Homer Johnston

I have great news for you: you're wrong. :D If you can't get it to work, post some of your code and I'm sure someone will look for mistakes.

In Visitor, the roads are added as "artificial objects" like houses. In my tool, there is a script file which contains all of the road families... the tool looks up what pieces are available for the selected family type, and uses them... will provide more info on the weekend. A snippet: // ============================================================= // MASTER TYPE LIST HOMJ_RP_RoadListMaster = [ // ArmA 1 roads "ASF", "CES_D", // ArmA 2 roads "asf1", "asf2", "asf3", "city", "grav", "mud" ]; // ============================================================= // START OF DIFFERENT ROAD TYPES HOMJ_RP_Road_ASF = [ "ca\roads\", "pictures\questionmark.paa", // picture for listbox [["HOMJ_asf6konec", 6.25]], // connectors / special pieces [ ["HOMJ_asf25", 25], ["HOMJ_asf12", 12.5], ["HOMJ_asf6", 6.25], ["HOMJ_asf10_100", 10, 100], ["HOMJ_asf10_75", 10, 75], ["HOMJ_asf10_50", 10, 50], ["HOMJ_asf10_25", 10, 25] ] ]; HOMJ_RP_Road_CES_D = [ "ca\roads\", "pictures\questionmark.paa", [["HOMJ_ces_d6konec", 6.25]], // connectors / special pieces [ ["HOMJ_ces_d25", 25], ["HOMJ_ces_d12", 12.5], ["HOMJ_ces_d6", 6.25], ["HOMJ_ces_d10_100", 10, 100], ["HOMJ_ces_d10_75", 10, 75], ["HOMJ_ces_d10_50", 10, 50], ["HOMJ_ces_d10_25", 10, 25] ] ]; HOMJ_RP_Road_ASF1 = // Starts at straights, then goes to high-radius turns, and works to low-radius... [ "ca\roads2\", "pictures\asf1.paa", [["HOMJ_asf1_6konec", 6.25]], [ ["HOMJ_asf1_25", 25], ["HOMJ_asf1_12", 12.5], ["HOMJ_asf1_6", 6.25], ["HOMJ_asf1_0_2000", 0.5, 2000], ["HOMJ_asf1_1_1000", 1, 1000], ["HOMJ_asf1_10_100", 10, 100], ["HOMJ_asf1_7_100", 7.5, 100], ["HOMJ_asf1_15_75", 15, 75], ["HOMJ_asf1_10_75", 10, 75], ["HOMJ_asf1_22_50", 22.5, 50], ["HOMJ_asf1_10_50", 10, 50], ["HOMJ_asf1_30_25", 30, 25], ["HOMJ_asf1_10_25", 10, 25], ["HOMJ_asf1_60_10", 60, 10] ] ];

Ok, starting to rough in some more functionality. This weekend I'll release the first "alpha" version - it will most likely explode in flames when you use it, and the EXPORT button will only copy a bunch of text to clipboard. You'll have to manually paste it into a text file to import into Visitor. TO DO list over the next few weeks: - make a terrain-smoother algorithm and import script for Visitor - Translations/stringtable for other languages (I only speak english, will be hoping for assistance with translations in a couple weeks!) - make a .EXE to run in the background and provide the following abilities: *save & load work *produce .txt files automatically *save & load GUI settings (key binds, view distances, stuff like that) Another demo video for fun since I know there are probably at least 2 people interested in this - don't bother frontpaging this one on any news sites, as I'll make a better one in a few days with captions and descriptions...

Welp - that was easy - I discovered that modelToWorld [0,0,0] gives the proper "center" for Visitor! Cheers,

Just a quick blog-style update, rambling "out loud" sometimes helps me figure things out. Well, after spending a week doing nothing but playing Minecraft (Notch, I hate you) I've started toying with getting imports into Visitor, and unfortunately it's much more fun than I hoped! BIS was nice enough to use the [0,0,0] origin of the P3D (which is an end of the road piece) in-game for setPos, but the Visitor import script (and Visitor itself?) uses the center of the object's geometry for location... this essentially means my fancy math for placing parts in-game is useless for actually determining Visitor coordinates. It'll take me a couple nights to figure out a solution. I'm still hopeful I can put up something that is alpha-usable by the end of the coming weekend... Adios til later!

Like Mikero said, ArmA2 is defunct. You should be developing for OA:Combined Operations. Using ArmA2.exe is like using ArmA1, or Operation Flashpoint.

Haha - I'm guessing you never used the old road painter? :) that is how it worked (except it used a separate program to produce a TXT file). The reason why I am abandoning this method is because it limits the road to only using 10_25, 10_50, 10_75, 10_100 turns, which makes everything difficult. I think once more progress is made on these tools, there will be no desire whatsoever to use Visitor's "Road Networks" anymore :) Mikero - great to hear from you! I think PBODLL may be very useful later on. For now I have to just get something basic that works :) [Edit] just adding a little video, gives a better idea of where the tool is going than just talking about it. g_yWZB9Hy_U

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...

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...

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...

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.

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

I'm at work, and I haven't looked at the visitor comref in years, but there appear to be oodles upon oodles of matrix rotate/move/scale commands, perhaps you should check if those are described in the visitor comref? From this thread, http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=68238 I'm suspecting that these are just to set up matrixes for multiplying, but there are no associated commands to apply the matrices to objects (gee, thanks BIS :P)... but I guess it might be worth doublechecking.

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.

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?

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.

Following the preview developments of my road tool and shezan74's "Fence Generator" tool, I thought it'd be interesting to see what other aids for Visitor people would like to see. When I tried to make an island last year, I quickly concluded that I didn't have the time to use Visitor as-is... but I do have time to make tools to speed things up, and maybe eventually there'll be enough helper-tools that I actually can make an island :p Post any "this process is annoying" or "I wish there was a tool which did ____" type of thoughts in here, and with some luck it may become someone's "rainy-day" project this summer... I'll start: I'd like to see development of MaskMapper continued (although I haven't worked with it much so don't know its main limitations - feel free to expand on this) I'd like it if we could create roads by drawing splines in the editor, and auto-generating a best-fit road. Spline points could be shifted to 'bend' and re-route sections of road in real time. (This idea might require a new Visitor which was capable of handling more than the basic 10deg, 25/50/75/100m curves...)

theoretically yes; it's just a matter of spending the time to code it... the only exception would be that you can't scale the size of objects in-game, as you can do in Visitor.

How can we get the name of this forum changed? I'm really tired of reading new threads every day that should go in mission editing. I think this forum should be "Terrain Editing (Visitor)" instead of "Map Editing (Visitor)" - anyone have other suggestions which could lead to less mistake posts?

Please don't accuse others of being at fault, when in fact they are correct and you are in error. You edit a map when you make a mission. The mission-editor is a map-editor by definition. I encourage you to draw your own conclusions from this. It is not "stupid peoples' " fault. It is a very simple, honest flaw in the names of these forums which could be easily corrected with zero negative results. The only reason provided so far to oppose the fix is that people are resistant to change. It bothers me that this is so, but it's the truth.

The game's stamina system causes this when you sprint any length of time. Turn off post processing, or stop running around ;)

There's nothing stupid about the issue or suggestion, nor is there any reason for this thread to be locked. Please don't exaggerate the amount of "drama" involved, and please don't confuse "drama" with awareness. This thread and the replies within it are doing nothing more than bringing awareness to a well-reasoned and rational suggestion. The moderators are free to make use of it, or be conservative and ignore it.

No worries mate, small slips of the mind happen. Keep drinking that Brawndo. ;) I would be curious if the mods had any other opinions on this. I don't want to get caught up further in semantics over how people should interpret "Map Editor"; I just simply want to improve the forum. Also, Pufu's suggested names for all of the editing forums would be very clear and concise, if we could get that improvement in place... :o

Alright, fair enough. First, I loved the movie Idiocracy - instant classic. Second, let's consider your logic. I'll try looking up the definition of "map". From dictionary.com: Now, just in case you've never seen the mission editor, here's a screen shot: You might notice something in particular: the mission editor gives you a representation on a flat surface of the (mission-author-placed) features of an area of the earth, showing them in their respective forms, sizes, and relationships according to some convention of representation. Furthermore, it allows you to edit these features. Thus, the mission editor is, by definition, a Map Editor. I'm not twisting any words. It's pretty simple why people use the word "map" for this, and why they're posting in this forum instead of the other editing forum. So, now that that is out of the way: once again, can we give any consideration to having the forum name changed to remove this ambiguity, reduce moderator work, and improve the relevance of threads in this forum?

Similar to what Shezan said - you should hunt down the *actual* folder and clean it out. The P: drive is not an actual drive partition. It is simply a shortcut link to another folder (...???...\ArmaWork) which exists wherever you installed the tools to. Find this folder and clean it out as you need, and you should be good to go!