Homer Johnston

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.

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.

very minor update. not really worth posting, but I ate a lot of sugar tonight and this is fun, so whee. arke4EEFHzk

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. :)

Sorry Carbone, but it's pretty simple: if you want a helicopter simulator, you must play a helicopter simulator. ArmA is not a helicopter simulator, it is an infantry simulator. You could try going and posting on the DCS forum that you want DCS to have as accurate infantry movement and simulation as ArmA... same concept. :\

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 :)

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...

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...

Unfortunately I can't help you with your exact problem. I will however, say this since noone else has: I REALLY don't want to be a jerk, but unless you're making a desert, or a couple of "small" islands with large amounts of water, you are wasting your time to even think about making a 102km x 102km map. To have enough quality for people to use it, it will literally take the rest of your life. It can take people six months to build a 5km x 5km map. Your map is four hundred times larger than this. You will be two hundred years old before you could have the entire map area finished to Chernarus's quality. This is only a friendly reminder, but please consider it. this is why the majority of island builders NEVER produce anything. They think "bigger is better", and start up a project which is simply impossible. If it's just a big empty desert or water map however, then ... please ignore me ;)

Another preview... should be releasing something that looks this in the next day or two. It will feel a little bit "rough" and I'm expecting some bug reports, but that's what betas are for right? :D A big thanks will go to Leopotam for allowing me to use & supply his "ArmA Offline Storage Monitor" tool to enable file exports from ArmA. :) The first page of this thread will be updated with all important information when this is released, but for now I will mention using the beta tool will require: - using Leopotam's "ArmA Offline Storage Monitor" (a simple console window which is left to run in the background), with an export script slightly modified by me - using Lester's (MapFact) Editor Update addon VhFCPnvbL_4 Again, high-res video is available if you watch it at Youtube.

Then let's call them "Leo's Forest Generator" and "Shezan's Fence Generator" :p This tool is definitely a step in the right direction! I gave it a quick try and it seemed to work pretty good - definitely could be useful for roughing in the majority of a forest, then perhaps spending some time customizing around the edges a bit to blend things together... Cheers! :)

This isn't really related to anything, but I've been working on this for the past couple of weeks during my lunch breaks at work... today I finally brought it home and plugged it into ArmA: The blue points are "anchor-points", selected by mouseclicks ... there are also auto-generated "tangent-control points" not shown. The entire red-line is auto-generated. With a little work, these anchor & tangent-control points could be dragged around to "bend" the spline... anyone want to think of some uses for this ability? :cool:

IIRC (it's been a year since I did this) if you have buldozer open when you import a heightmap, it will update the terrain and object heights as it goes. It looks really cool watching your heightmap change in real-time, but it works really, really slow :p

it will also go way slower if you have buldozer open... I don't know if anything bad will happen if you don't have buldozer open, though. Like Ice said... should work, just make sure you back up your work

wasting more time photoshopping up preview pics... Preview #3 GUI is mostly in-place, still a few placeholder-buttons. Still hoping I will release something usable by the end of next weekend. All for now!

the generated road is no different than a road drawn in visitor, so the road smoothing script works no different either on an imported road section. Have I read that sometimes, the smooth roads script doesn't work? Maybe later this summer I (or someone) could write a new script... we'll see how things turn out. After I have this tool working "as-is", I intend to try and expand it by allowing you to place T's and crossroads... you won't be able to import them into Visitor, but HOPEfully you'll be able to draw full road networks and import it section by section into Visitor (you will still have to place T's and crossroads manually in Visitor at the end/start of each section) [edit] Beton posted first :P

By the way Leopotam - just a thought: it would be possible some day to "combine" your algorithm into something like the painter tool I'm making; that is, to be able to place down points and draw a preview of the road in real-time, and shift points to make changes ;) If you can develop an algorithm which predicts roads in a good enough manner, this might be the "ultimate" solution to road-building...

Nutty, although I haven't used this tool yet, I'm thinking about trying to use this as a way to save data to text files for my Road Painter tool - would you have any issues with me linking people to your addon? It seems like it could be a really awesome tool for developers! (able to make things like ArmA1's 3DE...)

I don't know whether you could apply this logic to your algorithm or not, but feel free to look at the math behind my radius-selection... drawing from origin, to the big X. It's pretty simple... all based on the equation of a circle. http://img.waffleimages.com/bf69ef121ad6dbeeca8442cec51ed204707205dd/Circles.JPG it's a little more complicated that that, because you have to do a coordinate-transformation to get the destination X,Y coordinates relative to the first point... but if you know how to do dot products, then you're probably able to do a little trigonometry? :p

F***ing marvelous - this is what I was really worried about. If you go into the edit-road dialog (Options>Roads) then you can alter the "max angle" and "max bank" settings, which are somehow related to the "Test Direction" button and its warnings. If the AI are OK with it, then I am going to guess that these warnings are just to let you know that your road is "unrealistic" (steeper than you said it should be), because you can increase the previously mentioned "max" settings and the warnings go away. Thanks Bushlurker! Should be able to get a beta of this released sometime on the weekend, need to add a few more things to the GUI :) initial beta will require some copy/paste/Notepad++ find-replace labor. Next week, if everything else is going okay, I might look into using Nutty's addon to write to file automatically and remove the Notepad++ requirement.

How good are you at math & trigonometry? If you want, I can explain how I automatically select road radius in my "painter" tool... are you familiar with the equation for a circle?

Does anyone know if there is a script way to change the color of dialog buttons? The three ctrlSet_____Color commands don't seem to work, although they do for static controls. Thanks!

Really? Buttons are painted by the following settings though - are you sure? colorFocused[] = { 1, 0, 0, 1 }; // border color for focused state colorDisabled[] = { 0, 0, 1, 0.7 }; // text color for disabled state colorBackground[] = { 1, 1, 1, 0.8 }; colorBackgroundDisabled[] = { 1, 1, 1, 0.5 }; // background color for disabled state colorBackgroundActive[] = { 1, 1, 1, 1 }; // background color for active state Thanks for your time...

If anyone would have some time to experiment with that option and with what ZeroG said, it could benefit us all very greatly... For now, a simple picture to show where this is going. The cursor is now always visible on-screen (but not in screenshot - just imagine the ArmA cursor showing at the last blue dot :p). The preview-line follows the cursor... left clicking places the road, and you can pan the view by holding right-click & dragging, and zoom with mousewheel (just like in the editor).

Ah! I didn't even know about that button. I actually haven't laid many roads in Visitor. Can anyone tell me more about this - does this button check if the slope of the road is within limits? i.e. how steep it is to gain altitude; 5 degrees by default. What is the difference between "Max Bank" and "Max Angle" in the road settings? Ignoring all coding issues for a second, what could be done to fix or help this? - changing terrain properties? (this is what the SmoothRoads script is for, right??) - alerting the user that the road will be out of limits? - anything else??