Leadwerks 3.1 editor - roads

[zanderuk]

Hey,

 

Just bought leadwerks, but I see that the road node tool is no longer in the editor?

 

Does anyone know why? and how to create roads then?

[DudeAwesome]

Never Heard- about that tool

[zanderuk]

In version 2.3 it had a road node tool.

 

[Josh]

Leadwerks 3 has a new terrain system that renders the area around the player into a series of textures. When roads are implemented, they will be baked into this "megatexture" instead of rendering it on top with alpha blending. This gets rid of all the z-fighting issues the old roads had, and should render faster since the roads are just part of the terrain texture. It is presently not supported though.

[zanderuk]

ah okay then josh, so i would need to model the roads in a plane or something like that for now then, and then shape the terrain according to the road structure?

[Josh]

Honestly, I would just use painted paths for now and add roads when they become available. Anything else will be really painful.

[Rastar]

This is one of the first things I'd do if Leadwerks had an editor plugin system - a general tool for placing splines and an extension that extrudes or generates a geometry along those splines. For the "megatexture baking" option that Josh mentioned we would of course also need to be able to programmatically alter the heightmap and modify the texture. Come on Josh, set the community on fire :-)

 

I'm not sure if the texture baking works in all cases, though - only for very high resolution terrains, I guess (like 1m per px or so), because otherwise the heightmap couldn't be modified to include the road geoemtry, and the road shape would follow the bump and dents of the terrain. It did in LE 2.x, actually, and I never liked that. In those cases a mesh might still have to be placed on top of the terrain, but the baked texture could still be used for rendering the road for higher view distances.

[YouGroove]

It depends on the roads you need, for simple mud or grass roads terrain texturing will be ok.

But for real roads meshes, you will need models and you'll have two options :

- Have some road mesh tool to manipulate and make road meshes along splines in the editor

- Be able to export terrain mesh : in Blender it's easy to draw splines than apply some planes and make extrusions ot have solid roads and you can any time in Blender move splines points and change splines curves.

 

Basic explanation :

 

Perhaps if Leadwerks 3.1 will bring open editor programming and allow users to make plugins, some people will make some model based roads systems.

[zanderuk]

ah thanks guys, thank you so much for the replies. i'll think it over and try some different ways. have a great night !!

[beo6]

Wouldn't tessellation for the terrain remove the need to model the road?

[SlipperyBrick]

@Rastar. Sounds a lot like what they have in CryEngine. Just to get my opinion across and I am still learning about a lot of things. I have used a few engines and I find that nearly every engine focuses a lot on the whole outdoor big world environment making. If you want to make a game that is indoors or may be outdoors and indoors, I think something new for this needs to come along. I don't think I am explaining myself correctly here but, game makers who are making an environment set indoors have to model their environment. I would love to see tools available for setting up structures inside an engine (if that makes sense) something other than CSG. Something similar to the spline tool idea that Rastar mentioned. Working with splines you could easily model complex shapes the only different is for building structures instead of roads you'd be working vertically on the Y axis. This is just an idea and I know there is implications to this but some innovation needs to happen