Map - Terra Nova Initia

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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21

Hey everyone! been a while since i posted here now, but there has been a ton of progress and soo much has been added in and some tweaked, Main thing im working on now is landscape for the surrounding land which turned out to be bigger i expected … so i compiled a overview picture for my sake and for those of you who are curious

For those who wants to know… the small islands in the middle is on a 32x32 landscape which is bigger theisland

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Edit!

I also made a small ancient city

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22

holy ****, that is HUUUUUUUUUGE

23

That map will take a long time to finish :open_mouth:

great work !

24

My god I think I’m in love with the platform near the waterfalls.

Can’t wait for this map to be completed. Although if it aint soon I may just continue with our own map an steal that location :wink: haha

25

You can get the miniature version of the map here http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=481811048

Or the full size map here http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=481811048 , It is unfinished as you pointed out :slight_smile: but updates go out rapidly but both maps are fully playable

26

Just finished a rough draft of the western part of my map, I also did some more accurate calculations and Terra Nova Initia is aprox 16 times bigger “theisland” And i will not stop working on this map until i get it to the same quality as the island which I guess will take me quite some time so any input and help is appreciated

What you see on the image below is the western part of the surrounding land filled with 3500 actors or 1400 dino spawners

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27

Holy dino ****, that’s gigantopithecus. Sorry I couldn’t avoid the puns.
If you are really hell bent on this scale (good luck) here’s a tip I learned making a map I’m currently doing.
Making all the near and far sublevels for your map is going to take ages. As is assigning the vegetation for each sublevel.
Basically all we need to do is make two template sub levels that will contain all the vegetation we will need for our far sublevels and for our near sublevels. copy them and rename for each sublevel we will need.

-First create a dummy sublevel for your far and near sublevels (I called mine "vegetationTemplate_Near and vegetationTemplate_Far.)

  • assign all the vegetation you will want to use to your far and near template sublevels. Place your vegetation on a small limited area of the map if you want to test your settings.
    -DELETE the vegetation instances from the map for both template sublevels after you have everything you want! This is important, when you copy the vegetation from one sublevel to another the editor will also copy instances. We do not want this, it will add lot’s of extra vegetation we don’t want. What we should end up with is two template sublevels with only the vegetation
    -Now go into your Ark dev kit directory in explorer and locate your map and your two template sublevels. These two sublevels will serve as the base sublevel for ever sublevel you will want to have vegetation for. Simply rename the sublevel to whatever you want. (A1_Near, A1_Far, etc etc.) This is also why we made sure we had no vegetation actually placed on the map before copying. We don’t want to copy more instances of the same vegetation on each new sublevel.

Good Luck!

28

That’s exactly what i did! xD but its a good tip for the future mappers, Im going to add it to my make a map tutorial :smiley:

29

Very nice, does the editor lag for you? Surely having such a massive map loaded in takes its toll.

30

Not much but some, only when i try to do big actions so i tend to do smaller changes at a time

31

A small update of the latest update i had to the map

[screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/L8kPeID.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/wP2NdjA.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/EOFMIJ4.jpg [/screenshot]

[screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/woUkTKl.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/okdfi8x.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/RZ9F7sf.jpg [/screenshot]

[screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/XlJZkUq.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/Ngbq9TS.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/AdmcpBh.jpg [/screenshot]

[screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/3D268sl.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot] http://i.imgur.com/73pJm4s.jpg [/screenshot]

32

This? All of this? Beyond amazing!
Just one question though. With the much larger map size, do you expect any negative effects on performance, and if so, to what extent?

33

I actually dont expect any side effects to the size due to the nature i stream the layers and with view distance, The only draw back i guess is when you look at a island or something from far away all you see is the landscape and no trees and they only render at certain distances

34

So I have done some calculations and this map is roughly 16 times bigger theisland at 1340 km2 and will require a lot of work to bring up to the standards and quality as the default ark map, This is not something i will be able to do alone and are there for looking for a maximum of two people to join my team and help me shape this map and help me improve it.

To join you should know how to communicate well in English, have a decent internet connection (we will be sharing alot of big files) and have some experience with UE4/ADK

If you are interested please add me on Skype (scottnewfield) or add me on steam ()

35

Hey, I have test-run your map, and unfortunately, it doesn’t work well on non-dedicated servers (couldn’t get the server launcher to install it for some reason).

Running it in single player, it takes only a little more time to load up, but it goes on to eat up 7 GB of RAM at which point the Unreal Engine seems to throttle (my system could easily dedicate at least 10GB). The result is very poor fps (10-20) and/or frequent lag. Tuning graphics would likely yield better results, but I wanted to test it w/o doing that. Just for comparison, running the island in SP takes around 4,5-5 GB of RAM and works at a stable 60+ fps on my system with the same settings.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t something you can fix on your end, but just thought I’d give you a heads up.

36

Thanks for the feedback Sench, I actually have never tried to run my map in non dedicated multiplayer before, So i decided to test this out on my system, sure thing it maxed out my ram starting up at 15.9gb (About 9gb or so for ARK) but after it started up the ram ARK used dropped to 2.5gb, and my fps was at a stable 55fps on max graphics same as on theisland, were you running this on a old system perhaps?, And as the map continues to be developed I am sure il find new ways to tweak the map for further performance etc, like right now im using several waterplanes to make my rivers, but when i have time I will be making river meshes to reduce the amount of actors on the map

37

Maybe it would have stopped lagging after a while, I wasn’t that patient and waited around 5 minutes, only taking a short stroll around.
How do you make it use that much RAM though? On my system, ARK refuses to go above 7 GB, crashing if it tries. Even though I have 16 and could spare at least 10 for sure.

38

Idk man, I have a pretty intense system and Windows 10, dunno if the last ones makes a difference but I had no lag at all once it was done loading, or during loading for that matter, it did take a while to load the map though like 2-3 minutes or so but i dont think itl get any longer that, Il remove a few files as the map goes on and hopefully that reduces the time slightly

39

It’s been cool to see this develop. Thanks for sharing!

40

So I just finished the last landscape of my map and thank god its done, Sculpting landscapes is such a dull and long process but I’m quite proud of the results. Now all that is left on the map is to place in the foliage, do some more final detailing and place in the massive cave and polish some of the existing caves and tunnels, and the slow and painful process to develop the fine details across the entire map to make it as content rich as the theisland as at the moment most of the landscapes are flat and kinda dull, but this is due to change :slight_smile:

Thoughts of future projects… use worldmachine

[screenshot]http://i.imgur.com/l02XlVD.jpg[/screenshot] [screenshot]http://i.imgur.com/4bzJUUU.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot]http://i.imgur.com/mMWdVdo.jpg [/screenshot]

[screenshot]http://i.imgur.com/zkNpDIE.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot]http://i.imgur.com/2m1s8BB.jpg [/screenshot] [screenshot]http://i.imgur.com/353U7rh.jpg [/screenshot]

[screenshot]http://i.imgur.com/Bn9NH0n.jpg[/screenshot] [screenshot]http://i.imgur.com/8b68hqk.jpg[/screenshot] [screenshot]http://i.imgur.com/OT63tOF.jpg [/screenshot]

Image explanations

img1 Some smaller islands/bumps in a shallow water area

img2 A small cave going through a mountain crossing the shallow water area

img3 Entrance to the desert from the north side

img4 A small oasis in the desert (plan on making some caves there and a waterfall

img5 A small Laguna just south of the desert

img6 birdsview of where the lava river meets the ocean

img7 Closer look at where the lava meets the ocean

img8 A overlook over the area from the top of the vulcano where the lava pours out and continues to run down the mountain side (This was a real pain to setup)

img9 Another picture following the lava river inland