Skip to main content

Criterium: Roads

Roads are tricky.  They have to match the terrain; they have to bank, curve, swerve and whatnot.  I have three ideas for roads, and no idea is trivial to implement.  All my ideas output a road mesh with a rectangular cross section, so there will be no gaps between the road and the underlying terrain.  The road will actually be a rectangular "tube" with only the top of the tube showing above the terrain.

First up is procedural generation of roads.  For this scheme, I would first generate the terrain heightmap.  Then, the roads could be generated by following contours, making random changes in direction, or making random jumps to different contours.  In the end, the procedural algorithm would output a list of waypoints for the road, and a mesh could be generated from the waypoints.

Second is direct creation of the road mesh.  I would have to make a modeling tool for the road, and extrude road segments from the end of the road.  Perhaps Bezier curves and control points could be used to manipulate curves in the road (both vertical and horizontal).

My last idea is a combination of the last two.  I could paint the road waypoints on top of a 2D texture, and then have an algorithm calculate the appropriate height of the road at each point.  The algorithm would need the heightmap as an input to calculate the road height.

That's all for now, more ideas soon.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lua-Style Coroutines in C++

Lua's implementation of coroutines is one of my all-time favorite features of the language. This (short) paper explains the whole reasoning behind the Lua's coroutine implementation and also a little about the history of coroutines. Sadly, coroutines are not supported out-of-the box by many modern languages, C++ included. Which brings me to the subject of this post: Lua-style coroutines in C++! For those who don't know (or were too lazy to read the paper!), Lua's coroutines support three basic operations: Create: Create a new coroutine object Resume: Run a coroutine until it yields or returns Yield: Suspend execution and return to the caller To implement these three operations, I'll use a great header file: ucontext.h. #include <vector> #include <ucontext.h> class Coroutine { public: typedef void (*Function)(void); Coroutine(Function function); void resume(); static void yield(); private: ucontext_t context_; std
8 comments
Read more

Criterium: Road Screenshots

I finally got around to making the road tool for Criterium.  The tool has two parts: a Java application that lets you paint roads on the 2D heightmap texture, and a Ogre-based tool that automatically converts a 2D path into a 3D mesh.  The Ogre-tool queries the heightmap to get the height of the road, and performs smoothing so there are no discontinuous road segments.  I've posted a screenshot below.  Also, I've got my GIMP terrain shown in the screenshot.  I generated it using random noise and the GIMP lightmap filter.
Post a Comment
Read more

Jet: Particle Systems

Here's a demo of the new particle systems I've implemented in OpenGL.  Performance is much improved over the DirectX version.  Particles are initialized in C++ rather than in Lua.  Also, I use two particle buffers and swap between them, rather than using one buffer per particle system.  Anyway, here's a video capture:
Post a Comment
Read more