World Editor News

Oh, I had not, I try and see if it improves things, thank you

 

Is there a way to put the map back after using the World Editor?

 

I have been using the meshroads to make fences and low walls, and was thinking would it be possible to have different shapes along a spline, to make guard rails or concrete walls with a beveled top, so it would not have such sharpe edges.
Something I would love to be added in:
- Making a shape out of a spline, then use a long spline with nodes/points for the lenght (Like the meshroad tool) To extrude the shape along this spline.

 

In practice, I have found out that bringing models in single dae file or putting each dae file to separate directory is needed.

I think that currently logic of software is to look for main.materials.json and if not, then look for dae, then generate main.materials.json based on dae file which software happens to pick first, then maybe repeat or not, but as there already is main.materials.json by then, anything in other .dae files in the same directory is ignored, because logic checks if there is main.materials.json.

It would be a HUGE timesaver if it would work so that if no main.materials.json is not found, all .dae files are listed and materials would be appended to main.materials.json.

Challenge of that is of course that for each object found from .dae file existence of material in question needs to be checked from main.materials.json.

It also would take some time, but now I have gigantic .dae files to get main.materials.json done, after that is done, I can do smaller .dae files, but first import needs to be huge, also as there is limit of 2000 or less items I usually put several of big .dae files on different directories and then edit main.materials.json files together and after that put sane sized .dae files in, removing those gigantic ones and have several main.materials.json files combined together, that has been fastest way to do it for now.

Of course my usage might be tad specialized as I have everything done in Blender, then I import to Beamng editor and set object to 0,0,altitude as I have not figured out prefab and forest exporters yet, which might help to put things on place bit more easier way, but I would see lot of benefit if more than one .dae file would be processed into main.materials.json

 

I'm doing now some AI decal roads, over 30km by 30km static mesh and at first decal road laying on top of static mesh was fine, I have mostly 1.5 to 3km long strips of decal roads, but after having quite few of them, now I'm getting big slowdowns.

Odd thing of this slowdowns is that when I click last node, then alt and moving starts fine, but when I'm near centerline of the road where there are vertices, things slow down, I get less than 10fps.

Then while holding Alt-key down I click to create new node, but for that I have to wait mouse cursor to disappear, click is not registered otherwise and because of slowdown it might take more than a second for mouse cursor to disappear.

It is odd that with only few of these roads placed everything was working quite smooth.

Also I got whole game to crash, that happened when I was adding new node, but HDD has gone to sleep, so it takes a while for HDD to spin up and BeamNG goes to not responding state during that, then after HDD has spun up, game just closes down.

I'm not sure, but there might be some computations during this add node process that are bit more than needed as my i7-8086K should be enough for the task.

Also it would be fine if there would be like steady 9fps, but instead at times everything just freezes for split second when I'm moving new node near centerline of road. where vertices for static mesh are.

Not sure if there really is anything to be done to this, but it is somewhat affecting usability of the editor. I think it is still much better than with old editor that did like to freeze quite bit if I remember correctly.

 

Here is a video of how things are slowing down with decal road tool, it is becoming rather slow and I still have something like 100km of roads to be added. From some reason those previously added roads seem to slow things down.

I should note that I have fps limiter set to 12fps as there is no point having more when editing and when things get this slow, but as you can see 12fps is rare luxury

Not sure if this happens for everyone, but it is somewhat challenging to edit decal roads, it would be fine at steady 5fps, but as you can see there is those hiccups that freeze everything for a second or so.

Also not sure if anything can be done to this, but as all previously added decal roads seem to increase slowdown, maybe there would be way to sleep them from calculations of current one, or something, idk?

UPDATE:
Oh, I also figured out something.
When I have other decal roads hidden, line over the eye icon, then I try to add new decal road by alt-clicking the ground, whole game crashes.

I did not have all decal roads hidden, but most of them and it seems to crash quite reliably, so I have to keep decal roads visible, if there would not be crash, maybe performance would be better with other decal roads hidden.

Edit:
Oh yes, remove the video when not needed anymore, let's not waste bandwidth. Google blocked me completely long time ago, so I haven't figured out where to upload videos now.

 

Try changing the decal road material to something else than road_invisible. That takes away the freezes on my end, but hiding the roads crashes the editor here as well.

 

This has greatly reduced lag, thank you!


Here is something I have been thinking though...

In Godot game engine, when I do top down 2D game, I can use A* Walker to create a random levels or to place objects on correct surface.

I'm not sure how moddable editor is in this regards, but technically, we know texture under the cursor and when given start and end point, I'm not seeing why decal road placement would not be possible to be automated by implementing a walker than finds shortest path between the points, then populates appropriate node density between the points.

So all that would be needed is to give parameters for the road.

Is this technically possible or is there some limit I'm not seeing?

There is some info how A* is used in Godot:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_astar.html

I think pseudo random tour mod utlilized something bit similar but for different purpose?

e: Update on lagging decal road placement:
After placing few blue grid material decal roads lag game back, so I switch to another material and lag is gone again.

So for some reason, decal roads of same material are affecting placement of new decal road, but decal roads of different material are not.

Some computations must happen between same material roads that are not present with different material roads.

I'm placing invisible AI roads, so material choice does not really matter for me, but perhaps this can help to narrow down the reason why this slowdown is happening in first place.

 

Thanks!

Also I might post quite few things here, do take it as documenting the findings, please don't think it as a negative posts, I think this editor is worth bit of effort to make it perfect

Might be of course handy if there would be standard formatting so easy to put to db of issues or something.



Anyway, it seems I'm not able to plant forest.

So on template map, in forest tools, I see this brushes option, but when I click new brush option, my asset browser becomes active and that is that, nothing else happens.


Then if I go to other tab to plant tree, under some not yet clear condition all of my UI disappears, this was reported earlier I believe, so for now my progress with a map is facing a wall.
I did test right now and UI did not disappear, but also mesh tro_brush_small is not getting painted on terrain (test done on template map).
I have had UI disappear on custom map and I think on that map I had deleted the default forest, so maybe that is the trigger for why UI disappears for some reason.

Also after deleting default forest, I have not found out how to create new one.



Although I'm not sure if it is possible to plant trees on static objects, or grass. My idea was to use forest brush to paint trees that are actually grass on static object, but this might be impossible, anyway thing isn't working as of now so I see how it is in 0.23.

Planting grass on static object might not be possible, I think it was working only on terrain with certain material type, but I need to educate myself more on this subject, I'm missing way too many details how whole thing works right now and there is many pages I have collected to read on this subject.

 

Sometimes assets just.. never show up at all?

All I was trying to do was setup a new PBR material. The assets didn't show up, so I restarted the game.
I clicked convert to PBR, changed the active layer count.. aaand the game crashed
I restarted the game now for a 3rd time, and the files still did not show up

I ended up just using "ol reliable" (Notepad) and what do you know, these "nonexistant" files worked perfectly fine on the material.
Spent a total of 15 minutes trying to get this setup in the new editor, gave up, then spent 15 seconds doing it manually.

Edit: Another problem I found is if you are using the orbit camera via right-click, and press F11, and your mouse happens to be over an imgui window in the editor, you're stuck there until you leave the editor, right click again, and go back in.

 

I am pretty sure the main game maps are stored in the games steam folder zipped. How they normally stay.
But when you mod a game level it creates the level modified in the user folder. Likely you can delete the user folder with the level saved and the game will revert back to the zip file for content. Not 100% sure if that will fix it, but pretty sure.
see here in the user folder, I accidently saved a tweak on the new gridmap and accidently hit save when exiting, so it made the folder in the user folder. The userfolder is at its default location where you see it on my drive. I would just try to delete that folder and boot up and you should be good to go.

 

ScatterSky gradient file selector is broken, only colorizeGradientFile can selected and changed. Typing the path still works though.
Example: Trying to change ambient to nightColor changes colorize to nightColor.

Selecting gradient files from unpacked folder and packing the level in mod manager won't change the gradient paths, breaking the sky.

 

Is anyone else finding sometimes forest brushes getting deleted after use?

 

I managed to get the map back to normal. Thank you

 

This is exactly where my problem was, where the text is highlighted, it was saving on \levels\gridmap the terrain data instead of \levels\project3 for example. I never loaded the game gridmap to know what was going on. I recommend exporting the terrain to a separate folder from time to time as a back up in case something happens. I figured out what happened with my terrain by using the games clear cache. It restored the real gridmap terrain which is where my level was saving too. About crapped a goose when my level loaded and I saw the grid map with all my static meshes floating in the air. (The backup export saved me)
Only thing that is a problem for me now is the texture cooker. Which locks up my game if I try to edit any textures that are cooked. I don't even bother with it, been converting my stuff to dds in Gimp.

 

Is there a correct method to adding forest brushes?
If I create a new forestItemData class and set my mesh to that, then create a brush element pointing to that forestItemData, my game crashes as soon as I try to paint/place.

However if I create a TSForestItemData class and set my mesh to that, then point my brush element to the TSForestItemData, I can place the forest item but after saving and reloading beam, the placed item no longer shows.

Doing this all on the Loaded Template map provided by HighDef on the repo, If that makes a difference, I haven't yet tried on any other map.