Chairborne 2594 Posted December 27, 2012 I have a few brief questions. I'm creating a road network for the first time and i was wondering if there are specific precautions i have to take in order for the AI to use them perfectly or i can just put them in the map using the standard creation tool in visitor and the AI will automatically recognize and use them? What do i need a terminator for? Is it just to set an end point for the road or the AI needs them to know where a road starts and where it ends? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
minimalaco 30 Posted December 28, 2012 Standard tools sucks, use this (roadpainter): http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?128340-Road-Painter-2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Chairborne 2594 Posted December 28, 2012 Cool thanks! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bushlurker 45 Posted December 29, 2012 (edited) I'm creating a road network for the first time and i was wondering if there are specific precautions i have to take in order for the AI to use them perfectly or i can just put them in the map using the standard creation tool in visitor and the AI will automatically recognize and use them? Even though there are alternatives nowadays, it's a good idea to have a fool around with the basic Visitor built-in Roads Network Tool... sometimes it's still pretty useful for making neat city grids, for example, or for when you just want a quick road or two.. besides, it's good to understand the basic default concepts... If you haven't already come across a link here on the forums, then you might want to briefly read the old but still relevant Alliexx's Roads Installation Guide, which you can find in the "resources & tutorials" section of my little website. That explains which road parts are useful and which aren't, plus how to install them all correctly in Visitor... Follow that up with a quick scan thru this equally old but relevant thread and you should be pretty much covered on the standard road tool basics... At the other end of the scale is Homers Roadpainter 2 - that tool abandons the "road network" concept entirely and allows you to lay roads freestyle in the main game editor, smooth the terrain to match, and import the lot back into Visitor again... Deeply impressive! The slight downside is that, in Visitor 2D view, the resulting road pieces don't "look joined up" - a quick check in buldozer and you'll see that, visually, they are - and crunched to a working file and put in-game, the AI will follow these roads just fine, but it does make it a little tricky to just quickly edit or tweak a "roadpainter road" in Visitor, or just quickly add a new small section... Which often brings you back full circle to the old built-in road tool - which is why it's useful to learn the basics of that in the first place ... Just to confuse things further, there was a "Roadpainter 1" ;)... This was Homers previous Roadpainter incarnation, and it was a sort of "halfway house" tool... it had the ease of use and brilliant freestyle roadlaying stuff using the in-game editor, but its output was basically in the form of Visitor Road Network import files, so you had to slightly laboriously place appropriate keyparts, then import the road sections one at a time. The upside of that was, once they were in, they were regular Visitor Road Network roads, with all the fairly easy editing and visual accuracy features they have (they look joined up)... If you want to have a go with that version of Roadpainter, you can also find it in the same section on my website... It's handy to know about all these alternative ways of laying roads - they're all useful in different contexts... What do i need a terminator for? Is it just to set an end point for the road or the AI needs them to know where a road starts and where it ends? It's generally considered wise to begin and end all road sections with a "keypart"... if you read the above basic roadtool stuff you'll have seen that a "keypart" doesn't necessarily have to be a "konec/terminator" piece, but often is... B Edited December 29, 2012 by Bushlurker Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Chairborne 2594 Posted January 2, 2013 Thanks for your help Bushlurker. I've already installed and used Roadpainter 2, it really makes road creation A LOT faster and smoother when i need to do long distance connections in a way that they don't look like rigid sim-city 2 networks, but as you say, the built-in road creator is much better when making urban areas, since it allows the creation of accurate grids. So basically the AI needs terminators otherwise it cannot use the roads properly or is it just a mere visual effect that has no relevance in actual gameplay (from what i've read the answer is no i guess)? Also, how do i create airport runways? The objects in visitor 3 seem to attach automatically to one another, probably to make positioning easier and in buldozer they look linked just fine but when i binarize the map and open it in arma they get f'd up and are all divided. Is it me doing things the wrong way or it's just the normal way of visitor complicating easy stuff? I've also seen that the terrain beneath doesn't get automatically smoothed like normal roads but i think i've figured out the solution (placing ground textures with roughness set to 0, still have to try this out). Since i've already got this thread opened and i don't want to spam the whole section, i'll write it here. How much do community-made building addons interfere with the overall game performance? I mean, i've found a few cool-looking buildings from various addons made by mondkalb but i'm afraid that using a whole addon just for a set of 2-3 buildings might become heavy for the server to run, is this true or it just depends on how many types of buildings i actually place in the map (so the server has to keep them in memory)? In other words, i have 10 different buildings, does it matter if they come from a single addon or from 10 different addons in a matter of server/computer load? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
