OPERATION MARKET GARDEN: VIRTUAL RECONSTRUCTIONS

BY YELTSIN PENADO

"Groesbeek Heights, Netherlands 1944"
1080x1920 (Screenshot)
Arma 3 Eden Editor

Operation Market Garden: Virtual Reconstructions

Operation Market Garden: Virtual Reconstructions is a series of custom-built Arma 3 terrains that digitally reconstruct the Dutch landscape during one of World War II’s most complex and costly Allied campaigns.

These environments function as historical simulations, performance spaces, and interactive reconstructions. This project focuses on bridging military history, digital world-building, and contemporary art practice.

What is Arma 3 and why Arma 3?
Arma 3 is a large-scale military simulation platform released in 2013 and widely regarded as one of the most robust and enduring simulation engines available on PC. While the base game is set in a near-future conflict in the Aegean islands of Altis and Stratis, its true strength lies in its extensive modding ecosystem.

The Arma engine allows creators to build far beyond traditional gameplay. Artists and developers can construct entire worlds—designing terrains, weapons, uniforms, vehicles, scripted scenarios, cinematic sequences, and custom mechanics. Rather than delivering a fixed narrative, Arma 3 provides a framework in which users can author their own experiences.

I was initially drawn to Arma 3 through its modding community, using the platform to create original scenarios and environments. Over time, this evolved into a broader practice of historical reconstruction. I am able to utilize the engine as both a simulation tool and an artistic medium.

What is an Arma 3 Terrain?

An Arma 3 terrain functions as both level design and virtual geography. Terrains define the physical space in which all activity takes place: towns, rivers, farmland, forests, infrastructure, weather systems, and time-of-day cycles.

These landscapes are created through a hybrid process involving geographic data, image editing, 3D modeling, and scripting. A terrain is not simply a backdrop. It actively shapes movement, tactics, visibility, and narrative outcomes. In this sense, terrain becomes an authored environment where history, performance, and player decision-making intersect.

What is Military Simulation?
Military simulation (often referred to as milsim) is a subculture focused on recreating military experiences with a high degree of realism. While physical reenactments exist, digital platforms allow participants to collaboratively inhabit simulated conflicts through games and tabletop systems.

Within video games, milsim is less concerned with spectacle or abstraction and more focused on modeling reality. Core systems often include fatigue, logistics, radios, command hierarchy, weather, ballistics, and real-time coordination. Players adopt specific roles, follow communication protocols, and operate within structured chains of command.

Storytelling in military simulation is largely procedural. Meaning emerges through preparation, waiting, coordination, failure, and adaptation. The experience exists in a blurred space between game, training exercise, reenactment, and performance: where participation itself generates narrative and meaning.

Why Operation Market Garden?
Operation Market Garden represents a theater of World War II that is rarely depicted with geographic specificity or environmental depth. While often summarized through strategic outcomes, the physical landscapes: villages, river crossings, farmland, and elevated terrain which played a decisive role in the campaign’s unfolding.

These virtual reconstructions focus on locations that are underrepresented or, in some cases, digitally recreated in detail for the first time. By reconstructing these environments at a human scale, the project emphasizes terrain as an active historical force rather than a passive setting.

Artist Statement
I am interested in World War II as a setting for narrative for several reasons. Growing up in the post-9/11 era, I was surrounded by the resurgence of patriotism in digital media. Video games, films, and television series transformed distant battlefields into heroic spectacles, offering stories with a clear moral framework. A world divided neatly into good and evil. This culture shaped how I understood history: not as lived experience, but as an endless cycle of reenactment and simulation.

In my work, I use Arma 3, a military simulation platform, as both medium and subject. Known for its open engine and robust modding tools, Arma 3 enables players to construct entire worlds and rewrite history through code. I employ these same tools to build historically grounded terrains and digital landscapes drawn from archival maps, aerial reconnaissance, and modern topographic data. Each terrain becomes a stage where past and present intersect, where history is reconstructed not through documentation, but through immersion.

I am particularly drawn to the act of simulating war itself and not only the battles, but the mundane rhythms that surround them: transporting supplies to a virtual front line, loading ammunition at a digital campsite, or enduring the silence between rolling barrages of artillery. These acts transform labor and repetition into ritual, revealing how the aesthetics of war are sustained in contemporary media. Depicting WW2 battle locations provides a unique experience where they are experiencing a historical event through the lens of an artist's estimate.

Project Netherlands, one of my ongoing works, is currently used by organized military simulation groups for virtual reenactments of Operation Market Garden. I wish to acknowledge the contributions of Brothers in Arms Arma 3, ADF, 1er RCC, and the Spearhead 1944 team, whose participation and recognition through Arma 3’s Community Radar highlight the evolving relationship between historical memory, simulation, and collective play.

Through this work, I seek to understand how digital environments preserve, distort, and perform history and how, within the logic of simulation, memory itself becomes a playable terrain.

You can follow my research process and updates on DISCORD

(Publication PDF view book here)

Development Process and Images

Topographical data is sourced using Open Maps data. these are modern topographical data created from satellite images. The modern topographical data is then sculpted using L3DT to reflect the terrain's height structure in the 1940's. Historical topographical data is a composite of era-specifc historical documents, books, and local research institutions.

Aldbourne, England 1944 - (water data)

Research Item - Map printed and spliced together
Eindhoven, Netherlands (bottom left)
32x21.5 inches
Arnhem, Nijmegen, and Groesbeek, Netherlands (top right)
11"x19" inches
Maps sourced from the Library of Congress: Netherlands 1943. I found it interesting that, historically, the plans for Market Garden were put together in a hasty manner. Military commanders had to paste together smaller maps to produce an inaccurate rendering of the Netherlands. Most digital renderings of Operation Market Garden reference a survey from 1943 - a year before the battle started. This means that soldiers were destined to fight in an unfamiliar environment, even with maps at their disposal.

Groesbeek Heights 1944 (Satmap) - 7936x7936, JPEG
Satellite Image: Creating an in-game world that feels realistic requires the production of a Satellite image (Satmap). The Satmap is read by the game and is a 2D layer that is applied to the 3D topographic terrain model (Heightmap). It's a massive UV map that (when done correctly) makes the world appear realistic through atmospheric perspective. When playing Arma 3 - at a distance the satmap allows the area to look more realistic at at distance. This Satmap was hand-painted using a 9-pixel brush (aliased) and took months to produce.

Groesbeek Heights 1944 (IDMap) - 7936x7936 JPEG
The IDMap tells the game where to put ground textures. Each color represents a texture that is recognized by the Arma 3 engine. Both the IDMap and the Satmap have to be worked on in layers to reference the same materials. This process is painstaking. The IDMap image was painted with a 1-4 pixel brush (aliased). The brush needs to be small to work on terrain details.

In-Game Screenshot of Groesbeek Map
Once the terrain is created. The program files need to be configured through programming. The coding language used is Arma 3's Status Quo Function (SQF). SQF is similar to C++ and allows the terrain builder to add in-game sequences - realistic weather models, Map locations, sound effects, lighting, and more.

Screenshot of Arma 3's Eden Editor
The Eden Editor is a powerful tool that allows modders to create their own missions and scenarios. In this instance we use it to place assets and produce a object placement reference. You can place an asset or object (trees, buildings, etc.) into the terrain you've built - this function documents the object's placement and produces a file that references the in-game object's placement and rotation axis. This allows the terrain builder to add buildings and custom assets.