DEVS: Is there a max amount of roads A3 can display before crashing?

So basically what it says. Because my current project strongly suggests so. I am getting CTDs when having all my road layers exported in the roads.shp, layers that work fine on their own. I have a bazillion roads... a very large map 30x30km and every real world road and path on it imported.

Did you wipe all the attributes from them that weren't needed?

Do you mean all except ID and Order? Yes, at least those are the only ones I can see when right-clicking and selecting database properties.

I am still having troubles with roads and I know others are too, I'd really appreciate if some DEV could drop in and tell us something about the technical side of things. I am trying to hunt down all the gremlins in my roadfiles right now. Results so far:

Too many road polylines or potentially vertexes -> poor performance and/or crash. Recitifed by going into global mapper and combining roads into longer segments. Also using the SIMPLIFY command and a value of 1.0 which reduces redundant vertexes. Seem to have a positive effect on AI pathfinding too. Had a lenghty discussion with Rydygier of pathfinding in complex dynamic missions and basically a disjointed road network will make AI pathfinding very heavy.

Too many attributes -> crash. Recheck your database properties of all the layers before exporting to road.shp

Any chance you can post a link to the bad shape file so we can take a peek.

I do remember Ian banks saying something about max vertices per road segment which I think was 500. But don't hold me to that one.

As far as additional attributes in the shapefile I've had a few different things in them and never experienced a problem. Back in the alpha day I created the shapes myself in global mapper and we used a few extra attributes that we came to find out was actually created by tb itself when you export

Having same sort of issue at the moment dunno whats going wrong worked fine when I did the roads at the start of the project yet now for some reason when I try it seems to lock up bulldozer and when I export the roads they are not working.

ManagerConfig()

15:37:33 ragdollHitDmgLimit (0.000000) is lower than minimum (0.010000) and it was set to min.

15:37:33 Initializing Steam Manager

15:37:33 ManagerConfig()

15:37:33 Steam Manager initialized.

15:37:33

15:37:33 ==== Loaded addons ====

15:37:33

15:37:33 C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 3\dta\bin.pbo - unknown

15:37:33 C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 3\dta\core.pbo - 72362

15:37:33 C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 3\dta\languagecore_f.pbo - 78060

15:37:33

15:37:33 =======================

15:37:33

15:37:33 ============================================================================================= List of mods ===============================================================================================

15:37:33 modsReadOnly = false

15:37:33 safeModsActivated = false

15:37:33 customMods = false

15:37:33 hash = 'FAB37C2D89CDF9B046E12991D397DBD376D5E0E1'

15:37:33 name | modDir | default | origin | hash | fullPath

15:37:33 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

15:37:33 arma 3 | A3 | true | REGISTRY | a7d8115be5ee6708b69a339f0feb104ae75a610e | C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Arma 3

15:37:33 dlcbundle | dlcbundle | true | NOT FOUND | |

15:37:33 heli | heli | true | NOT FOUND | |

15:37:33 kart | kart | true | NOT FOUND | |

15:37:33 curator | curator | true | NOT FOUND | |

15:37:33 ==========================================================================================================================================================================================================

15:37:33 DX11 - Initializing DX11 engine.

15:37:33 DX11 - Using DXGI adapter 0 (detected in config).

15:37:33 DX11 - Using DXGI adapter 0.

15:37:33 - adapter description : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti

15:37:33 - adapter vendor ID : 4318

15:37:33 - adapter device ID : 4106

15:37:33 - adapter subsys ID : 679688258

15:37:33 - adapter revision : 161

15:37:33 - dedicated video memory : 3089948672

15:37:33 - dedicated system memory : 0

15:37:33 - shared system memory : 1204953088

15:37:33 InitSound ...

15:37:33 Error: CoInitilizeEx (XAudio2-1st trial) return 80010106

15:37:33 InitSound - complete

15:37:33 PhysX3 SDK Init started ...

15:37:33 PhysX3 SDK Init ended.

15:37:33 Root "scripts" folder no longer supported, 'scripts\editor.sqs' ignored

15:37:33 Root "scripts" folder no longer supported, 'scripts\editor.sqs' ignored

after that it get stuck and will not load yet when I remove the script to my roads it works fine but you cannot see the roads

That seems to me to be a different issue based around how the exe is attempting to read that sqf... maybe bad formatting in the sqf or where it is?

That's just me blowing wind and guessing, the real experts will definitely know more than me.

KNG I'm sorry I do not know what problem you are having. Seems editor.sqs related though?

Regarding the roads I can now almost certainly confirm that I have fixed my problems by going through my roads in Global mapper and combining and simplifying them. I don't have extreme FPS problems anymore which is also nice.

Just when I thought my road related woes were over I started to get CTDs again. SO I had to export my roads and remove all the attributes again. Note: the attributes get f*cked up really easy in TB for some reason. So my advice is to start assigning road types and orders only when everything else is inplace, in case you need to wipe the attributes at some point. Well, beside road type assignment my roads are DONE! I measured in global mapper, 2454 km was the result :) Glad I didn't have to place those by hand

Ok well this is proving to be more difficult than I thought. While I don't get outright crashes on loading my map any more my roads are definatively the source of bad performance and glitch up the entire map and game after a while

Can someone take a look at my road shapefile and tell me what is wrong? Please!!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B15h3Pblg44Cam1qTUk5eHdmcVE/view?usp=sharing

Does anyone know how many roads Altis has? I've imported DC's DBF file into MySQL using Navicat and the roads table has 9616 records.

-edit

DC, you also have 1 record in there with two NULL values. It has _ID 20216

I'll have to double check. But I think if there are no values it defaults to a dirt road. I remember playing around with that before

I did some testing:

My map without roads: FINE

My map with Altis Roads.shp (which is totally inappropriate, but a useful test): FINA

my roads: total crapout.

In Global mapper Altis roads measure total about 730km while my roads are 2454km -> obvious difference but not I think critical? My individual paths are way longer than Altis tho, could that be a source of problems? They are long because I have combined them from shorter segments because I was getting crashes, which might relate to some hard but unknow max limit of road segments?

I did some testing:

My map without roads: FINE

My map with Altis Roads.shp (which is totally inappropriate, but a useful test): FINA

my roads: total crapout.

In Global mapper Altis roads measure total about 730km while my roads are 2454km -> obvious difference but not I think critical? My individual paths are way longer than Altis tho, could that be a source of problems? They are long because I have combined them from shorter segments because I was getting crashes, which might relate to some hard but unknow max limit of road segments?

If you have combined them something must've gone wrong. 9616 records means TB sees 9616 individual roads. Dividing 2454km / 9616 also makes for very short roads. Is it possible each segment is seen as an independent road?

hmm I really don't know; I'm not very good on the terminology here. I guess one line is made up of points or vertexes, but what is a segment in relation to this?. TB and Global Mapper reliably selects the whole road when I click on it. GM reports 9 594 features when I select all? Where are the 20 more that Navicat sees. I do believe this road number might be correct for while som roads are very long the majority are just small dirt paths that go into the woods from the highway.

A segment is the line that connects two points. Multiple segments make up a road path.

I don't know where the extra 20 come from that I have in my database, they must be in your data otherwise I wouldn't have them. All I did was use Navicats import feature since .DBF is actually a database format. It had one table in it: roads. The import just reads all the records from that table and puts it in MySQL.

This got me thinking though, you haven't defined the roads settings manually right? It's very possible that when you merged the road segments, it didn't update the database info tied to it.

What I did was combine all the roads that needed combining, wiped all the features then readded ID and ORDER (set all to 3 in GM because way faster then in TB), reimported to TB changed the asphalt roads etc and then exported to roads.shp.

Why this crap is happening I dont know. Either TB cant properly handle the shapefiles without corrupting something or the engine cant handle this many roads. Either way it renders my entire project more or less impossible.

EDIT: Also, what needs mentioning is just how spectacular the game breaking issues are when the roads go bad. Basically it starts destroying the games config internally (cant read it or something else) so basic BIS units and vehicles start giving RPT spams and visual glitching.

EDIT: Also, what needs mentioning is just how spectacular the game breaking issues are when the roads go bad. Basically it starts destroying the games config internally (cant read it or something else) so basic BIS units and vehicles start giving RPT spams and visual glitching.

Maybe there's a memory buffer overflow, that could definitely cause stuff like that. I imported the Altis DBF and that has 1415 roads so I think you're hitting an internal limit with almost 10.000 roads.

Well that's nice. It sort of renders my entire projects irrelevant, and thus the large amount of hrs I have put into it recently. I really wish some dev could give some hard info on this. What is the point of a new road system if it has such inherent limitations? And to make a project WE the modders would very much like to know the hard limits before embarking on a project and potentially putting several 100s of hours into them.

I guess I will have to try and export just my main roads and see what happens then-

It sounds like your map is going to be very detailed (which isn't a bad thing :D) but maybe it's a bit too much for Arma to handle. 9000+ items just for roads is pretty massive, I wonder how intricate that road network looks to be honest :P The AI would have to make a lot of decisions traversing it and considering how derped they already are, I don't think it's doing them much good.

Starting with the mainroads is a good idea, just build up the volume from there if possible, good luck :)

Thaks BLB... Well the thing is I got the pathfinding to work sort of well enough with some road debugging help from Rydygier. As for intricate, in more developed countries there are a lot of roads, esp. if you want to feature a decent size city.

As for the road network I would say it is none or all in this case... Just a few wont do much good and just look retarded. I did an autocombine in global mapper that brought the number down to about 6000 but it still bugs out in game. So I would pin this on an engine issue... I guess I would need to make a report of this and cross my fingers.

EDIT: And also, why should a large road network be a problem? We have millions of objects that the game copes with gladly.. Personally I hope it's just a bug because the devs havent tried such large road networks yet.

Folks, I have seen this question asked a few times in several other threads with no answer. Could someone please explain what the "database properties" needs and what the entries mean? I am trying to clean up my roads and I have dirt roads on top of concrete roads and the wrong concrete roads on top of other concrete roads. I currently have ID (integer) and ORDER (integer). Another question is do all roads need to be on the same shapes layer? Could I have my main roads on one layer and dirt roads on another? Thanks!

I think they can be on different shapes layers. You need to export them as one file though both for buldozer viewing and ingame. Take a look at my Atlas Guide a few posts down that has some stuff about roads in it that might help.

Thank you Jakerod for responding. I was actually using your tutorial to get where I am at now, however I have seen many other tutorials that use up to 4 columns of data and none of them use "float". What does that do that "text" or "integer" does not? Thanks.

Most likely this: Floating Point Numbers (Wikipedia.org)