[Skunkmeister]

Slovakia took how many years to make?

They had official sanction, so they had tools, and could likely get quick answers to questions.

In a few weeks, look at a map like the Slot. Slovakia has custom objects, etc, and looks very nice, but with a few years work it should be nice. I fully expect the Slot to be the best PTO map in PF, by far. In a couple months total work, mostly done by one guy. It'll be the best because it will actually look like the SWPA (unlike NG), because it was chosen well in terms of the area covered, and because it has better looking airfields. Imagine how much better/faster it could be with official sanction.

Screw the "evil" moniker, why is the map stuff secret AT ALL? I mean they could have made the maps outside the SFS files, throw all the parts in there that we have once extracted, tell people how to use the FMB to edit maps, and let us go to town. Keeping the map making stuff secret was dumb, IMO.

One clarification, I did the bulk of the land mass, and once I got to the part of texturing, it was way too much for me alone to work on. Also, despite the 496 000 square kilometres of area that the Slot covers, there wont be anywhere near the same number of objects that Slovakia has.

The only reason why the Slot map will be the best is because I actually asked for outside input and considered everything people told me. Right now I am lucky to have people on the Slot team that are as much knowledgeable about the area as they are passionate about the history and the events that took place there. Not to mention a high degree of perfectionism Also keep in mind that prototype to beta took about 7 weeks, but correcting everything to make it fit for release may take a while longer. I like to say that it will be out in February, but realistically, it probably wont be until spring break in March before the public sees it.

I do agree that the map making stuff was dumb to keep away from the community. I know Oleg's excuse was that they were all in russian and not very user friendly, but in a matter of weeks people here managed to reverse engineer many of the maps, and in the same process created tools for making new maps which are easy to use as long as you know the limitations of the game.

By far creating new maps is one of the more useful things that has come of the hack.