Road Painter 2

[Homer Johnston 0]

Current Version: 0.3 (BETA) May 25, 2012

DOWNLOAD v0.3

-Download Mirrors/news posts welcome!

This should be considered "beta" software - backup your work frequently before and during use!

Caution: the tool uses your clipboard to transfer data. It's possible to get large amounts of data on your clipboard (80+ MB in some cases)... I've noticed this causes some programs (like mIRC) to lag strangely. You may want to copy something else small onto the clipboard after you finish using the tool, to "clear it off".

CHANGELOG:

v0.3 - added terrain smoother, file in/out operations (saving session, exporting road paths to file), several misc. UI improvements and bug fixes

v0.2 - added Operation Arrowhead road definitions, fixed panning issue with windowed or 3D res other than 100%

v0.1 - initial release

DEMO VIDEO OF INSTALLATION AND USAGE:

INSTALLATION:

1) Move the included folder, "_Road_Painter2.TerrainName", into your "...\Documents\ArmA 2 Other Profiles\Username\Missions" folder

2) Rename the suffix ".TerrainName" to your own terrain

3) Move the included folder, "@HOMJ", into your "...\ArmA 2 Operation Arrowhead" folder

4) Launch ArmA loading 1.60 Beta, plus @HOMJ and your terrain as addons. The supplied .cmd file is optional to help with this (all you should have to do is edit it to include your @folder)

Questions, comments, bugs, suggestions, maybe even offers for help are welcome! Currently on the future to-do list, in order of priority, are:

1) See if I can add train tracks to the system

Cheers.

------------

Old Versions for archive/backup

v0.2 alpha

v0.1 alpha

Edited May 29, 2012 by Homer Johnston

[droogs 1]

Many thanks Homer, will have a play and let you know and whohoo beat Bushy to the post :P

[Guest]

I would like to forward your release to the community by writting some news about it and update our pages (no mirroring, only info) but I got a little confused just now.

Is this supposed to be an update of your previous release ( http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=10346 ) or is this a completely new tool and the linked one should stay as a different tool?

I ask cause they have the same name except this is an early alpha and the one released was already a beta.

Sorry if this is a stupid question but I rather not delete our page while it should have stayed ;)

[Homer Johnston 0]

My fault, I should have explained this in the root post...

I consider them completely separate tools, however I expect the original one will soon be considered obsolete. The two tools work on very different methods: Road Painter 1 produced a file which you could import in Visitor using "road networks". Road Painter 2 generates dumb objects, the same as houses and fences - quite a drastic difference. I eventually abandoned the original project because it gave me so many limitations (and because I didn't quite have enough experience to code something as complex)... this rewrite gives me more freedom.

There may still be people who wish to use the original tool while this one is developed a bit more (maybe for a week or two). If the original tool was likened to ArmA1, this tool in its current state would be like an "open beta" of the sequel, ArmA2. Locking the original thread was fine :)

Edited December 4, 2011 by Homer Johnston

[Guest]

Thanks for the clearification mate :)

I wrote a news item about the release on the Armaholic homepage. I hope this gives you some extra feedback!

I will keep the old pages for now, in case you ever want them removed just let me know!

[minimalaco 30]

excellent, supports OA roads ?

I will try and then comment, thanks for your work

[Synide 0]

Good job. On mine the rmb to rotate the camera was wildly sensitive for some reason.

I noticed your comment about the old A1 road part 'kos10 75.p3d' - that's funny. If you open the model the poly's in the 0.5 LoD have been inadvertently inverted so there facing down into the ground. The QA guys back then must have missed that one.

Placing road-like 'artifical' objects is the only sane way to create roads in .pews imo, roadnets are a complete pain.

You're going the right way about it and it's comming along great. Again, good job.

Cheers, Sy.

[Homer Johnston 0]

excellent, supports OA roads ?

Yes, it should support any MLOD road models just fine - I actually forgot to add the OA road families into the definition list (RoadParts.sqf)... I'll do it next update. :)

On mine the rmb to rotate the camera was wildly sensitive for some reason.[/Quote]

I think I know how to solve that, but not why it happens: make sure you run the game in "fullscreen" and at 100% 3D Resolution, and it should behave normal. Forgot to mention that in the initial post as well... I'll find a solution for that next update. If that wasn't your issue, then let me know and I'll just add a mouse sensitivity slider to the side panel...

[Synide 0]

...run the game in "fullscreen" and at 100% 3D Resolution, and it should behave normal.

Yip, that fixed it. Maybe, down the track you can get it to behave a little nicer in Windowed mode. Defintely, not an issue that needs attention atm.

Cheers, Sy.

[hotzenplotz 138]

Ho very nice work , i like Roadpainter. Makes Streets so easy to my island.

The new version is Great.

Greez Hotze

[minimalaco 30]

This version is very good, waiting for the OA roads.

I try to add in "RoadParts.sqf", but no luck. :(

[Homer Johnston 0]

I'm hoping to post my next update by end of next weekend... currently swamped with another project I need to get out the door. In addition to defining roads in roadparts.sqf, you'd need to add them in the HOMJ roads addon... the addon adds them to the mission editor as spawnable/placeable objects, then the RoadParts.sqf file defines their geometry for the tool.

Naturally you'd be welcome to see if you could figure that out for yourself - I might be able to find time to do that and post it up this weekend but no guarantees at this point; might have to wait just a *bit* longer!

[edit] I'll almost definitely post a small update adding in OA roads this weekend plus one or two other small fixes. Turns out to be a bit of a nuisance because BIS randomly rotated one of the konec pieces (only one!) by 180 degrees... then I'll hopefully have something capable of smoothing the terrain by end of next weekend, fingers are crossed.

Edited December 10, 2011 by Homer Johnston

[Homer Johnston 0]

Minor update; OA roads added. Haven't tried importing them into visitor yet - let me know if anything doesn't work (please pay particular attention to the konec piece of OA asf2). Next update will be something for terrain smoothing, end of next weekend if I'm lucky. I should mention that if you import any roads with the tool as-is, you won't be able to smooth the terrain for them (at least not with what I'm currently making... )

Edited December 12, 2011 by Homer Johnston

[Wessix 0]

Hi Homer, i use youre tool an it is so great. Is there any news about the smoothing? i played around with some blurring in my heightmap but i had no breakthrough right now.

thx for your great work

[Homer Johnston 0]

Progress is slower than I hoped, but I finally figured out a smoothing algorithm that should work, it's approximately the same as the process Visitor uses... except hopefully I'll be able to make it more user-friendly.

Since I can't modify the terrain in-game, I'm going to overlay a point-cloud showing the revised terrain shape, above the actual terrain. In theory, I'll be able to make it so you can generate a preview, change settings, re-generate preview, and if you're happy with it then you can export a new heightmap file for Visitor.

Planned settings at the moment could be:

1) flat-width (any vertices within this distance of the road will be "flattened"

2) total width (any vertices beyond the flat-distance will be "blended" smoothly)

3) platform height (to allow you to give roads a raised center)

4) ditch depth (to drop terrain beside road)

Naturally the effectiveness of these settings will depend on the terrain cell size. The platform height & ditch depth may be useless if the cell size isn't very small, but on fine maps might give you the ability to easily make more realistic looking road terrain.

Here's a video showing where I've made it to so far; I just got the flat-width portion working. At this rate, it looks like it may still be a few weeks before this tool can really be as effective as I intend it to be.

4ZEsOUIfYNk

Edited December 22, 2011 by Homer Johnston

[droogs 1]

Looking good Homer. This will be a must have tool for every map maker's toolbox for a long time to come. well done

[[aps]gnat 28]

Wow!

And having a ditch feature would be great!

[Robster 11]

Your are a genius Mr. Johnston!

OFF-TOPIC: Sometime ago, I did realise that not being able to modify terrain in-game is a shame...

As long as you could modify terrain on the go you could get holes when bombs explode, trenches wherever might be needed, and a lot of stuff that happens in RL and infantry men see on a regular basis... y'know your shovel as your main weapon...

In fact, this kind of requirement would really make a difference between FPS war game and an infy simulator...

[Wessix 0]

Hey Homer, that looks so promising.

Have you thought of making your tool for buldozer.exe instead of making it as an mission in game? With buldozer opened and v3 in background it is possible to change the height of vertices.

It is also interesting that instead of buldozer.exe you can copy your arma2.exe or arma2oa.exe to your P:\ drive and change the setting in v3 and it works.

an in the v3 readme:

Viewer setup

============

First thing you should do is to click "Tools" > "System Preferences" to set the path to realtime viewer working directory (standard is P:\). All path indications will be relative to this path, so if something does not work as expected you should check there first.

Also define the call parameters for the viewer.

Path to viewer (Commands in [] are optional; leave [] away when using that command):

PathToArmaDir\Arma.exe -buldozer [-window] [-addons=addons.txt] [-cfg=PathToConfig] [-maxmem=1024]

-window : Starts Buldozer in window instead of fullscreen.

-cfg=PathToConfig : Forces Buldozer to use a certain config.

-addons=addons.txt : File containing necessary addons, if you want to see correct clutter settings for edited world, its folder must be mentioned in such file. Also, some UI elements might be missing if they are not called for by the TXT file and unpacked to viewer's working directory.

Example of addons.txt:

***start***

addons[] =

{

"ca\", "ca\data\", "ca\UI\", "ca\UIFonts\"

};

***end***

Visitor 3 PE allows user to use Visitor scripting language, which shares common features with engine scripting language. Some scripts may cause viewer or Visitor crash if viewer is connected.

just had some kind of brainstorming, not knowing if that would be possible at all.

Wessix

[Homer Johnston 0]

I would gladly make it for Buldozer, but I'm led to believe that dialogs (i.e. a custom UI) and maybe handling SQF scripts are not possible with it. I haven't actually investigated it and I could be wrong... If there is any documented info which might suggest it's possible, I'd love to find it!

[Wessix 0]

Ok, and another possibility if the scripts in buldozer don't work perhaps also not possible, but it came to my thoughts:

perhaps it is possible to change the .xyz heighmap files out of your script, since they are only textfiles??

just another thought

Wessix

[Synide 0]

I would gladly make it for Buldozer, but I'm led to believe that dialogs (i.e. a custom UI) and maybe handling SQF scripts are not possible with it. I haven't actually investigated it and I could be wrong... If there is any documented info which might suggest it's possible, I'd love to find it!

While watching your original thread unfold the other week I felt you should be doing this for buldozer instead too.

And, like you I wasn't sure that scripting etc. would be supported well while running in buldozer mode.

So, a few weeks back I did a couple of limited tests. Well, I sorta only did 1 & half tests.

In Buldozer when you hit F1 you get the plain unadourned game 'Options' menu. I modified the Rsc in the P:\bin folder to have an additional button that launched Gaia's debug console.

This worked fine. The debug console was entirely functional. I could run scripting commands like 'createVehicle' for instance.

So...Yes, you can run .sqf & do a customized user interface for buldozer. But, of course you won't be able to 'play' a character model for instance. And, scripting commands that are simulation centric would be problematic. Oh, and I'm not sure about 'mouse' related scripting in the context of buldozer-mode. You'll have to test that yourself. If you're inclined to go down this route that is.

I'm not much up on the UI side of modding. But, if you can get your scripts to 'fire' keypresses on the buldozer controls for moving the terrain up and down then those alterations will instantly feed back into visitor3.

Of course the roads you 'paint' (like when your in mission-mode in your current effort) will only exist for the duration of running buldozer and will not feed back into visitor3.

However, you should be able to run Jaynus' ArmA2Lib tool with buldozer and save/load persistent data to disk while you're in buldozer.

Then shut buldozer and flip back to V3 and import that text file - instant V3 road and/or placed building/tree etc.... :)

Food for thought eh?

Edited December 23, 2011 by Synide

[Homer Johnston 0]

Very ingenious Synide... hm, If enough of the scripting and dialog features work in buldozer, and if we can use the sleep and copyFromClipboard commands in a visitor script... a visitor script could theoretically loop, acting as a pipe from Buldozer into Visitor. I think just about anything would be possible then... these are very big "Ifs"!

[minimalaco 30]

OA roads run fine, thanks mate !

[oldbear 390]

I am wondering ... I am dreaming of a tool allowing to lay railways tracks as we are laying roads in your marvelous "Road Painter" tool.

I am dreaming of a tool to lay rivers as well.

Of course, we will need an addon featuring straight and curved parts !

Do you think such enhancements are conceivable ?