Just sent Dazzy at the VFR Addon Site the latest upgrade to the Autogen program. One thing that numerous people had asked me for was that when creating multiple houses along a freehand line, that the houses aligned themselves with the slope of the line. I had coded that tool quickly and the simple programming was to just have the houses align themselves N/S/E/W. Well, got into the code last night and figured out how to make it work. There's a new checkbox on the main screen for turning on that alignment now.
Another new checkbox makes all multiple houses have random sizes and spacing, a feature that makes them look more like the real world, especially in housing developments where homeowners have multiple choices on models.
Fixed a couple of small bugs and have created a ton of autogen homes in the last few weeks using the program. The Phoenix scenery is becoming such eye candy that when I go into FS to see the results of my last editing, I find myself flying around for an hour.
Next feature I'd like to add is a custom bridge creation tool. Already have the ability to lay down a sequence of GUI objects such as bridge segments but you end up with only the center segments and if there are separate end ramp segments, it's still difficult to place those. I envision a tool button that allows you to choose the matching bridge segments you want to choose visually from the availble GUI objects, draw a line on the image tile and the objects are placed at the right distance apart and alignment. Trick will be determining the distance between the segments. Probably will have to be some trial and error thing since I'm not sure one can query the underlying model information and get that from the stock GUI objects.
The other software I'd like to write is a visual aid to making tweaks to photoreal scenery tiles. In a huge project such as my Phoenix project, there are a few areas where the scenery blocks are off by a little bit from one another since it was often difficult to find real world coordinates to match to. It's especially noticeable when a road goes through a tile and suddenly jogs to one side. Redoing the entire block of tiles is awkward, especially after you've invested time in defining autogen since now your autogen would no longer line up. What I envision is being able to display areas of tiles together in the bad areas, selecting multiple tile images, merging them together, and sending them into a graphics program of your choice. You can then make some minor graphical edits to the merged tiles. Once completed, the program will them split them back up into the separate tiles and encode them back to the DXT format. Is this something anyone else has done or would see a use for?
Art Martin
Another new checkbox makes all multiple houses have random sizes and spacing, a feature that makes them look more like the real world, especially in housing developments where homeowners have multiple choices on models.
Fixed a couple of small bugs and have created a ton of autogen homes in the last few weeks using the program. The Phoenix scenery is becoming such eye candy that when I go into FS to see the results of my last editing, I find myself flying around for an hour.
Next feature I'd like to add is a custom bridge creation tool. Already have the ability to lay down a sequence of GUI objects such as bridge segments but you end up with only the center segments and if there are separate end ramp segments, it's still difficult to place those. I envision a tool button that allows you to choose the matching bridge segments you want to choose visually from the availble GUI objects, draw a line on the image tile and the objects are placed at the right distance apart and alignment. Trick will be determining the distance between the segments. Probably will have to be some trial and error thing since I'm not sure one can query the underlying model information and get that from the stock GUI objects.
The other software I'd like to write is a visual aid to making tweaks to photoreal scenery tiles. In a huge project such as my Phoenix project, there are a few areas where the scenery blocks are off by a little bit from one another since it was often difficult to find real world coordinates to match to. It's especially noticeable when a road goes through a tile and suddenly jogs to one side. Redoing the entire block of tiles is awkward, especially after you've invested time in defining autogen since now your autogen would no longer line up. What I envision is being able to display areas of tiles together in the bad areas, selecting multiple tile images, merging them together, and sending them into a graphics program of your choice. You can then make some minor graphical edits to the merged tiles. Once completed, the program will them split them back up into the separate tiles and encode them back to the DXT format. Is this something anyone else has done or would see a use for?
Art Martin
