Want to make a Highway/Road in TGEA

#1 I personally havent done this as I tend to stay more in the past and the fantasy side of things but I have read numerous times that it is better to do roads and similar objects as dif rather than dts due to the collision benefits of dif and possibly a few other enhancements. Once again take this with a grain of salt as I have not worked with tis at all but I have read it several times.

#2 If your in TGEA make the road a texture and paint it on your terrain...this is what i did. I also use L3DT, using th climate editor, and the attributes map painter to make the alpha maps, essentially an Atlas Blended with 8 Textures.

#3 The problem painting texture, is that it dissolve with other textures, for a roman like road it might work, but how to paint a Modern Concrete Highway over the terrain?

For an instance say, something like this
I bet using DIF will get the results, tough it will be lot of work to design a track/highway using this method.

Also i was a bit lost about how to setup the physics for a driveable car, the two examples i got wich are the Bravetree Car and the Buggy are really undriveable, the spring system is pretty weird and this cars tend to fall if you do a normal turn, any suggestion on a normal datablock for spring and wheel data?

#4 You can paint it, one texture for the dark asphalt and one for the white asphalt, I can make a demo for you if you want:) makes it a lot easier because most modern highways take a lot more time into road surface construction making nice flat areas

#5 I would say go for a DTS with and use polysoup. I'm not quite sure about the grass not popping through the road when you use fxGroundCover. Guess that's a problem for later.

#6 Anyone wanting to make roads, and not use the classic DIF or DTS method, should check out this thread:

Procedural Road Generator

The code is not complete yet, but if enough community members take a stab at it we could have an awesome road resource to work with.

#7 Thanks guys for the fast replies.

I will check both all methods you told me.

The Procedural Road Generator looks promising, it will be easier to paint roads using it, and lightweight, but if you work with Polysoup on the other hands, it will allow you to use shaders on it so the road will reflect or be affected by the lighthing (this is popular this days in some racing games).

@Bobby = If you can help me to check that out it would be great, did you tested the Procedural Road Generator Resource?

#8 Here is a demo of what I was talking about, I didn't paint a very strait yellow line down the road center but it was just a quick job, and there is still texture slots open too.

DOWNLOAD-->www.mediafire.com/?u0uzdcex9om

Also try opening the opacity maps to play with the texture placement, and you'll find numbers in the atlas.h in the shaders file that will adjust the tiling size of the textures:) This will at-least tell you what will work for you.

And I also dropped this into the racer starter kit and the collision works good with Atlas2, or like I expected from the GG buggy(not that it isn't fun!!)

#9 Thanks you very much Bobby, i see your point now.
I will keep looking at it, since i really don't like the idea of making 10km or more of road in DTS.
I was still playing with TGEA a lot this days, so i'm gonna start working on this proyect on weekend.

How did you make that terrain? Any tip on how to capture REAL satellite data to generate a specific land area? Should i use Terragen?

#10 Well to get you satellite data to really work well with something like Atlas, i would say play with it a bit in what ever your comfortable with, i use L3DT but Im used to it, so it works great for me. but remember that getting things like over hangs and certain features might not transfer that well, but you'll get the general shape, i also have customized the terrain shader a bit, you'll see my post on 8 textures for atlas here

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=70794

Also Bryce works good for DEM's too;)

#11 Thanks again Bobby i will buy L3DT, im sure it will help me a lot in making the terrain i need.