Placing bridge sections in Visitor....

[Undertaker]

I've flattened the sea floor between two islands (only a short distance apart), with the intention of placing a bridge. Problems occur when, in buldozer, the bridge sections twist into odd shapes and can't be aligned by hand.

There seems to be such a small amount of literature on Visitor2, which is suprising! Even more surprising is the fact that no-one appears to have asked this question before! With all the Visitor users out there, a manual should have appeared by now!

Any help gratefully accepted!

[Planck]

I don't really use Visitor, I find it to be a little quirky at times, so I can't help you much in that respect.

Can you post a picture to show what you mean?


Planck

[Undertaker]

I don't really use Visitor, I find it to be a little quirky at times, so I can't help you much in that respect.

Can you post a picture to show what you mean?


Planck

Sure!

Here is a typical bridge section, skewed by the nearby coast. This is the bridge section 'most_stred30.p3d' from O.pbo. There is another bridge section with the same name but smaller in the Resistance Data3d.pbo, which behaves well, but isn't the bridge I need.

These sections can't be moved or selected by hand in Visitor, and some of the textures appear to be invisible or inverted....

Causing a headache, as this is the one thing missing from my island....

[Planck]

That looks very strange.

It appears as if parts of the bridge are trying to follow the terrain contours.

I can successfully place bridges with WrpEdit no problem, but I have never seen this kind of problem with WrpEdit.

Maybe someone who uses Visitor can shed more light on this.

Best of luck


Planck

[shinraiden]

That is just plain whacked.

Can you post detailed descriptions of how you got to that point?

Some objects, like roads and forests, are supposed to be skewed. My understanding is that the bridges are 'unique' and are not supposed to be handled like roads, so that they should instead be handled like an ordinary building, that just happens to have a roadway LOD. If that tracks, that could also be the reason behind reports of AI difficulty with the bridges.

Never seen this on WRPtool either.

[Planck]

Of course the bridge tries to follow the terrain, it is classed as a road.  I know this because it has class.....road as a named property in the p3d file.

I put a bridge on a copy of Abel.wrp using WrpEdit, I then viewed the wrp in Visitor and behold, the bridge was warped as if trying to follow the terrain, although it was ok in game.

The difficulty here is in trying to place a bridge in Visitor.  It will be hard trying to match the pieces up, but, as it is a road, maybe it can be placed with the road laying function.

I may try playing with that some time.

As for the difficulty AI has using the bridges, I don't think it is the bridge that causes the problem.

I think it is the terrain that the bridge is passing over that causes most problems, especially if it is steep slopes or rocky terrain.  Also the lamposts on the bridge seem to be a favourite target for armour to crash into.  They seem to hit each one as they go across.

Anyway I hope some of that made sense and possibly helps a little.


Planck

[surpher]

Been placing bridges in Visitor today, had problems at first, but here is what I come up with. First of all Ignore what they look like in Buldozer(they look fine in the game) and don't position them with Buldozer either. Use Ctrl-R and Ctrl-P to rotate and position them in Visitor.

This diagram and the two formulas should give you an idea how I went about things. (diagram might be scrambled, but you should get the basic idea)


    Top(19)__                                           _______
                   \                                        /
                     \__Bottom(-10.035)_______/

Formulas

End sections
Bridge Height - ((Top + Bottom)/2) + 0.75 = ERS
example :33 - ((19 + 10.035)/2) + 0.75 + -19.2325

Middle sections
Bridge Height - (Top + Bottom) + 0.75 = ERS
example: 33 - (19 + 10.035) + 0.75 + -4.715

ERS = Elevation Relative to Surface(in the object position popup, Ctrl-P)

Notice I've removed the minus(-) from 10.035 and added it to the answer, it's just to make thing easier, I'm no mathematician.

My terrain surface, and the road surface on the bridge match up perfectly. I guess you could use your own values. Hope it helps
         

[Gielovic]

what does the bridge hight mean? the hight of the model?

[surpher]

Yes it's the height of the model, got it from the WrpTool manual.

[shinraiden]

Thank you. I don't think that all of the mental digging that midship and klink and I did on trying to get to the bottom of this is in the public side of the wrptool forums, but that's the basic jist of it from the manual.

Being on the road I don't have  my notes on me, but there was some information somewhere that may be of use to addon makers to build different height bridges that we could get packaged up some time.

There are two significant issues to watch though, 1- not placing the bridge against a garuanteed embankment, and 2- the Nogova bridge is not 'zeroed', that decimal part is very important. And this is general tech info that is relevant to any editor you use.

[aries_pup]

i managed to make mine work nicely... jus remember the objects supports a negative number or zero for the height... so one way is maybe u can make the bridge slightly taller and reducing the height of each segments to make it work...

keep testing in-game and coming back to visitor to shift it... For bridges, no point looking at the bulldozer for accuracy, coz it messed up... but it have to be active for u to export the wrp file...

thats bout it i guess... keep trying...