Road Painter tool (development thread)

[bushlurker 46]

Truly impressive!

This will save weeks and weeks of work!

Absolutely amazing!

B

[shezan74 11]

Really amazing :) i think i must restart my island from scratch now :D

Thank you Homer Johnston!

[beton 2]

Pff... i can´t believe what i see there...had the same thought as shezan, but no i won´t redo all of my islands.

This is an awesome masterpiece...

I´m wondering if this tool could be used to create walls, fences and plants too in the future?

Nice to hear that some of you guys are working together and share your knowledge, thats what community needs.

great....

[mikebart 1]

thats amazing!, im really starting to feel like i've gotten into terrain making at the right time, hehe :)

[Homer Johnston 0]

had a rather unusual weekend with personal stuff... didn't have time to do anything to this, but I've added some download links to the first page. It is an early preview version!! Right now I don't have time to "support" it, so you're on your own to try it out and see how it works. The youtube video I posted above should help. I will be back in a few days, hopefully...

[[aps]gnat 28]

That is one awesome video! and hence an awesome tool.

Great work.

New Challenge for someone else;

Use the XY road points from the export file to "paint" a line of X colour onto a MASK file. Bingo then everything is done for you!

[beton 2]

Thank you Homer... willtry asap...

[Homer Johnston 0]

Gnat, that is a pretty neat idea :) generating masks based on objects? hmm, maybe that's worth mentioning in the "suggestion box" thread?

Beton, to set it up, basically:

1) extract roadtool.utes folder into missions folder, so you can load it in the editor

2) rename .utes to another island extension, if you wish.

3) extract Leopotam's utility anywhere (I put it in P: with all my ArmA tool stuff)

Then follow the beta video (open Leo's utility, load mission in editor, hit preview & try stuff out)

also, if you turn off "auto radius" then Z & X change radius. I think those are the only relevant keyboard commands for the preview version...

Edited April 5, 2010 by Homer Johnston

[bushlurker 46]

Ooh! A hands-on version!

I've allowed myself to get sidetracked with other aspects of my island and left roads on hold recently, waiting for a chance to try this tool...

I'll give it some extensive exercise this evening and report back...

Thanks Homer!

B

Edited April 6, 2010 by Bushlurker

[Homer Johnston 0]

anyone try the preview yet? I'm not sure you could efficiently use it for island building yet unless you have a lot of long open roads, but certainly just to see what it will "feel" like...

I'm planning on doing a major code rewrite to allow me more freedom, then I should be able to figure out a way to place key-parts and do the "export/import-by-section" idea I mentioned earlier (paint road -> set placeholder for keypart -> paint next road ... import each road separately into Visitor, placing the keypart in Visitor in between road imports). A more usable release is probably 2-3 weeks away at this point.

I will also experiment with integrating Leopotam's Road Generator algorithm too, so that you can draw roads by placing a series of points and moving the points to adjust the output... basically, use ArmA to give his generator a GUI. I'm not sure if it will work good or not, but certainly worth a try :)

Edited April 6, 2010 by Homer Johnston
I am a compulsive editor.

[bushlurker 46]

#include extreme_happiness.hpp

Well this works an absolute treat!!!

What a relief!!!

Theres a little juggling of apps and windows to get used to, but once you get into a groove away you go!

I had an hour to try this out last night and I'm already thinking that my remaining roadworks will now take a few weeks at most, instead of a few more months!

Homer mentioned previously he's gonna add the ability to add a "dummy T or X keypoint" - it needs this!!!

That would speed things up tremendously!

At the moment, the procedure I evolved is to...

lay keypoint in visitor - flip to roadtool and enter keypoint details

construct road section till next keypoint

export road section

import road section in visitor

add keypoint to end

add that keypoints details to road tool

construct next road section using road tool

etc, etc...

If you were able to include "dummy" keypoints in the roadtool you could generate a section - allow for a specific type of keypoint (maybe make a note on paper of what type it is), then since the road tool allows precisely the correct gap for that component, you could export that first section as "roadnet01.txt", then stay in the road tool and do the next section - export that as "roadnet02.txt", etc etc

Then later you could return to Visitor and simply import all your "roadnets", one after the other - manually adding the appropriate keypoints between each section...

Less hopping back and forth, in other words...

Homers already mentioned this, so I'm assuming "dummy keypoints" will happen, and that'll be the icing on the tombstone for the old Visitor procedure (although I still did a couple of short 6-section roads the old way - simply to avoid the hopping back and forth which the "dummy keypoints" will soon negate anyway)...

Can't think of any other suggestions right away - I'll have to use the tool a little more... (try and stop me!!! :D)...

It would be nice to view the roadtool procedure from other angles than vertically downwards whilst roadlaying - to be able to pan around like Visitor would be nice... we're not all following perfectly matching google Map overlays for our road networks guides y'know - mine is a crazed jumble of shapefile layers and bits of satimage cobbled together in ENVI, for example, and since I've reduced scale so much - it's simply not practical to follow every turn of every road... being able to "see where we're going" from a sortof perspective view would be supernice - tho possibly not practical from a coding point of view?

Anyhow... critique??? It's hard to think of any right now - I'm still recovering from the Sheer Relief as I realise I may now finish my island before Xmas! :D

... There's still a slight tendency to use, say - 4 x 6.25m sections where a single 25 or 2x12's would perhaps have been just as good - and saved on the object count (a constant paranoia with big islands), but that really IS nitpicking...

Homer... you're a genius!

B

*edit

I'm planning on doing a major code rewrite to allow me more freedom, then I should be able to figure out a way to place key-parts and do the "export/import-by-section" idea I mentioned earlier

Post overlap there! hehe...

Exactly what it needs...

Edited April 7, 2010 by Bushlurker
... me too

[Homer Johnston 0]

Oh balls, I forgot to mention it only uses 6m straights. If you want to hold off on your road-building for a couple more days, I may be able to "hotfix" that.

Rotatable camera will be implemented at some point, no worries there - it was low on the priority list compared to the actual "placing roads" aspect of the tool ;)

Any other feedback anyone has will be taken into consideration, so don't be shy. :)

[prowler.wolf 0]

This is coming along nicely. Been so busy that every time I come to this thread there is a new version to download. :o

[trezza 10]

I really need to install the BItools and try out some of this new stuff, went to windows 7 and i can't be bothered putting on half the stuff i used to have.

[Homer Johnston 0]

very minor update. not really worth posting, but I ate a lot of sugar tonight and this is fun, so whee.

arke4EEFHzk

[shezan74 11]

very minor update. not really worth posting, but I ate a lot of sugar tonight and this is fun, so whee.

What the hell, who's the fckg guy that created a full road network on my brand new airport? :D

Bravo Homer, a very very nice work :yay:

[[aps]gnat 28]

Just amazing!

Uber tool.

Will we be able to add customer roads ?

[Bartchie 10]

very minor update. not really worth posting, but I ate a lot of sugar tonight and this is fun, so whee.

This is getting much much better. Don't eat just sugar. Eat it with tea :D

[Homer Johnston 0]

Gnat;1604688']Will we be able to add customer roads ?

Do you mean roads made by other people, not BIS? It is possible - if they are "smart" enough to follow the same basic naming guidelines as the BIS roads (e.g. type_turn radius.p3d) then the name handling will work. All that will be needed is an addon to make these roads an editor-placeable object. Right now I am using the mapfact Editor Update addon for this purpose to save some time. In the future if needed, I could develop my own "roads" editor-addon which would allow any 3rd-party roads.

[beton 2]

I ave already ported over the cobblestone roads from arma1. At least in visitor and ingame they work as usual.

Sorry homer is still have not tested your outrageous work yet... lack of time atm.

[Lester 0]

What a great Tool !

Respect to the work and the excelent maths !

But one Question, is it planned to use smooth street apperance transitions like that:

http://a.kiel.us/smooth-hard_transitions.jpg

(In ArmA1 this method works fine with the AI on our Dreide Island and of cause ... it looks much better than the hard one ;) )

[Homer Johnston 0]

Of course! :) The fact that I was able to do transitions like this was an unexpected benefit of my changes, so I was just playing around :p. at some point I will add a button to place a konec piece, and automatically set the new road type.

Does anyone think it would be against the EULA or cause any copyright issues if I made an addon which included ArmA1 roads?

Lester, will you mind if I pull out the road configs from your Editor Upgrade to create my own roads-addon? This way I could maintain and update with any other roads the community might make, and include A1 roads. I will probably need to rename the classnames... e.g. from MAP_asf1_6 to HOMJ_asf1_6.

[bushlurker 46]

The Arma 1 roads (but not their textures) were released by BIS as mlods, and I believe that, much like CAA1, if you're using them to create Arma 2 content, there shouldn't be any issues... I guess you could PM a Mod - Suma maybe - if you're really worried, but I don't think it's a problem... at least I hope not - my custom models pack for my island is full of adapted Arma 1 stuff!) :)

B

[Homer Johnston 0]

A wall-of-text update for anyone interested.

• Roads are created in the following stages. It is more similar to Visitor:
  
  1. create key part.
     
  2. create road section (a name to contain all pieces between two key parts).
     
  3. select which road section you want to edit.
     - if section is empty (starting new), you will be prompted to click near a side of any keypart to start there.
     - if section already contains pieces, you will continue adding to it.

  [*]Keyparts can be moved/rotated with the mouse. Any drawn road sections will not move with the key part yet, but hopefully will later on.

  [*]Unfortunately, key parts still have to be placed manually in Visitor. If only we had our own program which could inject roads into PEW's. :(

  [*]The beta release will only support terminator and straight pieces as key parts (which apparently is all you *need* anyway). If there is demand, I will implement T's and X's (or other pieces??) in a future version.

  [*]Export will involve:

  1. entering destination path (default "P:\RoadPainter\").
     
  2. press "Export Roads".
     - All road sections will be exported to separate files that match their name.
     - This will probably take about 1/10 second for each section (to ensure none are "skipped" by windows clipboard)

  [*]Camera controls will be:

  - rotate with A, D

  - change pitch-angle with W, S

  - change height with mouse-wheel.

I have around half of the above working. Keep your fingers crossed, hopefully next week there will be a tutorial video followed by a release.

Current plans for future versions:

• Create my own addon which contains and enables placing of all A1/A2/Community roads.
  
• Map view which shows all road sections, labelled.
  
• Ability to save/load progress (I will need to write my own application for this which will take some time, because I am new to C++...).
  
• Test/implement Leopotam's algorithm; try drawing sections automatically with placed points.
  

[ebanks129 10]

Looking forward to the tutorial vid and release