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[cameni]

Roads always interpolate smoothly between two nodes, because that's usually what you'd want them to do. If it aligned to everything in between, why, that would be just the original terrain with a road paint on it.

Oh wait... You know what's happening with what I'm doing?  The false/mid point "created" when I delete a selectable waypoint does not align to the ground, it just cuts right through. Still... The align to terrain button should align the mid points as well, but if they don't exist anymore...

The false midpoint is no point. It's just the way it was rendered in the edit mode, causing all the confusion since it looked like a normal point. Of course they don't align to the terrain, because road segments interpolate between real points by definition.

I'm not sure what your answer was in your earlier post.  With the removal of the midpoint lines, does it those align those midpoints to the terrain when you make a new road with fresh unmodified points or does it no longer align anywhere in between the selectable waypoints?

It never aligned those midpoints because they never were points in the first place, carrying information about the height above terrain. If you want them to align, why you are deleting them?

[Jagerbomber]

because road segments interpolate between real points by definition.

Ok... I think. ?  (I'm still kind of confused about how interpolating works with roads or what it does.  Was it aligning to anything at all or was it like guessing an arc or something in the road elevation?  I don't know what I'm talking about.  )  It sure looked to me like the old midpoints aligned when making a new road.  What was happening with that glitch that I reported a while ago where it would cut straight through hills between selectable waypoints?  It wasn't interpolating?

It never aligned those midpoints because they never were points in the first place, carrying information about the height above terrain. If you want them to align, why you are deleting them?

Like I said earlier, it was kind of a stupid/pointless observation/concern to bring up since you can add points in between now.    And now that I (think I) understand the new changes and how the roads work a bit more... I don't think I have a problem anymore. 

[Sam]

How to you set the elevationbutton when you build roads. Be carefull, must be on zero! Otherwise you get not aligned roads. 

[cameni]

The elevation slider was meant to set relative elevation against the alignment level. In case you want dirt road embedded into terrain.
Once you set it, it propagates to other nodes

If you only want to adjust height for one node, use the v-mode.

[Luishi5k0]

Any word on landscape shadows at all? I'm actually looking forward to this small feature a good amount. And AngryPig said it wouldn't be too hard to implement.

[Mikel_S]

I know it has nothing to do with the engine, but the data used for terrain generation, but around where I live (60 miles west-north-west of NYC), the data is pretty sketchy.  Mount Adam and Mount Eve across the fields from me are kind of gimped on their height, and the road to the next town which runs along side some hills is all sorts of inverted.  The smallest hills are exaggeratedly huge, and one big hill that's kind of important to the rout is completely nonexistent.  But there's some areas where it's like "Oh wow, that worked out exactly like it does in real life" and it's amazing.  There's this one curve over the top of a hill, and it really lined up in game 100% perfect.  So my question is: While I don't expect it any time soon, will there ever be a way to alter actual terrain vertices, or would that just cause too much trouble?

[Jagerbomber]

One thing that you have to account for is that even with the current elevation data resolution, trees that were scanned in real life when scanning the Earth still make big differences in elevation (best seen when you're down on the ground) vs data points that are on the ground.  It's fairly easy to spot this in my town because of the corn fields surrounded by forest.  There might not be a hill in that forest you might be looking at, but it looks like one in Outerra because the elevation scan scanned the tops of the trees.

I would also suggest maybe adjusting your FOV setting, but you seem to be talking about multiple inaccuracies.  If these aren't just bugs/anomalies in the data, it could just be because of the elevation data resolution.  (Though what you're saying might be the effect of both of these.)  As far as I know, it's done by a grid of points (90m apart?) while everything between these points is kind of artificial.  Some of data the points are on the ground in real life while others are at the tops of trees, buildings, etc.  There's also the extra artificial bumpiness of the hills/mountains, but I don't know how much of a difference that makes.

[lonewulf47]

Well, yes that's exactly the problem I was referring to in another thread. there are actually two different sets of elevation data available: corrected and uncorrected. The ones that are publicly available are usually uncorrected i.e. representing the pure radar scan results which indeed shows elevations where "just" buildings are. This will be even more a prominent problem when you start creating airports. Although usually (at least in most cases) the airport layout is pretty flat (but not necessarily horizontal) the relevant elevation data shows hills at the airport building's locations. It is therefore inevitable to have a tool which allows flattening a certain polygon to allow a seamless creation of e.g. an airport.

[Mikel_S]

I kind of figured that trees would have an affect, making tall treed hills taller, and stuff like that... but...

The tallest hill on the route is heavily wooded, and doesn't even appear in the slightest.  Meanwhile, a mile down the road, there's a slight, grassy knoll on the left, and it is 100% accurate.  I mean, once we can determine forest placement, I'll be able to mask it up by wooding the road where it's supposed to be, but till then, it's no big deal.  Just a little snafu with the data.

So I was thinking: would it be possible to "portion" out bits of the world for hands-on terrain correction?

[PRiME]

It has been mentioned, and is on the table to-do

[cameni]

Version 0.7.11.3053

• enhanced road tesselation, removed geometry shader
• adjusted road transition to rocks
• fixed crash when deleting road node before the last one
• fixed road endpoint detection
• removed road segment crosspiece to avoid confusion with real road nodes

[PRiME]

Just wondering if it was possible to add in a feature called, road quality. So essentially I assume your roads are procedural so maybe have it so the quality of that particular road can be adjusted, so at the highest end the road is all good and no defects etc in it, while at the lower end of slider the road has pot holes, and its torn up a bit, and perhaps even has big erosion looking gaps when its real low etc...


That a good idea?  Would add to the whole, old Earth look were some of the old world roads still exist but have been damaged significantly. Depending on the geological area this may be different, for example Australia is pretty stable country and roads are likely to last quite a while there as no large environmental swings like some other places.

[Jagerbomber]

Not perfect, but a lot better than it was before. 

Can anything be done to remove the tear that occurs along the transitional area at the ends of a road since nothing beyond the ends gets aligned?  Aligning to terrain or manually aligning doesn't work in every situation.

Also, once I get down to the more detailed road tweaking I might want an option to be able to adjust the width of the transitional area on each side separately.  I'm not there yet though.

[C. Shawn Smith]

I'd like to request something not directly related to the engine!

Can you date-stamp the releases in the original post?  I haven't been able to play with the engine much recently due to work and working on the novella, and sometimes miss the updates until 3 or 4 revisions later.  It would be much easier for me to track the changelogs to see what I missed between my original version and the newest update, so I can do more testing, etc.

[ZeosPantera]

Ah, now this is a good update!