Road Painter 2

[Minimalaco]

This version is very good, waiting for the OA roads.

I try to add in "RoadParts.sqf", but no luck.

[Homer Johnston]

I'm hoping to post my next update by end of next weekend... currently swamped with another project I need to get out the door. In addition to defining roads in roadparts.sqf, you'd need to add them in the HOMJ roads addon... the addon adds them to the mission editor as spawnable/placeable objects, then the RoadParts.sqf file defines their geometry for the tool.

Naturally you'd be welcome to see if you could figure that out for yourself - I might be able to find time to do that and post it up this weekend but no guarantees at this point; might have to wait just a *bit* longer!

[edit] I'll almost definitely post a small update adding in OA roads this weekend plus one or two other small fixes. Turns out to be a bit of a nuisance because BIS randomly rotated one of the konec pieces (only one!) by 180 degrees... then I'll hopefully have something capable of smoothing the terrain by end of next weekend, fingers are crossed.

[Homer Johnston]

Minor update; OA roads added. Haven't tried importing them into visitor yet - let me know if anything doesn't work (please pay particular attention to the konec piece of OA asf2). Next update will be something for terrain smoothing, end of next weekend if I'm lucky. I should mention that if you import any roads with the tool as-is, you won't be able to smooth the terrain for them (at least not with what I'm currently making... )

[Wessix]

Hi Homer, i use youre tool an it is so great. Is there any news about the smoothing? i played around with some blurring in my heightmap but i had no breakthrough right now.

thx for your great work

[Homer Johnston]

Progress is slower than I hoped, but I finally figured out a smoothing algorithm that should work, it's approximately the same as the process Visitor uses... except hopefully I'll be able to make it more user-friendly.

Since I can't modify the terrain in-game, I'm going to overlay a point-cloud showing the revised terrain shape, above the actual terrain. In theory, I'll be able to make it so you can generate a preview, change settings, re-generate preview, and if you're happy with it then you can export a new heightmap file for Visitor.

Planned settings at the moment could be:
1) flat-width (any vertices within this distance of the road will be "flattened"
2) total width (any vertices beyond the flat-distance will be "blended" smoothly)
3) platform height (to allow you to give roads a raised center)
4) ditch depth (to drop terrain beside road)

Naturally the effectiveness of these settings will depend on the terrain cell size. The platform height & ditch depth may be useless if the cell size isn't very small, but on fine maps might give you the ability to easily make more realistic looking road terrain.

Here's a video showing where I've made it to so far; I just got the flat-width portion working. At this rate, it looks like it may still be a few weeks before this tool can really be as effective as I intend it to be.

[droogs]

Looking good Homer. This will be a must have tool for every map maker's toolbox for a long time to come. well done

[[APS]Gnat]

Wow!
And having a ditch feature would be great!

[Robster]

Your are a genius Mr. Johnston!

OFF-TOPIC: Sometime ago, I did realise that not being able to modify terrain in-game is a shame...

As long as you could modify terrain on the go you could get holes when bombs explode, trenches wherever might be needed, and a lot of stuff that happens in RL and infantry men see on a regular basis... y'know your shovel as your main weapon...

In fact, this kind of requirement would really make a difference between FPS war game and an infy simulator...

[Wessix]

Hey Homer, that looks so promising.

Have you thought of making your tool for buldozer.exe instead of making it as an mission in game? With buldozer opened and v3 in background it is possible to change the height of vertices.
It is also interesting that instead of buldozer.exe you can copy your arma2.exe or arma2oa.exe to your P:\ drive and change the setting in v3 and it works.

an in the v3 readme:

Viewer setup
============
First thing you should do is to click "Tools" > "System Preferences" to set the path to realtime viewer working directory (standard is P:\). All path indications will be relative to this path, so if something does not work as expected you should check there first.

Also define the call parameters for the viewer.

Path to viewer (Commands in [] are optional; leave [] away when using that command):
PathToArmaDir\Arma.exe -buldozer [-window] [-addons=addons.txt] [-cfg=PathToConfig] [-maxmem=1024]

-window : Starts Buldozer in window instead of fullscreen.

-cfg=PathToConfig : Forces Buldozer to use a certain config.

-addons=addons.txt : File containing necessary addons, if you want to see correct clutter settings for edited world, its folder must be mentioned in such file. Also, some UI elements might be missing if they are not called for by the TXT file and unpacked to viewer's working directory.

Example of addons.txt:
***start***
addons[] =
{
"ca\", "ca\data\", "ca\UI\", "ca\UIFonts\"
};
***end***

Visitor 3 PE allows user to use Visitor scripting language, which shares common features with engine scripting language. Some scripts may cause viewer or Visitor crash if viewer is connected.

just had some kind of brainstorming, not knowing if that would be possible at all.

Wessix

[Homer Johnston]

I would gladly make it for Buldozer, but I'm led to believe that dialogs (i.e. a custom UI) and maybe handling SQF scripts are not possible with it. I haven't actually investigated it and I could be wrong... If there is any documented info which might suggest it's possible, I'd love to find it!