of that, by say adding more rocks, and bushes, whilst controlling how they are all placed relative to one another.

We then use tools provided by our Rendering code team that are hooked into the Ego engine. These tools analyse the object density to make sure we haven't exceeded any of our memory limits in game. Finally, if an area needs it, artists can then go in and tweak everything to their heart's contentment to hit our high visual quality requirements.

7 -DevilSpike - What (if any) real world data was used to 'create' Skira? (such as satellite images, existing topograhpic surveys, maps, etc.)

We used satellite digital elevation data, which is generated by bouncing a laser off the ground from space. This gives us a terrain foundation to w@&k with which is extremely important to create a believable environment.

The resolution of the original satellite data wasn't high enough for our needs, so we increased the detail and ran a whole series of advanced processes on it to simulate water and thermal erosion, creating valleys, flood planes, beaches etc. We then took that data into Max and baked it together with other artist-created data into what became the final terrain data (including spots for buildings, etc.).

All that effort comes into it's own as you play the game, and you find yourself analyzing and using the terrain tactically, but also just enjoying the environment itself because it's cool to look at.

8 - SandmanCDO - What was the biggest problem the team had in making the island for the game? (which part of it's development made most money for the swear box)

Our biggest technical hurdle was just the sheer scale of the game environment when combined with the level of visual quality required. It's easy to make a huge environment if the data is simple enough. The real trick is combining quality with quantity and still delivering a beautiful result! Fortunately, the Ego engine gave us the power we needed to hit all of our visual targets and then some.

9 -Incidious Cell - From a game perceptive does the island feel like a living breathing place?

We've invested an incredible amount of time and effort into systems that help generate the perception that the island is populated with wildlife, changing weather, time of day, etc. All of these add up to build the perception that the island is a living, breathing entity in its own right.

In addition, if the player strays far outside of the area of their mission itself, they will find themselves stumbling across enemy patrols and other content that ensure that the island feels full and alive. (And that they're never really safe...  )

10 - _Jarhead_ - will there be towns/ villiages?

Yes, without a doubt. Initially we delivered the number and types of villages that would occur normally on an island like Skira. After initial internal reviews, we concluded that while it was realistic, it just wasn't dense enough enough. (It is an old, half forgotten, sparsely populated location after all.)

With that in mind, our design and art teams evaluated strategic locations across the island combined with overall campaign flow and dramatically increased the number, density and variety of villages to better populate the island more evenly.

[PZ]

Sounds like they have done a great job with the island - I am intrigued with their ides regarding the monastery and the villages.

[JRD]

Man... did you read the whole post that fast???

I'm impressed, we have THE admin here....  :-X

I was half way through it after posting and you were answering.......  :D

[PZ]

hehe, you're way too kind... I'd better read fast else I'd not have the time to do all the things I need to do during the day.  My wife routinely complains for me to slow down when I pop up the on-screen TV guide and start scrolling!  She's funny that way, and you'd think that she'd be accustomed to my strange ways by now...