New road and rail system questions

[bustr]

It's beautiful but, there has to be a better way to do this. On my current terrain I have many rivers to transition into large lakes set to the SL water and a large feeder river from the lake into the central sea. You can see there is no logical reason to place bridges at the mouth of every feeder river. I can see using a lot of supply barges. Those would be interesting diversions for tank attackers working in from the spawns across the bridges. I hope the error checker will tell me if there are any problems between the AI objects and the target field. I know better than to run these paths across objects other than bridges on top of rivers and road beds on top of bridges. I'm guessing from observation of the how the convoy road was set down next to a field that there is a separation of about 100ft or so the end of a path can't go near an object. So I can't use a visual only road to continue one of the field roads seamlessly to the town and touch a town road.

Still need to exactly when the mask has to be run. When I did that lake test I ran the mask after I finished adjusting the river path and lake shores, then ran build. I didn't have a CTD on exit from offline. Also I noticed trying to move objects with existing paths on the terrain near them, the "move" function would keep letting go of the object every couple of miles. And after that I would get a CTD on exit during offline testing. The mask takes a considerable amount of time to finish running.

You can see I still have a considerable amount of terrain creation left to go before I can add paths. Hitech, are Greebo and I doing the equivalent of beta testing the path function and just have to keep on playing with it to find issues versus anything specific you can direct us to try out?

[bustr]

Interesting CPU problem when I'm on my test terrain with two feilds, two rivers, one 1x1 water object and the City\strats\HQ. I ran the create all for roads and trains.

Here is a screen shot of the City\strat\HQ complex I'm thinking of putting in my new terrain. While I'm over it in the TE like this my mouse is having problems in the terrain editor, in Firefox clicking on links or buttons and clipping and saving screen shots, anything I use the mouse for. It effects pages refreshing in Firefox and the task manager buttons to change tabs. I'm including the performance graph at that time for the CPU which is an I5. I have 16G of ram. Wonder if this is what Ciaphas was referring to.....

So the City does not get a supply track?




This screen clip is screwed up becasue the mouse was not responding as expected. Amount of ram used was 3.37.





Here is the graph while I'm working on my terrain riftval. It has only a single airfield and no other objects, and no paths. Notice I got a clean full screen clip using the mouse.

[Greebo]

When I hit "create all" the paths created get laid out in 10 mile straight lines N, S, E or W of their respective fields or strats with each one of these paths consisting of 20 individual half mile segments. For each path the first thing I will do is roughly re-route it usually in some other direction from the field. This might be to accommodate the surrounding topography or to position it in relation to an SP. Currently the only ways to do this are to either move all 20 waypoints to their new positions one at a time or to delete most of them one by one, move the remaining few and then insert as many waypoints as needed to get the required curves. As I have 141 paths and so 2,820 waypoints to reposition this is going to get very tedious.

It would make this job a lot easier if there was some way of selecting a group of waypoints to move or rotate all at once. So I could then select all 20 waypoints on a path, rotate it from say E to SW and then move the whole path SW of the field. Then I could select the last 7 way points and rotate them to the W and so on.

[Greebo]

I began editing the road system on my MA terrain yesterday and got about three dozen routes done. I concentrated on the railways to the strats and the roads to uncapturable fields as they aren't intended to get much GV action so didn't need much thinking about. Then I ran rivers to all the ports with a bridge across each river and a visible-only road running from each SP up to each bridge to show GVs where to go to cross the river.

The plow road function is very useful for getting a gently sloping road, saves a lot of careful elevation editing. One issue the TE is that the "delete road" button could use an "Are you sure you want to do this?" dialogue, it is very easy to delete a road by mistake and there is no undo function to allow you to recover when you do.

This morning I built the terrain and ran it offline to have a look. I hadn't built a clutter mask so of course the vegetation poked through the roads but everything else was where it should be. The rivers look odd with their steep banks raised off the terrain and unless I am missing something this can't be altered as the mouse wheel just alters the rivers' width. Would it be possible to reduce the height of these river banks in some future update?

The reason for this post though is that while running the terrain offline for 15 minutes or so I noticed there were no trucks, trains or barges running on any of the routes. Before leaving for work I had a quick look in the TE to make sure the "vis only" option had not been set by default but it hadn't. When I tested a single river previously the barges were running OK and this river had bridges running across it. Apart from editing a lot more routes the only different thing I have done since then is add some vis-only routes. Could there be a bug related to that or does anyone have any other ideas as to why the trains etc aren't running on time?

[ghostdancer]

Pre AHIII I vaguely remember that the trains, barges, trucks would only run online but my memory could be playing tricks on me.

[Greebo]

I have had the barges running in the game offline since the new road system was introduced to the TE. I wanted to check to see if there would be a problem when they passed below a bridge placed across the river. I just don't understand why they aren't running now.

[bustr]

I tested that and they pass under.

I created a test terrain to model the strat complex for my new terrain and test the rail system. I wanted to hit create all, then manually move the tracks around and see if that created any problems. I duplicated everything you see in the properties for one set down auto  strait and no moving around the tracks. Ran a mask, then build, got no errors and went offline. The first trains should have spawned and run after 10 minutes arena time. Nothing happened and the first time I waited a few minutes past 10. So I exit the offline mode to check my setup and the game hangs, then CTD and generates a dump file. I went through this 3 times to make sure I was not causing it. On the tired CTD I submitted the DMP file to the bug forum. Here is the link. You can imagine how much I want this fixed now that I'm at the stage I'm putting in visual only rivers and GV spawns. The next step after that will be the active supply roads and tracks.

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,392782.0.html

[Greebo]

Thanks Bustr, it seems like its a bug rather than something we have done then.

Dallas....we have a problem.

[hitech]

Would it be possible to reduce the height of these river banks in some future update?

I will take a look how high it is, but it has to be above the terrain for z fighting issues.
And of course look at the bug.

HiTech

[bustr]

Greebo, those sheets of 1x1 and 2x2 water objects to create lakes and ponds above SL, they look great from about 100ft away, then they Z-fight like crazy past that.


The red outline is the hole I created to define the lake shore.

[Greebo]

Not sure if this is a bug or if its intentional but the create all button does not create any roads to flak bases. If they are supposed to have roads I'd like to know so that I can add them individually.

[bustr]

Because this is how my Flak bases are laid out in relation to the strats, and all I want is they act as auto ack. I will disable all rides at each one and barring Hitech changing it, set each one as uncaptruable. At that point if a bomber mission wants to flatten all the auto ack, they regenerate just like on an airfield. So I suspect there is no reason for a convoy road.

[Greebo]

My flak bases are already set as uncapturable. The create all button did run roads to the uncapturable airfields on the map so I am not sure whether that's the reason. It may be the lack of flak base roads is intended but I'd like confirmation from HTC.

[bustr]

I'm in solidarity over that one.