Terrain editor feature suggestions

ArmA editing, missions, modeling, textures, terrains

Moderators: Lone Wolf, Snake Man

Post Reply
Snake Man
Commander-In-Chief
Posts: 9338
Joined: 2000-07-31 22:01:01
Gaming Interests: ArmA, ArmA 2, Falcon 4.0 and OFP.
Editing Interests: All, I (try) to edit everything.
Location: PMC
Contact:

Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by Snake Man » 2009-04-05 21:45:16

Terrain Editor Suggestions

I'm putting together a list of terrain editor features, such as:

- 3D view with objects.
- 3D view with real time editing (paint textures into 3D terrain directly etc).
- Better handle of selecting zones something like a lasso tool.
- Better object replace function.
- Export elevations, objects (x,y,z etc) information into text file.
- Export PNG (grayscale 16bit for height and then PNG 24bit full colour).
- Export unique objects list.
- Full screen mode for experts (using only mouse and hotkeys).
- Import ESRI Shape files.
- Import various terrain formats (DEM, OFP, ArmA, Wilbur, greyscale, etc).
- Import vegetation from USGS LULC (land use / land cover) files.
- Map grid as UTM and as normal OFP/ArmA default grid style.
- Object 3D preview list (view object before you place it).
- Object brushes with altitude & slope logic.
- Object brushes with custom random placements.
- Object placer, to place for example fences automatically etc.
- Object prefabs, build and save them for later use, never discard your work!
- Obtain distance, measure horizontal distance and offset between any two points.
- Project file of terrain to include elevations, textures, objects, names, etc.
- Random object placement (whole map, selected region only, max min distance etc).
- Region tool for selecting specific areas of the map.
- Road building like in wrpedit placing roads with arrow keys.
- Road display, color and shape, user configurable.
- Terrain editing blur option.
- Terrain erosion tool.
- Terrain vertices control with fine detail.
- Terrain vertices editing brushes.

Please post suggestions of features that you think would make terrain editing more enjoyable. I'll update this first post as necessary.
PMC Tactical Forum New User Registration please read new info here.

PMC since 1984

Editing knowledge, visit PMC Editing Wiki
The leading, most detailed and comprehensive modification made for the Vietnam War - Vietnam: The Experience homepage
View our videos in PMC Youtube channel

PMC Tactical forum Advanced Search is power.

"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

DMarkwick
Recruit
Posts: 32
Joined: 2007-06-07 22:13:17

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by DMarkwick » 2009-04-06 15:33:22

Brushes with custom random placements.

So I can say add two types of tree, and set one of the trees to be twice as likely to be placed as the other. Also the ability to select a tree more than once, so that I may for example have a tree full size, and the same tree but much smaller with twice the likelihood of being placed.

Also some altitude & slope logic, so that as I spray up the side of a mountain, the brush will gradually place more & more brown instances of a tree for example.

Some kind of road placement system based off splines or something similar maybe? Might be a bit difficult that one.

Ability to define a polygon on the terrain, and have it populated by a similar method as a brush. So I can define a brush that makes up European woodland, and have that brush fill up an area I've defined on the map.


BTW, are you going to tackle terrain material placements also? You know - the 4-colour images that dictate what ground textures go where?

Snake Man
Commander-In-Chief
Posts: 9338
Joined: 2000-07-31 22:01:01
Gaming Interests: ArmA, ArmA 2, Falcon 4.0 and OFP.
Editing Interests: All, I (try) to edit everything.
Location: PMC
Contact:

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by Snake Man » 2009-04-06 15:53:03

Heh, were just talking here, nobody makes any promises to deliver any sort of terrain editor :roll:

But yeah without making those already mentioned promises, I'm looking into what features excellent terrain editor would have, this naturally would include ArmA and ArmA 2 satellite layer and mask texture handling.

Any other ideas for road placement?

I know in the net you can find good path finding algorithms so we could just say that "plot a road from city A to city B which distance is 8km in rough terrain, please use only low elevations on the path." and such path would be found. However... once we plot the path, then you need to place OFP/ArmA road objects to them, I think this gives us bad results as the road always would go just little bit to the wrong direction causing it to "snake" around crazy. Heck, on the other hand it might be a nice result for some countryside middle of nowhere road, who knows. But in a nutshell I don't think that would be highway like road at all, imagine driving fast on such road that curves one "degree" pretty much all the time. Of course we can easily make the util to configure the road placement that we must have minimum of X amount of straight road pieces on one "leg" of the road etc.

As for easier road placement, we already have this in WrpTool where you just RMB a road object you want to place. Not perfect solution but give me 10 mins and lot of RMB clicks and you got nice road network done. But yeah, it must be more automated for sure... Visitor 2 (and 3 I presume) places the roads in ... I don't know, about 10-20 object chunks(?) or something like this. Then there was that one road placer tool which I think was made by Dschulle, can't really remember what kind of results it gave. Anyways, roads are important part of terrains and it will be important feature in any terrain editor (which I strictly decline to promise to deliver).

You could say that in 2009 with ArmA 2 just beyond the horizon, the much automated tool is the key. I've done my share of manual editing over the years :)
PMC Tactical Forum New User Registration please read new info here.

PMC since 1984

Editing knowledge, visit PMC Editing Wiki
The leading, most detailed and comprehensive modification made for the Vietnam War - Vietnam: The Experience homepage
View our videos in PMC Youtube channel

PMC Tactical forum Advanced Search is power.

"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

DMarkwick
Recruit
Posts: 32
Joined: 2007-06-07 22:13:17

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by DMarkwick » 2009-04-06 17:32:08

Perhaps another way of looking at the road problem is to let the user place roads where he likes, and have some feature that levels the surrounding terrain? A couple of times I try to lay roads through hilly areas and find that I need to fiddle the terrain so you're not driving along leaning over at 30 degrees plus or something. And then I'm manipulating the terrain trying to fix it, in discrete height value chunks, giving me a somewhat "hacked" look to that area along the road.

Same algorithm might benefit areas around houses as well. Couple of times I placed buildings to find that one corner is buried up to the window while the opposite corner is hanging out in space.

OChristie
Newbie
Posts: 2
Joined: 2009-04-08 14:41:26
Gaming Interests: ArmA and ArmA 2.
Editing Interests: Terrains

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by OChristie » 2009-04-08 15:34:17

I personally would love too see the ability to Directly Import ESRI Shape Files into the program, they can define roads, vegitation, buildings etc.

Also importing DEM's into the program that keep the geographical location, so that you can bring Imagery in that is geo refferenced.

A really use friendly interface. Check out VTBuilder. Ability to Easily select an area and export data from the layers that are in the area bounds.
http://www.vterrain.org/Doc/VTBuilder/en/

I will still stick to Visitor for object placement etc. But, If you created a program that could do all of the pre-object placement work, i.e Importing Downloaded Data (Elevation, Imagery, Shape) and then preparing the Area, Exporting to PNG files (Grayscale 16bit for Height and then PNG 24bit Full Colour) ready for import into Visitor. Maybe defining the layers.cfg and even making the mask in the program. Then exporting all.

Creating a new project aswell from within the program after preparing all the data, it places all of the files in the right folders and does all of the rvmat naming.

Now that product I would pay $$$$ for.

Good Luck.

Snake Man
Commander-In-Chief
Posts: 9338
Joined: 2000-07-31 22:01:01
Gaming Interests: ArmA, ArmA 2, Falcon 4.0 and OFP.
Editing Interests: All, I (try) to edit everything.
Location: PMC
Contact:

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by Snake Man » 2009-04-08 15:52:03

Welcome to the forum and thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

I'll take a look at the VTBuilder.

What about the ESRI Shape file formats, are they well documented?
PMC Tactical Forum New User Registration please read new info here.

PMC since 1984

Editing knowledge, visit PMC Editing Wiki
The leading, most detailed and comprehensive modification made for the Vietnam War - Vietnam: The Experience homepage
View our videos in PMC Youtube channel

PMC Tactical forum Advanced Search is power.

"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

OChristie
Newbie
Posts: 2
Joined: 2009-04-08 14:41:26
Gaming Interests: ArmA and ArmA 2.
Editing Interests: Terrains

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by OChristie » 2009-04-08 15:58:01

ESRI Shapefile Documentation:
http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers ... pefile.pdf

Really Handy.

Linker Split
Recruit
Posts: 14
Joined: 2007-10-18 22:15:44

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by Linker Split » 2009-04-08 17:30:06

maybe you could add a sort of "real time 3D editor" in which you can modify the color of the terrain, or of the textures.

I mean, le'ts think you are in buldozzer, and you can select a desert area (so sand texture sand_co.paa) now i want to change it into grass (grass_co.paa) then I select this tool, and then with the mouse I literally PAINT it into the 3D viewer the region i want to have grass. In this way i think we could also be able to create better Mask files, cause we could directly paint it while watching at the satellite one

Nicholas Bell
Newbie
Posts: 2
Joined: 2009-04-08 17:04:54
Gaming Interests: ArmA and ArmA 2.
Editing Interests: All, I (try) to edit everything.

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by Nicholas Bell » 2009-04-10 13:28:44

Really don't have much to add to the suggestions posted, although it all seems rather "pie in the sky" kind of stuff. Unless there's someone with some heavy coding skills we might as well be telling the moon. Realistically, the most important things that I wish BIS would add is the ability to insert and delete objects in Buldozer, and to be able to fine tune elevations in Buldozer rather than the 1 or 5 meter current limitation. On the really unlikely to happen side of the list, I second the notion of being able to paint the satellite image and mask in Buldozer. Man, that would make my life so much better.

Got to ask, what is the point of this discussion? Is someone planning on coding an editor? Petitioning BIS? Why ask for input without a reason? I've been doing modding (called hacking way back when) and working "with" publishers since the early 1990s and am rather cynical about these types of empty wish lists. Only reason I am responding is because I would like to know the truth.

Snake Man
Commander-In-Chief
Posts: 9338
Joined: 2000-07-31 22:01:01
Gaming Interests: ArmA, ArmA 2, Falcon 4.0 and OFP.
Editing Interests: All, I (try) to edit everything.
Location: PMC
Contact:

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by Snake Man » 2009-04-10 14:01:48

Nicholas Bell wrote:Got to ask, what is the point of this discussion?
To have experienced terrain maker guys like you to provide feedback of what they think would be a good terrain editor, or for example other words, what sucks most in Visitor 3 (and heh WrpTool).
Is someone planning on coding an editor?
Planning, yes.
Petitioning BIS?
No, hehe.
Why ask for input without a reason?
It's not without a reason, I want to know what terrain developers are looking from a editor.

It's another question when any fruit comes out of this topic. I'm personally quite clear guy; if I've done something I'll say it, but I'm not running around the forums posting screenshots and making empty promises of some shit which never gets released.

When I have something to promise the community, you'll hear about it :)
I've been doing modding (called hacking way back when) and working "with" publishers since the early 1990s and am rather cynical about these types of empty wish lists. Only reason I am responding is because I would like to know the truth.
Well for WrpTool project I didn't ask anything, I just went and got it done.

I'm sorry that you seem to (and sorry to assume something like this) take this feature list as somehow offensive. All I'm doing is asking for a bit feedback, there are countless bums in the community who do real bad things and get away with it like nothing.

Honestly I find it funny that people are like "angry" to me that I don't go and promise that "YES I WILL KODE AND RELEASE THIS TOOL IN TWO WEEKS!!1" and that they refuse to even post feedback because of that.

I'd be very happy if someone did this kind of initiative on some editing area I am interested, no matter if something would ever come out of it (which of course would be very unfortunate), at least it would be "something" more than just silence. But, that's just me.
PMC Tactical Forum New User Registration please read new info here.

PMC since 1984

Editing knowledge, visit PMC Editing Wiki
The leading, most detailed and comprehensive modification made for the Vietnam War - Vietnam: The Experience homepage
View our videos in PMC Youtube channel

PMC Tactical forum Advanced Search is power.

"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

Nicholas Bell
Newbie
Posts: 2
Joined: 2009-04-08 17:04:54
Gaming Interests: ArmA and ArmA 2.
Editing Interests: All, I (try) to edit everything.

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by Nicholas Bell » 2009-04-10 20:36:56

I'd be very happy if someone did this kind of initiative on some editing area I am interested, no matter if something would ever come out of it (which of course would be very unfortunate), at least it would be "something" more than just silence. But, that's just me.
Well, I hardly think anyone who has the ability to do what is being mentioned here is going to see this list and suddenly decide to volunteer to tackle a task of this size just because we want it. But that's just my opinion - wouldn't mind being proved wrong.

And I'm not angry with you because you are not promising to do such and such by a certain time. I'm a bit more straightforward, I guess, and would have preferred some explanation with a clear (and totally understandable) caveat that whatever may or may not happen with no promise of delivery, as opposed to no explanation and leading one to believe that something was in the works. Well, now we know the truth, and that's fine.

No offense intended. I've just been around the block a few too many times. Rack it up to turning 50 this year.

Opteryx
Newbie
Posts: 1
Joined: 2008-02-08 00:41:54
Gaming Interests: Armed Assault (ArmA)
Editing Interests: Terrains

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by Opteryx » 2009-04-13 02:47:01

Ahoy..!


I see there's already been made some very good suggestions here which I've had on my mind for a while so there's not a lot I have to contribute with.
At any rate here's what I'd like to see in addition to the already made suggestions:

1) Ability to render terrain and objects in wireframe.

2) Ability to crop/resize terrain.

3) Simple and effective config editor where you can add things like clutter, adjust weather conditions with sliders, additional stuff like custom sky and all that with a simple GUI. (You know most terrain guys (including myself) are totally shit at C++ syntax so this would lift a major burden off our shoulders.

4) Update p3ds in realtime without having to restart the 3D viewer.

5) Function to select specific objects which you can for example; Rotate, snap to terrain, snap to specific altitude, delete, replace with other p3ds (while maintaining same azimuth/height)

6) Ability to tilt objects.

7) This would perhaps not be specific to the tool itself, but some kind of application which can extract elevation data from Google Earth would be very very useful as GE has some very high-res topo data not available online.

8) Autosave function.

9) Now regarding roads.... it is (in my opinion) the biggest problem with visitor and trying to replicate a real world location. Getting the roads systems to match with the satellite imagery is very hard and in some cases simply not possible so a spline system for the road networks would be a lot better, however due to the nature of the ArmA1/2 engine this doesn't seem plausible.

I'll try to add more if I can think of any.

Snake Man
Commander-In-Chief
Posts: 9338
Joined: 2000-07-31 22:01:01
Gaming Interests: ArmA, ArmA 2, Falcon 4.0 and OFP.
Editing Interests: All, I (try) to edit everything.
Location: PMC
Contact:

Re: Terrain editor feature suggestions

Post by Snake Man » 2009-04-13 05:58:08

Thank you Opteryx for the feedback, much appreciated.
PMC Tactical Forum New User Registration please read new info here.

PMC since 1984

Editing knowledge, visit PMC Editing Wiki
The leading, most detailed and comprehensive modification made for the Vietnam War - Vietnam: The Experience homepage
View our videos in PMC Youtube channel

PMC Tactical forum Advanced Search is power.

"ALPHA BLACK TO PAPA BEAR. ALL RUSSIANS ARE TOAST. OVER."

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests