Altis Desert (flyingwalrus’ Map Expansions)
"Mom, I want to play on Western Sahara!"
"No, we have Western Sahara at home."
This composition spawns a massive overhaul of Altis’ salt flats and immediately adjacent areas to the south around Cape Thelos, turning an originally barren area of the map into a sprawling desert / arid combat zone with 6 major points of interest and dozens of smaller areas to fight over. The 4sq km of edited terrain includes towns, an oil refinery, abandoned military installations, an old resort complex, and more.
With Arma 3 well into its 12th year, this composition is part of a series hoping to revitalize lesser-used areas of vanilla Arma 3 with interesting POIs and mission areas. Work is inspired by bijx’s POIs and HarveyNZ’s Altis Reimagined.
This composition requires the setting:
Make sure this is active for the script to execute properly!
- Load Zeus and open the Compositions menu.
- Place the "Altis Desert (flyingwalrus’ Map Expansions)" composition on the map. Wait for loading to complete.
- Fly (in Zeus camera) to the marked location to view or interact with the POI.
Official Servers: Compatible with Bohemia Interactive’s “Pub Zeus” servers:
- [OFFICIAL] Arma 3 Zeus by Bohemia Interactive (USA) #04
- [OFFICIAL] Arma 3 Zeus by Bohemia Interactive (USA) #02
- [OFFICIAL] Arma 3 Zeus by Bohemia Interactive (US) #02e
- [OFFICIAL] Arma 3 Zeus by Bohemia Interactive (US) #02w
- [OFFICIAL] Arma 3 Zeus by Bohemia Interactive (EU) #12
- [OFFICIAL] Arma 3 Zeus by Bohemia Interactive (EU) #04
Singleplayer Scenario Version: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3624752683 (can be extracted via a PBO manager to edit the scenario in Eden, allowing you to pre-place units / missions within the map).
- This composition is large with a tremendous number of objects. Continuously delete bodies manually or using EZM’s "Delete Bodies" function to maintain good frame rate.
- Once done with missions in the map, use EZM’s "Delete Radius" to clear objects in the area to maximize restored frames.
- EZM’s "Delete Clutter" will remove parts of the map, as the map leverages a number of destroyed objects. Use "Delete Bodies" instead.
- Aiming down sights on elevated positions makes the terrain invisible?
This is a known issue with deformer when terrain is edited significantly from vanilla. Unfortunately, still looking into fixes… - Cactuses and other vegetation act as solid objects when you run into them with a vehicle!
Vegetation and as many objects as possible have simulation disabled and have been made into simple objects to save your frames. Unfortunately, cactuses will have to be driven around. - AI can’t navigate roads and has trouble around rocks / water.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be too much of a solution to this one. Most areas have rocks spaced out a bit to allow AI to navigate in the more open spaces, but vehicle AI will struggle with narrow corridors and water. Plan accordingly and give AI detailed waypoints to help mitigate this.
