Increased terrain cause misplaced objects.

[bracer]

Hey!

I've increased the size of Emita City from 5x5km to 10x10km.
But I have some strange issues that annoys me.

The problem is that the objects show their correct position in bulldozer, but after I've BinPBO'd it and try ingame,
some objects have moved alittle bit.
It's allways the same objects, certain roads have separetad and some buildings change altitude and position.

Basically I created a new terrain with doubled values, from 5120x5120 to 10240x10240, sat, mask and terrain.
Then tried different ways to copy/paste from Emita to the new terrain, but however I do it, objects move after binarizing the map.

Does anyone recognize this problem?
Or have a good method to move a map to a bigger terrain?
Thanks in advance!

Cheers!

[Robster]

When you place objects over a certain grid, those objects will mantain their coords regarding that grid, no matter the new bigger or lower size you might use ... so, if you change terrain size you can't keep going without having some sort of displacement of objects which coords were inherited from former terrain ... anyways, I guess there shouldn't be any change if you just make an extension of your terrain, i.e. where you have placed your objects at south west area (on a 5x5 km) and then you make a new terrain (10x10 km) and you want to put objects into northern zones...

If you see a bit of displacement, then notice that over an x,y grid coord on a 5x5 scheme there are quite accurate coords, so you should use export / import objects scripts (inside visitor3 folder) to be sure that your coords are identical to those already made... you can't export / import custom sizes so, everything will be imported / exported with default size...

Those copy & paste methods are not recommended since they do not work properly...

Shortly, you might try as follows:

1.- Use export objects script -> export natural and artificial objects
2.- Make a new terrain 10x10 kms -> import new heights
3.- Import template -> use older pew from 5x5 kms terrain
4.- Import sat and mask for new terrain
5.- Use import objects script -> import natural and artificial objects ... if everything works fine you will start to see how your map show imported objects and zero objects will be rejected...

Hope this helps... saludines!

[bracer]

Thanks for the answer!
I'll try from scratch again following your example.

I've tried the import/export script, it produces the same result.
Everything is in it's correct place in Visitor/Bulldozer, but a few objects move after binarization.

That's the weird thing, that it's only a few objects of the copied ones that move.
I tried copying just a small amount of objects, but still the same objects change their position slightly ingame, some roads seperate.
I havn't figured out yet if it's because of the coordinate on the map or because of the objects.
Will try to copy the objects and move them to another spot on the terrain.

Also, after the port to a bigger terrain, there's clutter growing through the roads at alot of places.
Might be because of the mask texture that needs to be more detailed.

[Robster]

Usually we import road network using Homer Johnston's Road Painter... it's a flawless but manual process for A2 roads... so, i couldn't tell what's going on with misplaced roads using Vis3 directly...

If you just made some 2x "zoom" scale over mask to make it bigger you have to realize that every pixel is now 4x bigger, so accuracy over map is affected... anyway I would recommend to keep a 4x ratio or bigger for mask base layer and terrain grid size, i.e., if your terrain grid is 10m then your mask base layer should be 40m, since a reduced size for base layer mask reduces FPS performance when zooming or turning around 180º

[Bushlurker]

Try floating everything in the clipboard, Bracer...

Briefly...

Load your old project - make sure EVERYTHING is visible - roads, all objects & veg, etc... "Select All" and then hit <ctrl>C...

Now load your new project in Visitor - "import template" your old Project, like Robster says - that'll make sure all those objects are in the lists.... then - make sure you have ALL road parts defined in the new project roads tool - exactly the same as the old project...

Then "Paste Absolute", and everything should drop back on in exactly the correct coordinates...

The bonus from using this method is that all individual object sizes, etc will be preserved - unlike the import/export scripts methods...

I used this method when upgrading the CWR2 terrains from 50m cells to 12.5 - though in that case the actual terrain size was staying the same, I was just increasing the resolution, but it should work nicely in this case too...

The one microflaw I discovered was possibly similar to what you've experienced... I had no issues with buildings, etc moving (or maybe I just didn't notice?), but in some roads there were microscopic "gaps" between road pieces - showing as fine white lines...
I was able to eliminate these by selecting the roads one at a time in the Visitor 2D view...
Just "selecting" them so the whole road section was highlighted in Visitor, doubleclicking as if I was about to edit that road section, then okaying back out without actually doing anything seemed to be enough to "settle" the road parts neatly together again...


B