Easy street creation tool
Posted By: oliver2s
Easy street creation tool - 03/30/07 16:04
Inspired by CryEngine2 I wrote a tool for creating streets and roads very easy. It's just drag and drop and path based. It's hard to explain so I show you a small video of it:
YouTube - 3DGS Street Creator There are more features planned like
- adjusting height for bridges
- changing texture while editing
- chaging width of the street
[EDIT]: here's a screenshot:
Posted By: rvL_eXile
Re: Easy street creation tool - 03/30/07 16:08
Looks nice, would it be a new Ingame Editor Like ICEX2.0 ??
cYa Sebastian
Posted By: ulf
Re: Easy street creation tool - 03/30/07 16:09
looks very useful, will you include it in icex2 or will it be standalone?
by the way, will you make icex2 work with a7?
nice work!
Posted By: frazzle
Re: Easy street creation tool - 03/30/07 16:26
This is nice and now I understand why you asked about this topic "vertices - absolute to relative coordinates"
Keep on going and it might become as popular as IceX2
Cheers
Frazzle
Posted By: Germanunkol
Re: Easy street creation tool - 03/30/07 19:40
this looks great! good job!
looks like you can make really nice road with this...
have no idea how I'd program this. well done!
Posted By: mpdeveloper_B
Re: Easy street creation tool - 03/30/07 21:38
very sweet, i would like to see a demo of it
Posted By: VPrime
Re: Easy street creation tool - 03/30/07 22:20
Looks really cool!
I think future versions of WED should be like your editors
Posted By: Orange Brat
Re: Easy street creation tool - 03/31/07 13:33
Support for automatic (but optional) sidewalks and intersections with appropriate sidewalk corners (with adjustable curviness on those corners) would be nice.
Posted By: Night Viper
Re: Easy street creation tool - 03/31/07 14:10
I like it. I can't wait to see height adjustment in action.
Posted By: broozar
Re: Easy street creation tool - 03/31/07 16:10
lovely. if it won't be too much work, i'd prefer a bezier curve between the nodes, to round the corners and smoothen the bends.
I would like to see a crysis tool-set around your street creation tool
No, sorry, I am just kidding.
You are doing a great job like always!
Posted By: Alex J.
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/01/07 08:48
cool - inspired by sandbox2??
but it has to be bit more smooth
Posted By: Thracian
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/01/07 11:48
Yes, cool tool.
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/01/07 21:08
Thank you for your positive comments
Here some answers:
Quote:
looks very useful, will you include it in icex2 or will it be standalone?
by the way, will you make icex2 work with a7?
nice work!
It will be included in IceX3. If conitec didn't change the wmp format it will be compatible with A7.
Quote:
very sweet, i would like to see a demo of it
Yeah I think I'll upload a demo when it's finished
Quote:
Support for automatic (but optional) sidewalks and intersections with appropriate sidewalk corners (with adjustable curviness on those corners) would be nice.
I thought about this feature too. It would be usefull for making citys. I'm looking forward to it.
Quote:
cool - inspired by sandbox2??
but it has to be bit more smooth
It's no CryEngine, it's 3DGS 
Posted By: NITRO777
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/01/07 21:52
nice
Posted By: andy_1984
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/20/07 13:32
this looks to be a real winner for me, currently having a hell of a time creating streets, im building a small town where i live using stiched maps from google. would be awsome to import such maps to build on top of. with this software it will be a breeze.
sidewalks with height adjusment would be a must for this, would defeat the purpose of such a tool if you need to create them anotherway.
what does it output to .map ?
when can i get it im desprate
Posted By: Helghast
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/20/07 18:22
SEE!!
told ya making GTA wasnt that hard, now can you make it MMO as well
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/20/07 18:39
After finishing my final secondary-school examinations in three weeks and finishing my work on a casual game I will release a demo of this tool.
btw: the height adjustmend is finished, and the texture changing function is finished
Posted By: JetpackMonkey
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/21/07 08:14
Excellent job! I have three questions:
1. What are the roads made of-- MDL?
2. Will the height adjustment part of the tool automatically lift/grade a terrain to match the road?
3. If the road is polymesh/MDL geometry, is it be "baked" into a solid piece of geometry which sits on top of the terrain, so that it could be later used by the ABT scene manager or vent's awesome MDL shadow mapper, or is it dynamically regenerated with each level load?
Looks great
Posted By: ulf
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/21/07 08:50
oliver, will icex 2.0 work with a7? or will it be abandoned and only support a6.3?
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/21/07 11:56
Quote:
1. What are the roads made of-- MDL?
Yes, they made of MDL.
Quote:
2. Will the height adjustment part of the tool automatically lift/grade a terrain to match the road?
Yes, this is also planned
Quote:
3. If the road is polymesh/MDL geometry, is it be "baked" into a solid piece of geometry which sits on top of the terrain, so that it could be later used by the ABT scene manager or vent's awesome MDL shadow mapper, or is it dynamically regenerated with each level load?
In the editor itself it is dynamically gerenerated with each level load because of editing it after level reload. If you use the "export-function" there will be generated a solid mesh that you can load in MED oder so something else with it.
Quote:
oliver, will icex 2.0 work with a7? or will it be abandoned and only support a6.3?
I can't say anything about IceX 2 and A7 at the moment.
Here is a new screen with height-adjustment:
Posted By: aztec
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/22/07 10:20
Whohoooooo this looks great
Posted By: andy_1984
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/23/07 14:09
any chance of it making out of blocks aswel ?
reason i ask is im using newton for my driving game and models dont work for roads
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/23/07 14:21
Quote:
any chance of it making out of blocks aswel ?
reason i ask is im using newton for my driving game and models dont work for roads
No sorry, streets are mostly used in outdoor levels and blocks are really slow there. It doesn't make much sense to convert the street into blocks.
Posted By: xXxGuitar511
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/23/07 14:29
you can use models with newton. You just have to use invisible blocks with a mass of 0 [zero so they don't move]...
Posted By: Orange Brat
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/23/07 17:10
@oliver2s: That last image you posted should sell it nicely. I know from first hand experience that creating something like that in WED is a pain. I had a pretty big exterior once with a winding road around a lake (yes, I do tackle the occasional countryside exterior
). The level has been abandoned, however maybe I can finish it with this tool.
Posted By: andy_1984
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/23/07 20:08
just got thinking... if it can be exported to .3ds or other well know formats in segments and not the one big chunk it could be easily converted to blocks through other means
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/23/07 21:27
With the technique of this tool you can not only create streets, if I just use another model, e.g. an underground train tunnel I could easily create a big subway tunnel or a large bridge with many tiles and so on and on...
Posted By: Grafton
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 00:58
Can it create a loop?
Posted By: xXxGuitar511
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 03:27
How do you tell which vertices to modify?
Is it simply which ones are on which side of the origin, and then manipulating their original offsets to match?
Posted By: ello
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 06:23
wow cool, i wonder how you actually do that
Posted By: andy_1984
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 09:22
oh one other thing,
what about junctions as in another road joining from the side. will there be gaps ?
Posted By: Germanunkol
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 13:49
Quote:
wow cool, i wonder how you actually do that
yupp, same here.
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 14:09
Loops are not possible at the moment. I'm thinking about to implement it...
Here's a new screen with a railroad model (sorry, my server is very slow at the moment):
Posted By: Samb
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 14:24
looks cool
what about crossroads?
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 14:31
Crossroads are the next thing which I want to implement. I think this will be very hard but not impossible
Posted By: andy_1984
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 16:47
it shouldnt be an issue if you can have multiple seperate roads just join the 2 where the junction should be, or is street creation only limited to one long road like pictured above
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/24/07 20:17
Quote:
it shouldnt be an issue if you can have multiple seperate roads just join the 2 where the junction should be, or is street creation only limited to one long road like pictured above
No, you can still have many roads as you want, and connect two roads together wouldn't be a big deal. But it's a bigger thing to have crossroads because of the different directions.
Posted By: xXxGuitar511
Re: Easy street creation tool - 04/25/07 01:02
Was I right in how you did it though? using which vertices are on which side of the origin, storing their original offsets relative to a "mid-point", and rotating those?
Posted By: andy_1984
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/03/07 15:18
any news on a release oliver ?
would be much apreciated.
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/04/07 10:56
It takes some time. I'm not working on it until I finished school in 2 weeks.
Posted By: andy_1984
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/04/07 11:56
ah right no worries, i know it takes time buddy, just curios is all, nevermind the software just stick in at school till you got time
Posted By: lostclimate
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/08/07 20:41
is it a dll plugin, because if not, how did you edit the mdl file, Im curious because i want to make a script that will make one model with flat surfaces placed as grass sprites, at relative parts in a level, but i cant figure out how to edit a mdl file
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/08/07 21:08
It just uses vec_to_mesh to deform a street models. I'm thinking about to release this tool as stand-alone for free because I'm too lazy to write a complete editor with more features at the moment
I guess if I finished it you only have to bind the street-tool script in your project and press a button to activate it.
Posted By: lostclimate
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/08/07 21:50
how can you add street sections using this?
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/08/07 21:57
There many street tiles stitched together while editing. They have a small texture to save disk space and get there texture from one material, this saves also texture memory.
Posted By: checkbutton
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/09/07 07:33
Perhaps you can implement a crossroads function by let the user do it manually. So that the crossroad isn't created automatically when paths cross each other, but when the user hits a button. Then you could create crossroads with connection points at the side of the street. This would also make it possible to make different types of crossroads.
Hope I helped here...
Posted By: dblade
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/09/07 12:10
Looks usefull
Hope work on it will be finished, soon
Posted By: andy_1984
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/09/07 13:04
Quote:
I'm thinking about to release this tool as stand-alone for free because I'm too lazy to write a complete editor with more features at the moment
yup, you know you want to do that oliver
Posted By: lostclimate
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/09/07 16:56
well with vec_to_vertex you cant add vertices right? so how are you adding the tiles to stitch them?
Posted By: Germanunkol
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/09/07 19:38
how bout ent_create...?
Posted By: xXxGuitar511
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/10/07 02:36
He's not adding, just deforming. AFAIK, it's not one mesh, it's several copies of a base model linked together through c-script...
Posted By: Why_Do_I_Die
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/10/07 04:56
This looks really really cool , looking forward to a release.
Posted By: oliver2s
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/10/07 08:35
Quote:
He's not adding, just deforming. AFAIK, it's not one mesh, it's several copies of a base model linked together through c-script...
Yes, it's done exactly like this
Posted By: lostclimate
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/10/07 10:16
oh... damn, doesnt help me for my idea then, thanks anyways, and great work
Posted By: PHeMoX
Re: Easy street creation tool - 05/10/07 11:56
Quote:
Perhaps you can implement a crossroads function by let the user do it manually. So that the crossroad isn't created automatically when paths cross each other, but when the user hits a button. Then you could create crossroads with connection points at the side of the street. This would also make it possible to make different types of crossroads.
Hope I helped here...
Yeah, that would probably circumvent some difficult mathematical problems.
Cheers