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Aggror's devlog #3: Road splines


AggrorJorn

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In a previous developer blog I showed how I use spline paths inside the Leadwerks editor. The cool thing about splines as that they are extremely multipurpose. I started working on generating meshes based on the splines.  Think about ropes, wires, rivers, rollercoasters and of course roads

Ropes and wires are in progress because I find them the coolest. Especially rope bridges are awesome to make and see in play. They require a lot of finetuning so I have put that on halt for now. In the meantime I also started working on road nodes. The Return to the Zone project uses terrain textures, but the original scene from Leadwerks 2.3 used the in-editor road tool. Time for some new roadfeatures.

Roads
The generic nature of the splines allows easy creation of meshes based on the spline. Constructing basic geometry was relatively easy. However, getting the road to appear on the terrain properly proved a little harder. When there is no terrain, the generation of the road is instantaneous. The roads that are created snap perfectly together and it is really satifying to see the result. Per node you can't only tweak the road with the spline handlers, but you can set a road width, a material and several terrain alignment options.

When the node has to deal with terrain allignment the performance on startup is little slow at the moment, but the first results look promising. I want to add this feature to my winter game "On the road again", which makes cool random tracks from CSG brushes.  

Another cool automatic feauture is that the road still functions as a path spline. You can attach a car to the road spline and it will follow the generated road. 

 

Ropes and wires

For a next video I will show the progress on the ropes and wires, with hopefully some working physics. Here is an older image based on the earlier splines to give you an idea on what I am going for:

powerlines.png

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13 hours ago, Thirsty Panther said:

Sweeeet.

Selling this on the Workshop along with your 3rd person script?

Yes, I am not sure if it is one big spline tool package or whether I want to divide it in to smaller tool sets that you can purchases separately. I still wonder if I should add extra features, which makes it a lot more complex. Think about thinks like intersections,, generated sidewalks, bridge/pillars and even safety guards. But first some fine-tuning.  

fyi The third person script is done first, more on this very soon.

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20 hours ago, jen said:

Any plans to support road junctions?

I have been thinking on how I would go about its implementation. A connection on a spline itself would be more difficult (but not impossible), but an intersection on the nodes themselves might be fairly doable. It would not be as advanced as Cities skylines, but a basic 3 or 4 point intersection could be feasable. 

I do consider them extra features though. I would first like to improve the terrain alignment algorithm and investigating apossibility for exporting/baking the changes in the ingame terrain to the actual editor map. This would help performance significantly when dealing with carving and raising. Either way, these are things I really want, but I do not want to wait months before releasing the first tools.

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I will hold a poll to see if people are more interested in smaller(cheaper) packages containing individual functionality or 1 large (pricier) spline tools package.

The final development for the spline paths is estimated to be done at the end of the week. It could then be uploaded to the workshop store as a small tool. For the roads I am giving myself until the 20th of august before I want to upload it to the workshop store. This way I have a target deadline/milestone were I can focus on. Before then I want to have an acceptable performance on startup and some minor improvements on the texture blending. That is my aim to have as the base version of the tool. If time and progress allows it I will include more features like the crossroads. Of course new features can be added in later updates.

Feedback is always welcome.

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You can always sell them in parts, but have a bundle that has them all for slightly less then all of them separately.

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5 hours ago, Einlander said:

You can always sell them in parts, but have a bundle that has them all for slightly less then all of them separately.

Does the workshop store allow bundling for a different price like you can do in the free workshop? Or do you mean as an actual separate object upload? The first one would be nice since maintaining multiple packages seems like a hassle.

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I have yet to sell anything on the workshop yet, but I hope it allows bundles. Maintaining a separate Item for the bundle would be a pain, especially when updating.

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