mesh road vs decal road

#1 Without test I can only go by geometry, decals use far less polys as they are flat and the mesh road has edges so from a poly point of view they are less efficient. but if your importing your own from a 3D program you can optimise your polys to be more efficient.

Decal roads aren't that great when it comes to crossroads etc. or you want them to join end to end.

#2 you could try placing a single decal to be a crossroad or junction, and latch the decal spline road onto it.

#3 is it possible to add one own mesh to replace the default one in the road editor, and still possible to use the road editor (automated mesh creation and setting)?...

If yes, how to do this ?

#4 The beamng crew released a few patches that fixes up a problem where decal roads overlap. These changes never made their way back into T3D but they are easy to add, they supply the patch files.

www.beamng.com/entries/47-Normal-Bugfixes

#5

Quote:is it possible to add one own mesh to replace the default one in the road editor, and still possible to use the road editor (automated mesh creation and setting)?...

Not sure if this is this answer you're looking for; It's possible to export a mesh road from torque to a collada file (dae), import it in your 3d application and modify it. The whole downside is that texture mapping is not exported and you'd need to setup the uvw wrapping again.

There's also a resource (which I can't find at the moment) where you can define more then 4 sides for a mesh road in T3D; creating even more complicated shapes. The downside with this is that the meshroad object was initially introduced in T3D as temporary* objects that should be replaced with externally created meshes. It comes along with numerous bugs (like this) that were never solved over the years.

*:

//----------------------------------------------------------------------
// MeshRoad Class
//----------------------------------------------------------------------

ConsoleDocClass( MeshRoad,
   "@brief A strip of rectangular mesh segments defined by a 3D spline "
   "for prototyping road-shaped objects in your scene.\n\n"

#6 Oh dear :/. I'd be much happier if this were a production-quality tool. Having to export, UV map everything, and re-import a now-static asset is crap. Created an issue. I've been wanting for some time to completely revise all the spline objects in the engine. We currently have paths, mesh and decal roads, and rivers, which all would benefit from being under a common interface. In addition it'd be cool to have spline-based shape replicators, maybe also billboard replicators.

#7

Quote:I'd be much happier if this were a production-quality tool.

I couldn't agree more. In the issue example you can see the meshroad object used for things beyond roads; and only expect imagination would stop you from abusing it fully, in every way.

For the record; at this time the new Unreal Engine 4 doesn't even have a decal road tool (not out of the box anyway), and I believe does CryEngine Sandbox modifies the terrain to decal roads and not the other way around (true?)

#8 I can't really comment on which is better for performance but I think decal roads (with decals as well) are the better option with custom mesh roads used when a heightmap won't do the job.

Both have their advantages and drawbacks but decal roads are much more organic and in my opinion nicer and easier to work with.

#9 Do you not have issues making the terrain into a nice road surface? Since its polygons aren't aligned in relation to the direction the road is travelling.

#10 The only times I've found that to be an issue is when you are trying to get a raised center on a very narrow road (so the road shape is like /\ ) or if you want to be able to hook your wheel in a very steep ditch.

If you are using a low resolution heightmap (less than a meter per pixel) you could also have some issues.

#11 Right, whenever I think of terrain I always imagine the old Tribes terrains that used 4 or 8 metres per pixel. <1m per pixel would be... good.

#12 I find the height of the terrain having much influence on decal roads, even with 2 meter per pixel you can have smooth roads; but with a 1024m height it will look more like a chain of ramps.

I see lots of potentials in bug-free meshroads in combination with this recourse from Ryan Mounts. Especially the possibility to do things like roads with curbs and sidewalks in one...

#13 Yeah, that's probably something that should exist in T3D's future. Though I think we could get a lot of mileage out of allowing multiple path objects to use the same path. So maybe making curbs and sidewalks is a matter of having three mesh roads with different shapes and offsets attached to the one path.