smoothing roads script

I just ran into some problems with the smoothing roads script for visitor. Sometimes it works like a charm and sometimes i have wait for ours and it gets stuck.

Does anybody know what i have to mind when using the script?

By the way, i think it would be very useful if there was a thread where people could post ideas about what kind of scripts might be needed. And on the other hand people capable of scripting could post and discuss their scripts.

Hi,

As far as i know it indeed can sometimes take a very long time to finish, it depends onyou road, how long and across what terrain does it move.

I must say that i have rebuild one of my roads, because the smooth road script did not want to finish , even after a whole night it was not done. In my case it probably had to do with the fact that i circled my road around and let it run side by side(same road side by side), i have now split this road into 2 different raods, and all is fine, still about an hour to finish smooting tho.

As long as the numbers are not zero (0), i think the script does runs ok.

Later,

Allie

Jap,

its the same with my roads. I have split some of my roads but still... it worked on some and on others it didnt. Its really a bit frustrating to rebuild a road again and again.

Maybe someone with knowledge is encouraged by this thread to have a look in the script and fix or rewrite it...

thanks,

Beton

I have also test this and let the smooth road script works all night , around 7 hours without any result

I believe that a road must have a single slope, if you get roads going up and down, it will be better to cut it in two or build a separate part each time it goes up and down.

I think it's better to have short sections of road even if the stitching of parts is always a pain in the ass.

Well,

meanwhile i have started new on building my roads. I dont make them so long anymore as it seems the duration of calculation grows kind of exponentially accordeing to the number of roadparts. So i dont make any road longer than 50 parts anymore. When i think its long enough i start smoothroads script and wait for about 5 min at max. I control in Bulldozer and if it suits me i put a terminator at the end. If the script takes longer than 5 min i stop it shorten the road and start over again.

This works for me and roads work for ai ingame too...

Beton: thats the standard BIS bug in V3 since A1. Some slopes tend to cause this. Once I got so pissed I let the script run for 24 hours... it still didn't finish :)

So when that happens just delete it and make a new one and maybe lower some slopes in that area.

p.s. and for god sake never use absolute height script with bridges. After 10+ hours of work I've realized some bridges appeared all over the map not visible in V3 but well present in bulldozer. I had to start all over from backup :)

Its funny. On my latest island script doesn't work on 95% of the roads that are pretty straightforward. Does anyone have an alternative script for smoothing? BIS one is buggy as hell, or at least non well documented aka without support :/

I think that a new version of the "smooth road" script will be a nice addition to my Christmas presents ...

If not, I will get myself an other present needed by the present situation : an other computer dedicated to roads smoothing.

I have already and I am still spending too much time looking at the moving caterpillar.

I have tested various situations an will issue this :

- smooth only short section with one direction slope, to make a pass on hill make 2 sections, one up and the other down and so on ...

- if there is a big hole or a crevice in the terrain use Buldozer key before to flatten the ground

- do not make Z shaped roads too tight, as in mountain, it's depending upon if the terrain squares dimension : if the dimension is 10m x10m you can get a Z, if it's 25m x 25 let's go to a large open "S".

- when the direction of the road is "diagonal", I mean South West to North East for example, the result must be scrutinized for it can cause "ripples" on the road even on a more or less flat terrain like central Sbrodj valley.

At the moment i use the "ironing method":cool:

1. build a short peace of road (2-4 segments)

2. place it where i want the smoothing to be ( left and right of the original road)

3. use smooth roads with constant slope ( thats why i use just a short piece)

4. goto step 1

this can be repeated a thousand times:mad:

this is my favorite Method at the moment since everything else gives me very bad results most of the time. I usually have different pieces of roads at hand.. straight, slightly curved... and i pick what suits me best

I am also making an hypothesis :

A U shape mountain road on a 20m x 20m Terrain build can be an impassable test for Visitor but sometimes it works ...

So, we must also consider a factor : the place of the road on each Terrain square along with the size of those squares.

I also succedded couple of times doing this:

Open "non-smoothing" road, export it to txt file. delete it. create new terminator, import road, smooth it without a hitch in ~20 seconds :) I also learned to listen to hard drive, if you hear it working it works, otherwise it hangs lol

Guys at BIA/BIS are probably laughing at us using their fancy tools right now :)

Though I've been testing and fooling around with most aspects of island design recently, I've only just started laying a road or two on my "serious" island project, and I've been becoming increasingly scunnered (scottish word) with the Smooth Roads script myself...

Like Old Bear, I'm struggling mightily with a SW > NE diagonal road in particular... diagonal roads seem to suffer particularly from "jaggies" and general devastation of the surrounding terrain when smoothing roads, a fact made even more annoying by the fact that the roads are less smooth after "smoothing" than they were before!

Here's a few pics...

Before Smoothing... Notice the coastline is pretty smooth and even......

Another PRE-Smoothing... looks pretty promising (and fairly smooth) - so far... (this is the West Bank of Loch Ness by the way, and I've already murdered my RealWorld data making the shore that ironing-board flat - it ISN'T like that in RL. Clearly however, this road shouldn't require much smoothing...

OK - lets try the Road Smooth script - standard settings - moving average 25...

This script "smooths the roads", huh? More of a "corrugate landscape" script it seems...

Not only is the road considerably WORSE than it was pre-smoothing, but the script also crudely devastates the landscape on either side of the road into a series of unrealistic knife-edged ridges which spread out on either side of the road, ruining the landscape - and in particular - coastlines, on either side...

Not good...

I've been playing around with Beton's "ironing" idea, and although that helps flatten the road a bit, it doesn't really resolve the "jaggies" issue - just pushes the effect further away from the road itself into the surrounding landscape... in my pics above that means wrecking the hillside on one side, and the coastline on the other...

I've tried a few different settings - moving average 3, moving average 1003, moving average 999999 - doesnt seem to make too much difference... range 25 in the pics... at range 1000+ the ridges are a little smaller - and further apart - a step in the right direction, but increasing the "range" value higher doesnt seem to have any further ongoing effect.

I also thought... bank angle! - maybe allowing a 5 degree bank might help... seems you can only allow for banking of the road in straight sections (I'm modelling the scottish highlands - flat areas and straight roads are virtually non-existent :)), and, since the illustrated section of road had less than a 5 degree bank anyway (well, it did BEFORE I "smoothed" it - see pic #2, then #4), that didn't seem to make much difference either...

Not sure what to try next... if the script did actually flatten the whole road it would be a good start I guess, but it really only seems to affect the middle 70% or so of the width of the road - every few meters theres a deep spike up or down at the edges - so even if you ignore the ridges across the landscape and focus on the road alone - it seems you have to subsequently twitch-edit right along both sides of every road manually in bulldozer...

With around 100km of roads still to lay it's looking Seriously Not Good so far tho...

Guess I'll fool with settings a bit more - see if I can reach some sort of acceptable compromise, or some way of disguising the results...

B

Bushlurker put it right on the spot !

But I will say that here in place of using the "moving average" option, as you have already ironed flat the reality ^^, it will be better to use the "fixed absolute height" one, as the road seems to go flat along the loch.

Ah, on the same topic ... do not forget to close Buldozer when trying to destroy enhance your map with the script ^^.

one more tip: Use "constant slope" and do alterations manually :)

Yep...

finetuning has to be made by hand.:( Too bad that buldozer only works in 1m and 5m Steps.:mad:

@ Old Bear: I always use the script with Buldozer running, never had any problems.

Hi guys!

Thanks for the replies... it seems this doesn't just happen to me then? Thats actually quite reassuring - thought for a while there I was doing my usual blindingly obvious mistake procedure...

After an evenings practise I've started to get the hang of twitch-repairing the damage - though it's just quadrupled my road laying time estimate :(

Ah well - for now I'll just lay the roads where they're meant to go and worry about smoothing them later - that'll keep me busy for a while... I've been wandering around IceBreakrs Duala and Old Bears Sbrodj recently and it looks like you guys managed to make a damned fine job of your roads - that means it's possible :) I'll just throw limitless patience at the task - that usually works!

B

@Beton : of course it works but for me, on my own rig, it's faster if Buldozer is closed ... and I have already recorded freeze ...