Ideas for the world editor (feel free to suggest some)

Hi everyone, just though i would make a thread with my hopes and dreams for the world editor.

- Ability to import GEOTIFFs, to allow for higher vertical resolution for terrain.
- Add parallel decal roads, set their width and texture. Allows for very simple road marking editing.
- Seperate controls between world editor and freeroam (e.g, arrows for camera in freeroam, WASD for camera in terrain editor)
- Import .shp files as decal roads
- Spline editor for meshs (like mesh roads, but for more complex shapes such as guardrails)

These are probably pretty difficult to implement, but i reckon they would be handy QOL tools for map makers. Feel free to suggest some more below

 

The Spline editor or similar is something I have wanted for ages. Would make such a difference to the quality of Mod maps coming out (certainly mine anyway!).

Otherwise I'll have a think.

For the heightmap imports, you can massively improve the resolution and reduce stepping by converting these in GIMP (or equivalent) to Grayscale 16 bit and saving as uncompressed PNGs.
I have found this is adequate for the resolution needed even for very tall mountainous maps.

For the Shapefiles, I did work on a converter for QGIS OpenStreetMap road data into road decals. It worked too to a point, but the joins were messy, and it caused crashes on large maps. I will look into it again, but the premise was simple enough, I just converted the road data into excel (x,y, coords) and then used excel to turn those into the same format as the road decal position files that BeamNG uses. Not sure why I ran into issues with large maps, although I was going ludicrously large so I suspect memory issues were at play.

 

Great to hear you are working on these things. I'll keep thinking about any other changes that I think would help.

For me (I know it wasn't my suggestion), the parallel roads would either be on top of (for road markings) or alongside (e.g. for dual carriageway roads).

 

Wow, thanks for the reply! I (and others) always appreciate dev interaction

I dont like to use WASD, as i move around heaps in freeroam, and i use WASD for car control. Moving camera means car moves too. I could pause but its a just a personal preference.
With the spline editor idea, something like the track editor could be modified to have models such as guardrails. Of course, i dont know how easy that is but i think most map editors would be happy with some simple curves and straight lines.

Right now, i am pretty happy with the way the map editor is, it is robust, allows for lots of customisation, and the only thing holding me back is my technical knowledge (3D modelling ability, how textures work, texture baking, etc.). The ideas i have suggested, are mostly ways to decrease fiddle, whether it be with jagged heightmaps, or road markings. I think its important to be able to get down drive-able roads early, then the details. Thanks for your continued support to the game, and the mapping community

 

Ok, a few new thoughts:

1. When you import a new heightmap and use the texture maps for easy mapping of the terrain types, it almost always changes them all around and cuts a few out when you do it the first time. I usually have to redo it a couple of times until it works. I think this is an issue others have.

2. The window for the road decal textures always defaults to the bottom corner of the screen, meaning you have to move it each time to scroll down the list. This is minor, but getting it to remember where it was placed, or default to the middle would be great.



3. All assets in the mesh preview box are black after the recent update. I know there was a reason for this, but could we have a checkbox to see what they actually look like?



4. Fog... editing fog is a challenge. I make changes in the levelinfo properties and the sunsky properties, but they seem to either completely ruin it, or make no difference, and then they are back to where they were when I reload. I have given up on fog.

5. Minimaps. I honestly think this might just be me, but I can't work these out. It would be great to have a file upload for the minimap image, and the option to specify an offset and size for when you've modified maps.

6. Decal roads. This would be awesome, but I appreciate might not be possible.. could you have a system where you selected a road and told the editor to change the material for every terrain pixel that it touched? This way you could sort out the terrain type under roads in one simple method.

7. I think this was already mentioned above... but pavements. I was giving this some more thought, and wondered if you could have decal roads that had a thickness (I know this goes against the whole principle). I also know we have mesh roads, but they don't stick to the terrain as well. (Another solution would be to be able to wrap the meshroads to the terrain). Mesh roads also like to eat tyres for me.

None of the above are deal breakers of course, and I'm just suggesting them as possible ideas.

Thanks.

 

I would like to have a toggle button for selecting decal roads underneath the selected decal road. I must hide the top one to change the lower one if it’s completely covered. Or is there a better way?

 

I would like to have copy of 'river editor' but would be 'wind editor' and could do what wind do and it would work pretty much like that river, but not umm square, but a ball shape the area of wind.

And More advanced ai would be awesome