Road Architect: Roads, intersections and bridges for Unity [RELEASED]

I have the same glitch with intersections, didn't realise before.

By the way, Zurra what did you use for building sidewalks?

 

Hi MicroGSD,

First of all thanks for the great support you give by email, second i would like to ask my wish list:

-Camber in curves
-Smooth the borders of the terrain and posibble a curve defining the way of smoothing or the shape.
-An option to only create inside RoadMesh only Markers and not Cut (UV mapped on a world vector VS UV mapped to fit roads), the same for Shoulder
-Once you only create Markers instead RoadCut, for mobile platform its advisable that the UV of the mesh stay inside 0-1 range and not continuosly up, like the UV's from RoadCut's.
-To optimize if you can include the option that if you disable shoulders the road close down like the shoulders do (with an option to define the UVs width)

Thanks so much
ferlodavid

 

I have to chime in here as well, I also get parts of the road (or rather: additional pieces of the road) below terrain when I create intersections.

 

Hi Mons1999,

The release date for the next update is scheduled for May. I'd say about 4 months for the AI traffic tool at minimum.

Thanks

 

There seems to be an issue with the update. The markers spawn under the road. Road is at y:0.1 and markers are y:0.01. Can select all the objects and set the transform, but each time the roads are updated they revert back to that position.

 

Hi everyone,

This is an intended design of Road Architect. This is the part where the road goes beneath the ground and the actual dynamic construction of the intersection takes place.

The idea being that the player never sees underneath the ground. Most of the time it is even unseen by the developer. This facilitates better normal shading at the connection points for the dynamic intersection creation.

If this is causing issues we can add it to the issue tracker to hide or remove this unseen section of road. Is this design decision causing issues?

Thanks for the input

 

Hi Darkling420,

Can you please email us at support@microgsd.com and provide us with more detail? The markers are children objects of the road and the 0.01f should be additive to the road's height. Could you also please mention DX11 or DX9 in the email?

Thanks for the help and sorry you are encountering an issue.

 

Hi ferlodavid,

The first two suggestions are already in the pipeline and I've added the remaining issues to the issue tracker. All should be included in the May update.

Thanks

 

Hi MicroGSD,

I finally tested your system on Mac and it's really great but I had two important issues:
- Very often, when I want to add a node by clicking on my terrain, it doesn't work and I have an error message "Invalid surface for insertion node. Must be terrain." whereas it's a real Unity Terrain.
- Intersections doesn't work anymore when I increase the road definition. (and I have to because I work on mobile)

Thanks for your help.

Maroun.

 

Hi Mons1999,

The first issue is the previously mentioned issue about ctrl clicking vs shift clicking while on MAC. Try shift-clicking to add nodes instead of ctrl-clicking and see if that works for you for now.

For the second issue, the lane width should be changed proportionally with the road definition as well. Can you please email us at support@microgsd.com with a more detailed description of this bug so we can try and reproduce it?

Thanks for your time.

 

hey there man, amazing asset. I love it. Having one issue with my roads though, they "flicker" quite a bit, and also parts of the terrain poke through the road in some spots. Here's a video of the visual issues i'm having :

I am using unistorm, not sure if this may have something to do with that behavior or not.

 

Hi rpg_gamer,

Thank you for providing the video.

Are you using DX9 or DX11? Is this mobile or desktop? MAC/Linux?

Email us at support@microgsd.com and we will get this issue fixed for you.

Thanks.

 

this is dx11, on a desktop. geforce 760, win7

 

Hi rpg_gamer,

There are some DX11 shaders included with Road Architect. Change the GSDRoad1 and GSDShoulder1 material's shaders to this "GSD/DX11/Road Shader" shader.

In the next patch this should be handled automatically.

 

This looks like a great tool. I am new to unity and the asset store does not mention what license is required for using this in a commercial program.

Also have you considered airport markings/signs too? It seems like it would be easy to configure for runways and taxi-ways.

http://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim/aim0203.html

 

Hi longroadhwy,

You can purchase this tool and use it for commercial purposes. I don't care how many computers you use it on either.

I have not thought about runways before. I'll take a look at that and see how feasible it would be to include in Road Architect.

Are you thinking maybe allowing the design of an Airport's entire taxiway / runway system?

Thanks

 

Thanks for the license information.

Terrain Composer had a demo that include fighter jets so I thought that road architect already does 90% of what is needed for runways and taxiways so I thought I would ask. Then I saw UnityFS and I thought this could be really interesting.

I am using LAX as a model since it has a road that goes underneath the runway. If you look at this URL you will see what I am talking about

http://trafficinfo.lacity.org/lax/lax.html

Yes, Taxiways are a bit different since that a solid yellow line in the center and solid double yellow line on both ends where the shoulders are on the road architect. Since based on my quick reading of the documentation that you can put any material for shoulder that seems like it could be easily changed already. Then lights on the side for both runways and taxiways.

 

MicroGSD,

When is the next release coming out? It was mentioned in previously in this thread sometime in May 2014 is the next one. I have just started working with the tool.

 

On sharp corners with high grade, road triangulates in a wrongly, and i have to increase road definition just because of this, see image;

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dqzixr26kfl0k2o/Screenshot 2014-05-06 16.48.53.png

You can see that road has roughness (ups and downs) because of those triangle lines. If they were triangulated in opposite way, or if it wasn't triangulated at all(staying as a planar polygon) it could behave better.

Right now, even with high terrain seperation, i get these glitches where terrain pops up on the road, and this also changes behavior of vehicle.

Road definition is 10, and i cant set it more smaller on mobile.

I have asked you in e-mail, to add some options for performance, have you considered these? Both of these can be a toggle.

*Ability to create shoulders mesh together with road mesh, and sharing texture, as a single polygon on surface (means 1/3 poly on road surface)
*Ability to bake transparent road markers to road texture, and therefore getting rid of marker meshes, and transparent shaders (This can be done without baking, just applying the markers texture on road texture is enough)

Also, ability to change road definition on some points of the road (increasing in sharp corners, decreasing on slight curves and straights) it very important for me. (and any other mobile developer)

These days i've tested my prototype games performance frequently with enabling disabling gameobjects, and, with my custom side barriers i've sent you, enabling and disabling road architect makes very large performance difference. (Almost same performance impact than enabling/disabling terrain; even using terrain isn't much recommended for mobile, but right now roads are reducing performance even more).

Edit: There are some buildings, trees, unity terrain with highest pixel error, and a low poly vehicle in where i test. With road architect enabled(no side objects, with shoulders, road definition:10), i have to reduce draw distance (camera clipping plane) to 50. Where without road architect i get same fps with 150 draw distance. I suppose i can create other camera with culling road architect layer and having lower draw distance, but it will definitely look very bad.

Road meshes have diffuse shader, and markers have transparent/diffuse shader.

Edit2: With same setting, i did another benchmark on my mobile phone; 1500 draw distance
Everything enabled:.......................... ..............33 FPS
Road enabled, markers disabled:.................44 FPS
Road and markers disabled:..........................47 FPS
Road and marker enabled, terrain disabled:45 FPS (Terrain is 2000x2000 with 513 heightmap, 200 pixel error)

From these i can understand that transparent markers are the reason for the low performance.



If you have other suggestions for performance, please share

Thanks in response.

 

Hi Longroadhwy,

I'll take a look into adding this capability. If it is feasible to add then I think we will do it. Thanks for the suggestion!

This next patch is still slated to be released this month.

 

Hi Meceka,

Could you please tell me what the road grade percentage is in that screenshot? It looks higher than 10%, and 99.9% of roads in real life have a lower grade than 10%. If that is not the case could you please give me your terrain heightmap resolution and we can try and reproduce this issue?

You bring up several good suggestions. Some of these are already in the issue tracker. Here are some upcoming performance features:

• Ability to make sections of roads inbetween nodes as "striaght line", meaning only 4 to 12 triangles total in a section depending on shoulder usage.
• Shoulder and road base meshes can now be merged (check box).
• Ability to set road definition per road section.

The idea of baking the transparent textures into the base texture on a per texture basis is an interesting idea and I will add it to the issue tracker but I cannot guarantee that it will be added in this upcoming patch if the development time estimate is too high. It's bit more complicated than adding the transparent material as material #2. They use different UV coordinates and we have to consider allowing lightmap UV.

In the future the transparent textures will be a non issue because of a new feature we will introduce at some point.

In the future we will be including an optional LOD system that will automatically handle level of detail for any road object not seen by a camera. Options will be included with this feature.

One more thing that you've might have already checked is you can make sure that "Anisotropic Textures" is not "Forced On".

Could you please post your computer specifications? That way we can try and pick a similar device here at the office to try and replicate some of what you are seeing. Thanks!

 

It's really good to hear these upcoming features, thank you

My antisotropic textures are disabled.

I don't understand the relation with my computer, i'm working on android mobile phone. Anyways my notebook is i7 2670QM GT555M win8.1 64 bit(Did you ask because of flickering issue i am still having?)

About the triangulation, i'm not sure you understood it correctly, here are two more photos;
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zs9qa50e75rp1nb/Screenshot 2014-05-06 22.03.36.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/305udxgxm76x6zp/Screenshot 2014-05-06 22.04.25.png

You can see the yellow line in the road going up and down on each polygons edges. Those edges are making unrealistic bumps on the road, and it can be feeled very badly, and they are the reason i can't set road definition number higher. I believe those edges should be turned in the other way, or somehow removed? You can see from images that they make the road go up and down (especially if using road definition # higher than 10). And they are causing that terrain glitches, terrain penetrates road on those edges center usually.
By the way, images in this post are probably about 10% or less. I've sent the highest grade road in 1st post, so you can see issue clearly.

Terrain heightmap: 513, 2048x2048 pixel error:200

 

Hi Meceka,

The computer data will allow us to try and replicate the environment at our office. For instance my current development machine runs at 4.8ghz on 8 cores with a GTX 770, SSD etc, so our machines might hide some performance issues that normal users might have.

I see the triangulation issue. I think that when two things happen: Steep roads or sharp turns you will need to use higher road definition. Fortunately in the next version of Road Architect you will be able to set road definition on a per road section basis, so that will solve this issue.

I'll email you a development copy when we implement the feature.

 

Thanks for your response;

Can you briefly expain how you are going to replace transparent shaders?

Have you considered making texture atlases and sharing materials for batching? Most road objects have low vertices. It means they would also dynamically batched automatically. Also some materials are almost same but have different names.

By the way, i am usually talking about markers, but shoulders and road cuts also have useless materials. 1 Material is definitely enough for them, but they have "road" and "roaddetailoverlay" materials, one is transparent. You should avoid transparent as much as possible. (For both mobile and pc).

And there are "tiremarks" material in marker objects, it could be easily merged with marker material.

 

Another request:

Control the max road grade with a curve showing all height profile of the road

Thanks so much

 

What effects will you get from Horizontal offset opions: is Select preset and Curve ?

 

That is quite a system. Really 4.8 GHZ which cpu do you have? How much memory does the video card have and how much total system memory?

 

Hi Meceka, those are excellent suggestions with the materials. I'll see what it will take to do that before the next update.

Regarding the transparent shaders, these are to allow for multiple options for road markings. For example, some road shoulders need a specific kind of road marking while the road may not, and in addition the entire road + shoulder needs to have seamless asphalt texture.

I think what we will eventually do is some system like you described where the asphalt and road markings are included as one material for users who wish to utilize more simple road systems.

Hi ferlodeveloper,

I think this is a good suggestion. Maybe even dragging the nodes in the curve editor can change the height of the node in the world.

Thanks!

 

Hi dushun88,

Could you please provide more detail for the question you are asking? Are you referring to horizontal offset options with regard to the road, extrusion items or edge objects?

Thanks!

It's just an i7-2600K overclocked with water cooling. Corsair sells some cheap water coolers now that work fantastic. 16GB ram but it never gets fully used. I think Unity crashes most of the time before it even gets close to even 3GB memory usage.

The graphics cards I recently bought were EVGA GTX 770 2GB and 4GB. I've never been disappointed with their graphics cards.

 

What effects will you get from Horizontal offset opions is Select preset and Curve with Extrusion items

object. Edge objects and Other groups object is no problem.

 

Hi
I'm Building some city areas and this Asset looks a lot better than creating all my own road sections. My target device is Android, so optimizations in regards to textures and poly count are important. I think many of the concerns Meceka brought up are valid.

When do you think you will have the next set of updates out with the new intersections 2 -4, on/off ramps ? Also all the pics I've seen have a wider intersection than road leading to it, is there plans for a center divide area to keep the roads uniform or is this already an option?
As soon as this is city friendly I'll buy it.
Thanks

 

With the curves you can adjust the extrusion or edge object's curvature on that axis throughout its existence.

Some examples:

• Traffic cone placement for road construction
• Suspension bridge cables
• Reverse arch bridges

 

I think the next update will be out on time and in May or in early June. We keep adding features and issue requests from the users so it adds to the development time. I am looking forward to the next update though.

The next update will allow users to create intersections without extra width like you are describing.

 

Hi, i got this problem that was getting me crazy until i discover that it was related to the directx configuration. It´s a problem with the markers and i think that an image worth more than words so:



Right now i think that we can go without directx 11 but probably in the future we will need to port to it, so we really want to used this amazing asset if possible.

 

Is it possible to control road splines via a curve editor? Sometimes the node will bend the road into an unwanted shape.

 

Can Road Architect merge the shoulder with the terrain rather than simply raising the height?

If you could set a terrain merge curve at each node (one for each side of the road) you could have total control over how the terrain blends in with the road.

 

Either in the next patch or the patch after that a curve editor will be added, including standard spline options such as tension.

Can you please expand upon what you are suggesting? Sounds interesting.

 

Another suggestion:

To implement the camber option, you could add an option on Spline Nodes for grade camber plus an option for autocamber with a range value(security value) that calculate the curvature to previous and next Node and apply the camber in function with range value, or maybe autocamber for all the road with the range value and individual on spline nodes that overwrithe overall value.

To smooth the terrain it could be done with curves(two curves, right and left side), an option for all the road and after individual for spline nodes that overwrite the overall option.

 

Hello. Good Work.
I have some questions:
How can I create a way to have emerged terrain?
If you just create a terrain cropped ....
How can I raise one node at a great distance?
How to improve the graphics for Android?
How can I add my bridge?
And no work horizontal offset position ... How do I put fence on the all road on both sides?

 

HI Micro,

Two questions:
1. Any update time-wise on when the new patch will be out?
2. Also wanted to see if you were going to continue testing your plugin with version 4.3.4. We are very far along in our project and due to the number of issues people are experiencing with 4.5 we are not updating to 4.5. Can you let us know?

thanks in advance,
d

 

Hi,

Is it possible to tell the plugin to use a different material/material setup when creating roads and intersections? I can swap out materials after the fact currently (although the roads will occasionally switch back to the default materials) but that can take quite a bit of time with large systems.

 

Well I've updated to 4.5 and it's working fine. Road architect is also working alright. But it doesn't mean that it will work fine on your side too.

 

Thank you for the suggestion! I'll add this to the notes on the issue.

What do you mean by emerged terrain?

When you say raise one node at a great distance do you mean raise it very high? You can disable the road grade limit and the height can be unlimited.

What graphics in particular would you like improvement on for Android? Are you experiencing issues with textures?

To add a bridge, utilize the wizard, described here http://microgsd.com/Support/RoadArchitectManual.aspx#QSBridge and https://www.youtube.com/user/MicroGSDLLC/videos .

The horizontal offset dropdown for certain road objects may be not working but it will be fixed in the next update. For now you can manually specify. To put a fence on the right side of the road it would be (road width / 2) + shoulder width. With default settings this would be 8 for right side and -8 for left side.

 

Hi longroadhwy, we have not done significant testing with 4.5 yet but it should work fine. We will put it through QA soon for 4.5 and release an update on the store. The ETA for the next release is a week or two and the big update will probably happen in late June or early July.

The next patch will be out in a week or two and the big patch with most upgrades will be out in late June or early July.

I don't really want to re-do the undo system and that might be the only thing that will be affected from 4.3.4 / 4.5. However if there comes an issue with the undo / serialization items I will make it work with both unity versions. I'm not too happy that the Unity store requires a fully functioning undo system yet changes it so frequently with so many different versions.

Thanks!

 

Hi Leito,

In the next big update (late June or early July) you will be able to specify a custom default material for use with the roads. For now you could replace GSDRoad1 and GSDShoulder1 if you wanted to not use the included default materials.

Thanks for the feedback Meceka. I'll be replying to your email soon. Thanks!

 

In intersections, I always have this problem as in image below;

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e1jugzkb0b504mw/Screenshot 2014-06-02 23.29.08.png

One side is worse than others, but there are probably glitches in every side of the intersection.

But that one in bottom(of image i've linked) is the one that's most noticable. Is there a fix or a workaround for this? It happens also when i use left turn lane mod.

 

Hi Meceka,

The glitch you are speaking of, is that where the terrain is covering too much of the shoulder or is there something else in the image I am missing?

Thanks

 

A note to all customers: The latest version of Unity 4.5.0f6 has broken some of the transparent shaders while in DX11 mode. So for now you will have to use DX9. I'll post here when we fix the shader.

 

No, the mesh in intersection shoulders have defects. Happens most of the time on most intersections. Look at images below;

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ipcl7m2ctc7lhl1/Screenshot 2014-06-05 00.11.45.png

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wxg4xuhr1rrxm9m/Screenshot 2014-06-05 00.14.09.png

There is a single road object in this scene.