Roads

Hi All

What is the best way to build roads is it models or blocks.

I want to use models they are faster.

Defiitely models. I am also making one. Should i make it as whole or piece by piece? 'Cause when you texture it, you can see the (very big) pixels. Is there a tile feature in MED?

Sure, with the current MED version you can define tiling textures. Nevertheless it depends on the road size/length wether its better to seperate it into pieces. So you can also define LOD stages and so on. When you chunk your roads, be sure to share textures by link them to external textures - this saves memory and increases performance.

Thanks Heelx

So does "chunk" work on models too.

So along as the texture is tileable it till blend

Wow, thanks for advice.

But what do you mean:
"be sure to share textures by link them to external textures"?
How do i do this?

Woah... stop

"chunked" is not meant in the terminology of a chunked terrain. Chunked models don't work, though. I meant simply that you build your street model and after that you take a look and slice it into many parts -- chunks so to say.

But what do you mean: "be sure to share textures by link them to external textures"? How do i do this?

Imagine you've got 8 road-chunks with each models texture summed up you got a total of 8 textures or more (sideway, special signs or so) -- but originally, your very big model had only.. e.g. 3 textures or so. So: save your 3 textures as external files. Inside each chunk dont save the needed texture(s) INSIDE the model, but check the checkbox "extern" and choose the texture with the dialog: that means that the engine takes the model, looks where the imagefile on the HD lies and loads it. When 8 models refer to one external texture file it is just 1/8 of the memory in use than before (whereas you had saved the 8 textures INSIDE each model).

Download the latest release and have a look into the skin manager of MED and you know what I mean.

Thats great, thanks for the feedback

Hi Heelx

When you select "extern" MED does not let you select mipmaps (its grayed out).

Plus whats the best way to blend two sections of road (2 models) together.

Yeah that is right - that is because you don't inherit the bitmap in your model. I'm not sure, but A6 creates the mipmapchain automatically when you load the model. If it is not so you can otherwise save your texture as DDS file. There you can precalculate the mipmaps so that A6 doesnt spend time on it (faster loading), plus, even with the mipmaps inherited, the DDS file will be surely smaller than your original texture file.

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Plus whats the best way to blend two sections of road (2 models) together.

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I don't understand this question. When you've done a big model of your road and you've chunked it, the several chunks fit perfectly together. In the following picture I made a quick road model.. the red and green part display the 2 chunks for instance. You seperate them and later in WED you stitch them together... voilá!