Roads

[ONTOS]

I wish HTC would put roads through some of the woods, leading to a Field and Town. I'm sure they had them in WW II.

[bustr]

There is a tool in the terrain editor that allows the creation of of roads\track\rivers. They have a setting to use them as a cosmetic path and not a convoy type resupply. I'm required to install a fully functioning AI resupply system with my next terrain. The problem with putting in a cosmetic road is the mask tool that has to be run against the whole terrain after I finish with all of the roads\tracks\rivers will remove all trees and bushes on each side of the road out to about 1\8 of a mile. It looks like crap to be honest but, must be a limitation in the terrain editor and tree tiles related to the polygons that the terrain is built with are 1\8(660ft) of a mile in diameter.

Below is sort of a preview of where I'm at today during my work period on the terrain. You can see when it comes time for roads I'll have a lot more on my mind. All of those tan colored squares are location markers for fields and the auto populate function for AI convoy roads drops in a 5 mile long straight road running east. Then I have to visit every single instance of that 5 mile AI convoy road and fit it into the topography of the terrain while accepting the mask tool will kill a tiny line of my work to remove all the trees and bushes that could interfere with the convoy road, or train tracks or tug boat barge delivery rivers. Each strat will get a train track 5 miles long for an AI resupply train that I will have to fit into the terrain. I suspect this is part of the reason Waffle put farm land and agrarian tiles in the terrain editor that have preexisting roads. If you think about it, you only ever see about a 6mile diameter area around every field close up when you play the game. So the farm land tiles are easy to use with their already existing roads. I doubt Hitech will make Waffle go back in and add farm land around fields on old terrains just to have roads, and you can see some farmland agrarian tile with roads was added in during the migration to AH3.

If you look at my two terrains BowlMA and Oceania I used the agrarian tiles and villages to put in roads around the feilds.

It's up to the player who is building a new terrain for the game how he wants to paint it and apply things like the static none AI version of the resupply roads. That is why I always tell you gents to build your own terrains. It's the only way you will get something close to what you want. Or discover why what you want won't work like you think it will.

[hitech]

There is a tool in the terrain editor that allows the creation of of roads\track\rivers. They have a setting to use them as a cosmetic path and not a convoy type resupply. I'm required to install a fully functioning AI resupply system with my next terrain. The problem with putting in a cosmetic road is the mask tool that has to be run against the whole terrain after I finish with all of the roads\tracks\rivers will remove all trees and bushes on each side of the road out to about 1\8 of a mile. It looks like crap to be honest but, must be a limitation in the terrain editor and tree tiles related to the polygons that the terrain is built with are 1\8(660ft) of a mile in diameter.

(Image removed from quote.)

I assume you know that can be turned off on a per road bases?

HiTech

[bustr]

Yes, and when I ran the mask it removed a lot of trees to each side cosmetically. I think I started using the smallest brush to draw grass along the road path before running mask. Still, I've been wrong about terrain functions since I'm elbow deep in a terrain right now and everything is blurring together.

I'll do a quick test, lay in a few miles of solid trees, lay down a cosmetic road and run the mask. I'll report the results back here.

Wish the river object could have it's elevation set to place the water sheet closer to the ground. It looks weird in testing while driving a tank on the river bank 6ft above the surrounding ground.....

Still I'm guessing you did that to eliminate that Z-fighting that happens with those water object squares that you lay them down over a hole and cover the edges. Until you are about 1000yds away, the water object rapidly morphs and conflicts with the ground covering it's edges. I setup a lake and ran a river path out of it as a test, the water object square is not ready for prime time.

OK, quick test time, I'll be back with results.

[bustr]

Houston we might have a problem.

In the three screen shots you see the road I laid down through that orchard tileset. Then you see the road with trees in the center of it. The you see the road after running the mask. No trees were removed.

Do I need to not set the road as "view only", run the mask, then set the road to "view only"?
Or do I have to run the road in a much less convoluted series of curves?





Before "Mask".





After "Mask".





A screen shot of the magnificent "canal" paths. About 6ft above the surrounding ground that I set to 1ft. Reminds me of the canals in southern England.

[Ciaphas]

Could give it a shot and see how it turns out.

Great job on the terrain man


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[bustr]

You better hop in, they get bored with them after about 9 months and want something new. I'm almost finished with the topography and will be moving into laying down the bases\strats and tank micro combat terrains around all the spawns. These supply paths(road\rail) across all this complex terrain will be like building a clipper ship in full rigging in a bottle I'm fearing. I'll have to fit each one to the terrain at every field and strat. Meh, should try cutting a 16 point brilliant and polishing it. Hitech wasn't kidding with his post titled: this will irritate bustr.

[bustr]

Here you go, there is an order of tasks you perform to lay in roads. I reversed two steps becasue I hadn't touched laying down roads for about a month since I last tested process. It's that new to the terrain editor and I was busy with canyons and mountain ranges.

Not sure what to do with this anyway, it can be an unbelievable amount of futsing to get one road tweaked into place. Let alone a network of branching arteries along with the inevitable convoy roads and train tracks for the new AI resupply system. It did cut down all the trees once I got the order of tasks done correctly. See that right hand curve and all those black blobs on the ground, that used to be trees in the road bed.

This is a micro hill texture technique I'm testing to put around fields in my new terrain. The road tool worked on all the micro hills and removing the trees in it's way. That is a 6 mile diameter area which is the average micro combat area for tank combat at every field.