Road Painter tool (development thread)

[Homer Johnston 0]

hey there - believe it or not I am still alive... I haven't touched my ArmA projects in ages, sadly!

I saw in your SQF comments about modifying the exe program. If you can describe what different functionality you need from it, then I should be able to edit and recompile it for you without much trouble. If it'd help or if you have any questions, just let me know.

[bushlurker 46]

Hi Homer!!!

Welcome back!

B

[wattgaz 0]

Hi !

In fact my SQF DOENST WORK as expected !

Placement of road sections (location point) DIFFERS from editor/arma2 and Visitor3.

It create "stairs", as shown in previous post.

DON'T USE IT !!!

I had to fall back to your original script, I am modifying it just to export coords and angle of 1st keypoint , to avoid hassle in coord. manual entering/guessing in Visitor3 (For VERY LONG roads, half a meter of misplacement of starting point, it means BIG gap at the end )

I tried to mess a little with a convertion algo. script for full import as objects (lots of cos and sin around, lot of cases to include all angle changes regarding the angle measurements and road straight/angle sequences)

I managed to do something but not universal so I gave up.

[Homer Johnston 0]

cheers Bushlurker.

hmm, it's very unusual that it would develop those "stairs" (I couldn't see them previously; was at work earlier)... since it's intended to work by importing a txt file, and thus Visitor builds the roads exactly the same as if you were to place them piece-by-piece (with Visitor). has anyone else been using the tool and experiencing the same issue?

[wattgaz 0]

I tried many times with several full reinstall of BITools here is the difference :

- Visitor road tools has internal computations regarding angle, directions management, and fine positioning between parts

- If you add them "by hand" as objects (I dit it for airport roads on my map) then when there is a turn, you have to add a coord change to make roads edges aligned in buldozer. ( Did it visually)

So I discovered that object (center?) in Arma2 is not the same placing point in Visitor and found EXACT coord transformation:

example : angle 0 straigth 6m asf1 = X 0 Y 0

then turning part has to be= angle 0 turn 10 25 = X 0.145 Y 5.819

for edges to align perfectly in buldozer.

An export of the same section from ArmA2 and your tool : angle of turning part is still 0 but X and Y coords differs .

So the combination your tool + visitor road tool is OK

but combination your tool + export all parts coords + import as objects to visitor doesn't work properly

Edited May 12, 2011 by wattgaz

[minimalaco 30]

Hi mate, can be made ​​compatible with the roads of arrowhead?

[=kct=blackmamba 44]

yes i want to know exactly the same thing.

if i imported the file, it somehow only makes a straight road for me.

till now ive manualy layed all the road sections and im not happy with the outcome

hope for a breaktrough of this insane tool..

[Homer Johnston 0]

Hey folks, well after something like 2 years of absence I've finally decided to tackle roads again. I've started work on a new version from scratch. Road painter V2 (assuming it all works and gets finished) will work a bit differently than the old one. I plan to use roads as artificial objects (like wattgaz appears to be trying to do), as I got tired of the terrible limitations of visitor road networks. The tool will also be designed to only work by drawing singular paths starting and ending with terminators (faders). No crossroads. The tool will make use of all available turn pieces, instead of just the 10-degree ones. I think this will satisfy 95% of road usages. It will generate an import file which you can use to dump roads into visitor. This is going to have some new problems, such as how to smooth the terrain, but those will be tackled when I get there. I should have a rough test version out within a couple weeks, then we can start discussing features a bit more. I'm eventually hoping to implement spline-based drawing rather than piece-based, but that'll probably take me quite a while to figure out.

Edited November 7, 2011 by Homer Johnston

[[aps]gnat 29]

Awesome news !

Thank you.

[minimalaco 30]

Great news !

[Homer Johnston 0]

Looks like the fine-adjustment provided by the finer angles will make it more enjoyable to fit the road to curves, less fighting over which angle works best... :)

(no actual placement functionality or GUI yet, just math!)

q03xcf_psEY

[Homer Johnston 0]

Found a couple more hours to work on this tonight; I'll occasionally post updates as I deem worthy, if people have suggestions regarding what they see I'd encourage commenting your thoughts, otherwise I'm pretty happy just rambling on to myself.

I'm making this one more modular, so that in theory new roads could be "plugged in" easier. It also supports any combination of turn/straight pieces you give it, so it'll work e.g. with ArmA1 roads as well. I can't even remember what they looked like. Anyways - made a basic "pick road type" dialog thing which loads all the types (as defined in a text file). The new curves seem to work great; it's incredibly fast to just click around and place road where you need it.

At this rate, I'll probably have another more impressive pictures-update on the weekend, and then *hopefully* something up for beta-use by the weekend after.

[DualJoe 10]

Wow this is looking really nice, even more so if you can "plug in" custom road-packs. Can't wait to try this out on my current project. I was not looking forward to manually place miles of road piece by piece on top of the dykes.

[beton 2]

That´s really awesome...

i believe there´s many islandmaker´s eyes following this thread.

:)

[[aps]gnat 29]

... I'd encourage commenting your thoughts, otherwise I'm pretty happy just rambling on to myself.

* We watch, we drool ! *

[Robster 11]

I am in the islands "business" because of you Mr. Johnston, cause Minimalaco didn't know how to use your excellent tool

If it would be possible, when exporting it would be nice to ticket an option to export position (x,y,z,) of any individual part of road...

Just asking if it's possible, but thank you very much indeed for all your effort...

[Homer Johnston 0]

If it would be possible, when exporting it would be nice to ticket an option to export position (x,y,z,) of any individual part of road...

You may be in luck; that's essentially how the new version will work. I'm going to use the tool to produce an "import objects" file. Users will have to define road objects as "artificial objects" within visitor and then run the import script.

If you have a very specific purpose in mind or formatting you need in an exported file, feel free to let me know; it's probably very easy to accommodate for...

[Robster 11]

That's great !!! Wish you luck with all that heavy stuff!!! XD

EDIT: I don't understand well how configs and code work, but certainly is good to know where exactly is installed some object, since it allows to introduce sharp modifications and amendments in some manual and, even better, semi-automated way... which is always a great advance to avoid tedious tasks... just like adjust surrounding objects or expand roads after changing some part of terrain, i.e., after placing some water pond or adjusting some near river, etc...

Edited November 17, 2011 by Robster

[minimalaco 30]

Amazing, we expect an update for roads OA?

[Homer Johnston 0]

Amazing, we expect an update for roads OA?

That is actually a difficult question, since all we have is binarized ODOLs in a new format. I tried placing one in Visitor and it caused buldozer to crash stating an incorrect P3D format. I may be able to try some "clever hacks" but they wouldn't be very fun to use.

After the tool is improved to a usable state, I'm hopeful that we could try to produce a few community-made roads and release them for public use...

Edited November 18, 2011 by Homer Johnston

[DualJoe 10]

I have to make a couple of custom road-surfaces for my 1940 era map as well. Would be great I the tool could be made to work with them.

[bushlurker 46]

Hi Homer! Welcome back!!!

all we have is binarized ODOLs in a new format

The Latest BIS Tools release includes MLOD road parts for OA and PMC - problem with them being, all the "usual" curves are missing... that may not be a problem with your new approach to things... :)

Great to see you back and working on this again!!!

B

[Homer Johnston 0]

The Latest BIS Tools release includes MLOD road parts for OA and PMC

Oh, perfect - I'm just horribly out of date then :p ... the tool should be capable of handling just about any combination of turn pieces, so ArmA1, ArmA2, OA, PMC, and user-made road families should all work just fine. User-made roads will require you to have them spawnable in the editor via createVehicle, plus spend 2 minutes defining the family in a text file. Obviously the more pieces you give it, the easier it will be to shape the roads. I'll be able to post more details later.

The two massive drawbacks this tool currently faces are:

1) If you need to delete a road from your WRP, you'll have to delete the road piece-by-piece in Visitor

2) The default "smooth roads" script will not be usable

I'm hoping the first issue simply won't be that big of a deal; make sure your roads are correct before you import them, please! :p Actually I could probably write some scripts to automate this a bit, but it's time I'd rather spend on other features first.

The 2nd issue will require some real work - right now I'm planning to make my own smoother algorithm which exports a file, which can in turn be imported by a new visitor script to shift terrain vertices. With a little luck and time, I should be able to make something that is at least equal to the smooth roads script, and hopefully without any of the issues that seem to plague it...

Edited November 18, 2011 by Homer Johnston

[minimalaco 30]

Excellent, the current tool is very fast and easy to use, and have not had any problems.

the second point, I think there would be no problem, I create the way objects using OA roads, and then pass the old version to flatten the road.

Finally, it would be faster than them hand in hand.

Thanks !

[mikero 79]

If there's something useful i can do for you with dePbo.dll let me know. It can read and write pew and wrp files (both types) without effort and detecting road-section p3d's isn't a problem. calculating terrain heights is an art, not a science, with the triangulation methods bi use, it can only ever be guess, not, exact. Let me know what i can do for you, if anything.